Facebook and the power of interaction

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I am a Facebook user, by choice and largely convenience, but regardless, I am, and there's a good chance you reading this, are too. With over a billion active monthly users (of 7.125 billion people on this planet), Facebook is global, and where there are people, there are connections and relationships.

In week 2, we learnt about Space and Power, and how power is not per say a thing, but relational, shared through connections and relationships (Lecture 2 Power: The Panopticon, slide 16).

Power, as I understand it, is a relational effect of social interaction. (Allen, J. 2003)

Facebook holds this kind of power, yes as a company, but also a information network, harnessed by the users. A single user can own a page with a million "Likes" (1 Like being equivalent to one individual's interest gauged in the page), and thus have the potential outreach of 1 million, however this system heavily relies on the activity of the users who have liked said page, to share the post with their own social links, in order to spread the post, as to not just saturate Facebook with every post from a Liked page on the liker's feed. All evident as seen as in this video.

So whilst there is power in Facebook and it's relationships, it is a system that relies on the user on the other end playing along. Power restricted as good as the incentive is for users to want to share or reply to it, it is not simply a system where the user with the highest Like count has the loudest voice, but one where the users decide whether a voice is worth hearing, through their own relationships.

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Reference list

www.clipartbest.com

Facebook. (2015). Company Info. Palo Alto. Retrieved from
https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

Worldometers.info. (2015). World Population Clock: 7.3 Billion People (2015) - Worldometers. Retrieved from
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Van Luyn, A. (2015). BA1002 Our Space: Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place. Townsville. Retrived from
https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au/bbcswebdav/pid-1980982-dt-content-rid-2670854_1/xid-2670854_1

Allen, J. (2003). Lost Geographies of Power. Melbourne. Blackwell Publishing.

Veritasium. (2014). Facebook Fraud. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag