Week Six - Community

The online community I am going to discuss is Facebook (www.facebook.com). Facebook is an online social networking site launched in February 2004. Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by workplace, school, or college. Anybody can join Facebook as long as they are over 13 years old, Facebook is recognised worldwide and is multilingual. The site is highly interactive, being able to chat online with friends, or view others profiles and leave posts. Facebook allows you to decide upon your own privacy settings, ranging from allowing anybody to see all your information to completely private and only allowing friends to view your profile. This is good as it allows you to be private ad not let the whole world find information out about you. Many people on Facebook use it as a means to keep in contact with friends or reunite with people they haven't seen in a long time, or some people use it meet others. There are a wide range of topics discussed on Facebook, ranging from political views, cultural views, joke pages sports or events. There is most definitely something on there that everybody will enjoy. The only downside that Facebook can not provide that a real community can is the physical contact with people, however I think that is the reason people enjoy Facebook so much. The are able to stay in contact with the people they wouldn't normally meet in a real community situation or that they are not able to meet in person, such as a family in another country.