Question 2: Is Facebook Good?

The reach of Facebook as a social network is online any other. The ability to form groups, communicate with others, as well as share, like and repost was truly revolutionary. Zuckerberg associate’s "connection" with his intentions for Facebook, which can be correlated with Flichy's concept of "ideology, myth and utopia." 

The goal of Facebook was to be a platform that would connect people everywhere through one digital space. This free service provides a user-friendly opportunity to explore connections and share updates and information with people around the world. Recognizing that Flichy's idea of ideology and myth, is the distortion of the real experience, exposing people to an unrealizable world, Facebook is a perfect exemplification of this concept. Facebook creates a theoretical world where people can connect and communicate regardless of traditional barriers, whether physical, mental of geographical. 

In terms of Flichy's utopia, Facebook exhibits this through many examples. For one, Facebook allows the average person to connect with celebrities or other affluent individuals and feel as though they truly have a connection with them. This utopia is also seen in one’s ability to only showcase the part of their life that they want others to see. People are able to create an identity that they feel reflects their ideal perception. 

All in all, I do not believe Facebook is an example of Tech for Good seeing as there are so many ways one can navigate Facebook in order to use it in unethical and unexpected ways. I also believe that due to the vast amount of money available through Facebook, it poses significant conflict of interest when it comes to truly doing something for the good of people. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

(Un)Happiness and Network Sociality

Chamath Palihapitiya, a prominent/successful venture capitalist and CEO of Social Capital (and, interestingly enough, a University of Waterloo alumni) recently appeared on  Recode Decode — a tech podcast hosted by Kara Swisher.  In their conversation , Palihapitiya reflects on a moment where he introspectively asked himself why his successes in VC had made him less happy. He states:  “I had been exploring why, after the accumulation of all of these things— more companies invested in, more funds raised, more notoriety, more television appearances, more this, more that, more everything — why am I not more happy? [...] In fact, I’m less happy. And in fact, I think that I’ve actually really bastardized some core relationships in my life where I’ve created  hyper-transactional relationships  in many areas of my life.” He later goes on to say that... "... the counter-effect was, I would either be spending time with people that weren’t neces...
Read more

Changing Times in Ontario's Tech Ecology

Ottawa, Toronto, and Waterloo have long been the technological-innovation hubs of Ontario. These cities are home to major innovation institutions, Invest Ottawa, MaRS Discovery District in Toronto and Communitech in Waterloo. While these hubs have been an essential element of the growth of technology and entrepreneurship within the province, there is always room for more growth.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has recently announced the provincial investment in merging these three institutions into one overarching program. This program launches under the expectation that it will bring in $100 million dollars in revenue to its 30 scale-up companies, as well as providing services to thousands of entrepreneurs and their innovations.  This new program, called the Scale-Up Platform will be receiving an investment of $52.4 million from the Government of Canada in order to facilitate this growth. By combining these programs and affiliating them with the Ontario governmen...
Read more

Blog Post 2

From reading how CEO Mark Zuckerberg defends Facebook’s business practices as being a service that was built in order to afford people with the ability to connect and learn about one another operates as a socio-technical imaginary. To develop an understanding as to what this term entails, one must understand what an imaginary is and how it can be socio-technical. an imaginary can be identified as the vision and feelings one has associated with something. The socio-technical is influential as these imaginaries are “once products of and instruments of the co-production of science, technology, and society in modernity” (Jasanoff, 2015). Therefore, making socio-technical imaginaries explained by Josanaoff as “scientific and technological visions enter into the assemblages of materiality, meaning, and morality that constitutes robust forms of social life” (Jasanoff, 2015). When relating Zuckerberg’s idea of “connection” it operates as a socio-technical imaginary by building Facebook off of ...
Read more