Media and Technology Critique: Facebook’s World Domination
The dawn of the 21st century marks the shift into an era where technology dominates our daily lives. Two year olds who can barely speak in complete sentences can easily open up an iPad and navigate through the multitude of icons and tabs to play their games or start a storytelling app. The center of many classrooms today is no longer dominated by chalkboards but rather smartboards. Education is now, more than ever before, intimately intertwined with media and technology.
One media platform – amongst many – that emerged from the technology era is Facebook. A social media giant, Facebook changed the way in which people stay connected and share information. We are no longer dependent on phone calls and outings to catch up. Instead, Facebook made it very simple for all your friends – or at least, the ones that use Facebook – to know what you ate for lunch this very instant if you so choose to post onto your Facebook timeline. Furthermore, Facebook plays a role in changing the educational landscape amongst adolescents as well. Before the arrival of Facebook and other social media giants, students are more likely to physically meet up to study for tests and do homework with only their classmates and friends from the same class, and seek out their teachers after school or during lunch for additional assistance. Back in the days of snail mail and Windows 97, there was more physical interpersonal communication however information definitely took a lot longer to be transmitted amongst a group of students from different classes and periods. With the arrival of Facebook and the technology boom, students can easily form private Facebook groups and upload study notes for specific classes, be it AP U.S. History or English Literature, and share it amongst the fifty or a hundred kids that takes the same class with same teacher but in different periods. When students have trouble answering a question for homework that is due the next day, they can easily, with a few taps on the keyboard and a simple click of the mouse, send a request for help to the Facebook group. Most importantly, from the perspective of the adolescents, they know that they would get help and most likely an answer very quickly. Facebook in a sense provides a safe, positive, and convenient platform for students, especially those who are more introverted or do not do as well in academia, to give and ask for aid without feeling embarrassed or shy.
From an educator’s perspective, Facebook too can be a valuable learning tool. Just as students can form private groups to share notes and discuss about homework, educators can use this function to encourage students to engage in an informal discussion about certain topics with the aid of prompts. If you are a history teacher and the class is about to study the Great Depression, you can post prompts such as “what do you think are some of the main causes for the Great Depression?” to push the students to begin thinking about the topic and to actively participate in the class.