The Reign of Facebook

Facebook, the new internet phase that is being used by high school and college students nationwide. This new online friends frenzy is a way to keep in touch with various friends and an interesting way to also meet new friends. This new site has sparked much interest and is a wonderful new phenomenon. It is a great way to keep in touch with old friends, as well as make new friends. People post pictures and can tag pictures of other friends that are also in the picture. There are places to update your status and tell what are your plans are, so that friends may know what in fact that you are doing for the weekend. However, this is not seen the same way by all. Some feel that this website classifies people into racial groups. Everyone that is a member of Facebook, each has their own home page, it is known as their profile. On everyone’s profile there is a picture of the person and information about them, from what they like to do, to their favorite music and television shows. From these events, classifications and stereotypes can be drawn from looking at someone’s profile page. From the types of music they listen to and the way in which they speak with their typing can be used to derive this person into a certain stereotype. For instance, someone that listens to country might be stereotyped as someone that is white that lives in the suburbs or country. As opposed to someone that enjoys listening to rap, they might be stereotyped as someone that lives in the inner-city and is African American. Facebook, does not provide a specific location where someone can exactly identify what race they in fact are, but by using these stereotypes, one can come to the conclusion. More on the fact of stereotyping comes when the assumptions of someone’s race are verified by looking at their pictures to have a visual representation of who this person really is. Race is just a visual representation that we give to someone, and through the idea of sharing pictures, comes the negative of classifying people into race, even through the means of the internet. Facebook is a consumer product, and was not intended to be a negative way to classify people into stereotypes and into races. However, people will always find a way to do that either on Facebook, or somewhere else. Between this and Facebook, stereotypes will occur everywhere and anywhere.
My feeling on Facebook is that there is no stereotyping by the product what so ever. Some users may stereotype people on their own, but my conclusion that this is because of the result of Facebook is incorrect. Facebook is a program that is very basic in its format. It is up to the user to place whatever information he or she wishes to share about themselves. From this it is the other user that is doing the stereotyping, not the program itself. This is the same idea as being stereotyped on the clothes that someone would wear. The clothes are not the reason why someone would be stereotyped, it is the person that ultimately makes the stereotype. For instance, just because someone would wear a basketball or football jersey doesn’t classify them into the stereotype of being a “jock”, it is the person that makes this classification that is the cause of the stereotype. For this reason, I believe that the cause for stereotyping on the website, Facebook, does not come from the actual website itself, but from the users that use it and stereotype fellow users into groups and classifications.