The Melting Pot Called “Facebook”
In the recent weeks I took on an a Facebook experiment, if you will. I am a Facebook regular, but exploring it with more of an intention certainly put Facebook into a new light for me. I started out by exploring my feed and really paying attention to the kinds of posts my friends were posting and sharing. Just as I predicted (mainly because my Facebook feed usually looks the same every time I log in) my feed mainly consisted of photos of my Facebook friends of all sorts. Some of them across the world studying abroad in exotic countries, and others right here at Illinois State University. There was also a good amount of news articles (very few if any are actually credible) and some funny memes scattered throughout. I observed that my feed tended to be mainly light hearted, but always with a few heavier topics. My typical Facebook posts consists of photos from events I attend or exciting things I do or places I go. For my first post I posted something a little different than my usual light hearted puppy videos. As I was scrolling down I noticed a video that seemed to be showing up on my timeline over and over again so I took a minute to watch it. As it turns out this viral video happened at my very own hometown high school of Niles West! The previous day had been their homecoming pep assembly and one of the student’s older siblings who is in the U.S. Marines came to surprise him and his whole family in the middle of the assembly. It was a heart warming moment that brought myself (and I’m sure many others) to tears as the young man embraced his entire family into his arms in front of thousands of students and faculty. Not only was this video sweet and heartwarming but it definitely hit a soft spot being is happened in my home town… so naturally I had to share the video. Part of this whole Facebook experiment was to observe the interactions that occurred with the posts I shared. Typically, I would share a video like this for the joy of spreading it for others pleasure but I don’t expect much interaction on the post. I checked back in several times and found that there were a few likes on the video I had shared. Typically, I don’t really pay attention to the people who like my posts but in this case I did take note. As far as the number of likes the post received I was not surprised at all. I have noticed in the past (and think its quite interesting) that posts of myself with others get many more likes compared to other text that I share on Facebook. I was actually pretty surprised initially to see the people who liked this post because it wasn’t who I would have expected. Several people who I would only consider to be casual acquaintances, and then a couple of other people who have distant affiliation with my high school liked the post. That made me wonder if these people frequently interact with my page and I just don’t always take note of it, being I tend to not look at individual likes, or if they liked it because they have some affiliation with Niles West. After monitoring this post several times over a matter of two days and racking up a total of 6 likes on it, I concluded my first set of observations.
The next time I started my observations was four days later. Being this time around I logged in 5 times to take observation I started to notice a real trend in the types of posts and themes on my feed. I started to notice 4 main types of posts: Photos, videos, articles, and advertisements. Not to say these were the only kind of posts that ever appeared, but I would say roughly 80% of my feed was one of these four items. This time around I pretty much saw the same thing I observed the first time so it really confirmed my initial observations. One difference I did notice if the drastic increase in memes the second time I observed. I am not entirely sure why this is but I am confident with the theory that its because it was after the first presidential debate and only 4 days later jokes in the form of memes or short video clips were poking fun at one, the other, or both candidates and so people had reason to create memes. Most of the videos I came across were either preforming arts, cooking, or animal videos. I found this for the entirety of the experiment. The most noticeable item on my news feed would be the variety of articles I came across similar to my observations last week. As far as advertisements this is something I have not always noticed all that much but I found that as I scrolled down my feed there were fashion advertisements here and there. They were all for online women’s clothing stores such as “Tobi” and “Fabletics”.
This time I posted 5 strategic posts. My main goal was not to post something that I normally would not, but to have variety in my posts and observe how people interact with each kind of post. The first post I made was a shared video of a famous country artist singing to a cover of a Justin Bieber song. This is a pretty typical post from myself as I display my love of music and preforming arts on my Facebook page frequently. It got a pretty surprising amount of interaction as it had multiple likes and multiple re-shares. I was pretty surprised with this because of how early in the morning I shared the video. The next post I interacted with was liking a photo my friend posted of her and I. Typically these photos would get a large amount of likes, sometimes even hundreds, but completely against my prediction this photo only got a few likes from a couple of family members. My third interaction was liking a meme of Kim Kardashian that an acquaintance posted. This was the most out of the ordinary for me because I am not very close with the person who posted it. I also tagged my mom in a photo that I shared on Facebook via Instagram. This naturally got many more likes than other posts I had shared because it was of my mom and myself at a painting class. My last two interactions were tagging my roommates and my boyfriend in two separate videos. They all reacted how I expected by liking the tag and commenting back on it with appreciation.
If there is anything I was able to take away from this experience as a Facebook user, it’s that my Facebook feed is certainly catered to me and to the people I am friends with. The peers that I had a discussion with all experienced the same repetition of themes on their pages but we all had different main themes. I concluded from there that Facebook is really a large melting pot of all of my Facebook friends and their lives and beliefs. I also have learned that I feel pretty free to share my own interests on Facebook however I do not feel comfortable sharing anything too personal, or anything with strong personal/political views. I think as a teacher the only way I would use Facebook is to have my students complete some form of social media assignment similar to this one. I prefer to stay away from Facebook as a platform for the class because I feel that even if you have a separate page for your class to congregate on, it is walking a fine line that could have very negative consequences if anything where to go wrong. Seeing Facebook in a whole new light has certainly brought an awareness to me every time I log into Facebook and scroll through my news feed or have interactions with others.
