The first four chapters of the book “The facebook Effect” was very interesting and went over some interesting points that brought in connections between the book and our culture of technology. Chapter 1 starts out just giving some history on Zuckerberg and gives us background information about him. The chapter just talks about how facebook got started and discusses some of his smaller web projects that he worked on before facebook. It talks about his experience at Harvard and the motivation behind his creation of facebook which was creating a directory based on real information about students. An interesting point that I took from this chapter that I can link into American culture is the way that Zuckerberg started is the way that most people get started on something like a business or a successful website. Our culture has such a competitive mindset that people like Zuckerberg even when they think that it won’t be successful continue to try to make a success out of something. I believe that this is one of the things that drive America to make it what it is which our competitive spirit is.
In the second chapter of the book it goes into discussing Zuckerberg moving to Palo Alto California for reasons of his newly created website. The book states “Zuckerberg and Moskovitz took about 5 minutes to decide they wouldn’t return to Harvard” (Pg.64). I drew an interesting tie with this quote to American culture. Every day in our culture you see people making sacrifices in order to become successful. For example you look at Bill Gates who is one of the richest men in the world; he dropped out of school to work on Microsoft. In our culture in order for people to survive people need to make sacrifices like Zuckerberg did in dropping out of Harvard, which I would say is a pretty big sacrifice. Technology has made it easy for us as people to be more ok with making such big sacrifices such as dropping out of school because it has opened so many more windows in online worlds for example like facebook.
In chapter 3 the book goes on to discuss in a nut shell the power of social networking and the internet and the capabilities that it has. The book quotes “Social networking has now extended across the entire planet” (Pg. 85). This quote just shows the power of a social networking site like facebook. It is crazy to think how powerful something like this is. This site is worth mass amounts of money and there are millions of users that can connect all over the world. The meaning of “location” is almost completely eliminated with sites like this. In online worlds there is really no such thing as location because weather your chatting on facebook chat with someone in China or someone down the street it doesn’t matter, because in the online world you’re the same distance away, it is absolutely mind boggling to think about this. I think that we as a culture are just getting started, I am just waiting for the computer to bring other sense in such as smell and feeling into the equation!
In chapter 4 the book goes into more depth about discussing facebook and the process it took to get where it is today. The book quotes on page 91 “You were asked to list your relationship status and weather you were interested in men or women.” The reason that this quote caught my attention is because I think that this is a prime example of how the internet is slowly eliminating our cultures privacy completely. I’m not saying that this is the only way because there are a million other examples of how it is reducing privacy but this is one example. Our culture is slowly handing over privacy little by little and eventually it will be completely gone. This site allows people to see when and where you were somewhere and exactly what you were doing at a certain time which I think is absolutely ridiculous. I personally do not have facebook for the sole reason that I would like some sort of privacy in my life and I don’t like to be stalked by people wondering what I was doing on a Saturday night and who I was hanging out with. This reduction of privacy is a huge issue in our culture today and it certainly needs to be addressed.
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