Social networking sites

Face-booking Phenomenon

According to Cashmore (2007) currently there are more than 15 million people in the world who have been registered as active members on Facebook and most of them are teenagers, however the age group widens. The trend of facebook-ing is booming with enthusiasm as society learns about this new communication tools. McDowell (2006) states that social networking is made in order to maintain social relationship, allowing users to establish friendships or romantic relationship, while others may focus on business connection.

(statistic of Facebook users, taken from :http://mashable.com/2007/04/13/facebook-users/)

In my opinion, the features provided by social networking sites are really attractive to audiences. As stated by Walsh (2006) today’s society is experiencing ‘paradigm shift’ that is multimodal, multimodal is the situation when visual, electronic, and digital text collaborate into more than one ‘mode’ in order to produce a message.

The huge number of social networking site members is really reasonable, first because people nowadays compete to build more relationship with more different backgrounds of friends. Second, this is the effect of multimodality which is mentioned earlier by Walsh (2006) people choose multimodality because its provides tools for people getting information easier and it has potential to combine words and images in complex structures with logos, menu bars, hyperlinks, hot spot, video clips, animation, graphics, music, sound effect, voice-over or write-over.

Reference:
Cashmore, P 2007, Facebook’s Active Users In Millions, Mashable Social Networking News, viewed 3 June 2008.
http://mashable.com/2007/04/13/facebook-users/

McDowell, M 2006, Staying Safe on Social Network Sites, US-Cert Cyber Security Tips ST06-003, viewed 3 June 2008.
http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ST06-003.html

Walsh, M 2006, ‘”Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian journal of language and literacy, vol. 29, no 1, pp. 24-37.