Assignment 6: The Leviathan on Facebook

As Facebook becomes more popular, new applications are being added so people stay interested. The Facebook “wall” has been a popular application for a long time. This allows people to write messages on their friends’ walls for the public to see.

Another application that was created soon after the “wall” was the “status” application, where people can put up a type of away message which would inform others what you are doing at the moment. However many people use the “status” application to write whatever they want, including the way they are feeling at the moment. They can either use netiquette to avoid insulting their friends, or they can be intentionally rude to those who they are friends with on facebook through these applications. An experiment about group polarization in CMC found that participants in a situation where team unity was emphasized, who were in separate rooms, had a sharp increase in group polarization. This finding applies to the “status” and “wall” applications on Facebook because we use computers to write these messages in separate places, knowing that our friends on facebook have the ability to see our messages. Because of this, we tend to stick to the norm and try to act respectful.

Yet newer applications including “Advanced wall” and “Graffiti” allow people to be even more expressive because it allows a person to draw pictures on Facebook walls. In this situation the Leviathan are the Facebook moderators who passively monitor the network for offensive content. Regardless of this Leviathan’s presence, it enforces the norm in a laid back manner. People conform to respectful standards because they are aware of the lack of anonymity in these applications. All of these postings are presented so that the person who wrote on a friend’s wall is not anonymous. For example, when I write on someone’s wall it says “Robin Luckow wrote at 2:58pm on October 1st, 2007 …” with my profile picture next to the image. This makes the person aware of their actions and will make them more likely to conform to respectful standards. For example, I know that many employers look at their potential candidates’ Facebook profiles before hiring them to see what they are like. If there are obscene wall postings or graffiti drawings on one’s profile, this might affect the employer’s opinion that person and can determine whether one is hired or not. This can have an enormous effect on what one posts on their profile or on other people’s profiles.

Also, Wallace says that people are realizing “our contributions to the net are not as fleeting, nor as difficult to trace, as many had supposed”. If a person draws an offensive picture, it is likely that the illustration will remain on the profile. Therefore, people who write on Facebook walls or draw on Graffiti walls generally conform to the principles of human decency.