Free Essay

Facebook

In:

Submitted By sarahafr
Words 1837
Pages 8
Running head: FACEBOOK

Facebook

History and Company Overview
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
The story began from Zuckerberg’s dormitory room in Harvard University by hacking into the Harvard’s secure computer network and copied the student’s private dormitory ID images. He called the website Facemash which attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online. Later on Zuckerberg confronted dismissal from University by the administration due to the breaking of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Eventually, the charges were dropped and in the next semester, Zuckerberg started writing code for a new Web site called Thefacebook which inspired by Facemash (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA1-7).Immediately after Thefacebook(the primary name of Facebook) was launched in February 2004, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, three Harvard seniors, blamed Zuckerberg for stealing their ideas and creating his own social website while he promised them to help building a social network called HarvardConnection.com. For this reason they later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 7).
At the beginning, only Harvard students were allowed to register in Facebook but after a while in March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. Gradually it became open to all the universities in U.S. and Canada. Consequently Facebook reached 1 million active users In December 2004 and that was a huge success for the company (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 8).
In mid-2004, Zuckerberg became the company's president and moved company base of operations to Palo Alto, California by the advice of his business partner Sean Parker. In August 2005 Facebook Received $200,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel as its first investment. The company officially changed its name from Thefacebook to Facebook (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 9).
Only months later, in a logical step as zuckerberg said, Facebook expanded to high school networks and some famous company’s employees such as Apple Inc and Microsoft. Eventually the website opened to every one age 13 and older with a valid email address on September 26, 2006 (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 10).
Although During 2006-2011 Facebook had a very rapid growth from 12 million to 750 million active users, Nevertheless, Facebook's market growth suddenly started to drop in some regions. For instance Facebook lost 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011. Based on ConsumersReports.org in May 2011, there were 7.5 million children under age 13 which caused Facebook facing violation of site’s terms of service because of the underage users. Hopefully soon enough DoubleClick reported Facebook as the most visited web site in the world by reaching one trillion pageview in a month In June 2011. It also became the second most accessed website in the U.S. without considering Google as in the DoubleClick rankings. Based on recent reports on February 2012, Facebook is available in 70 different languages and has more than 845 million active users (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 2-3).
Service Line
Registration for the website is free and users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with their friends and other users in both private and public messages. A chat feature also is available. They can create and join their favorite groups just by clicking on the Like bottom (called "fan pages" until April 19, 2010). Some of these groups created by organizations with the purpose of advertising. Users have control over their information they have shared, as well as who can find them in searches, through their privacy settings. (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 21-22).In addition I can point out to some other services such as: Games and Applications and Gifts which allows users to send virtual gifts To their friends main profile page called “wall” or as a private message attached to each gift or another service provided by Facebook as a Marketplace On May 14, 2007 which gives users the opportunity to post free classified ads. On July 6, 2011, Facebook also launched its video calling services using Skype as its technology partner. (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 30).
Sales and markets
According to socialbakers.com, In January 2012 just before Facebook was scheduled to file an S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO, countries with the most Facebook users were: 1. United States with 152.5 million members. 2. India with 43.5 million members with an increase of 132% over the prior year. 3. Indonesia with 43.1 million members. 4. Brazil with 37.9 million members signifies the biggest growth region for Facebook with an increase of 268% over the year before. 5. Mexico with 32.0 million members. (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 50).
Currently there are more than two billion international Internet users with a penetration rate of 80% of Internet users in countries like Chile, Turkey and Venezuela, and a 60% penetration rate in the UK and US(blog.eloqua.com, February 1, 2012, PARA 1)

As we can see in the chart above Facebook sales for ads are number one, at $4.52 per $1 of investment. The Large Cap 10 from the S&P has the least performance in this group; however there is an exception that I should mention: Apple’s blowout 4th quarter close actually puts it higher than all the competitors including Facebook (blog.eloqua.com, February 1, 2012, PARA 4-5 ) Generally the majority income of the company comes from advertising. The percentage of ads was 98% in 2009 and 95% in 2010.It dropped off to 85% in 2011.Additionally according to the S-1 filing: digital cows, crops, and mafia hit jobs are a big source of revenue for the company; social game maker Zynga represented 12% of revenue in 2011.Moreover Gifts application which was launched on February 8, 2007, cost $1.00 each to purchase. (blog.eloqua.com, February 1, 2012, PARA 1)As a result Sales and marketing income was up 132% in 2012 for Facebook, costing $427 million. Research and development rose 169% to $244 million (blog.eloqua.com, February 1, 2012, PARA 1). Moreover Between 2009 and 2010 revenue grew 154% and the company gained $777 million in revenue in 2009 which grew to $1.974 billion in 2010.Later on revenue grew 88% between 2010 and 2011.Then almost doubled in 2011 when the company had $3.71 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profit. Finally Favebook gained over $3.7 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profit in 2012. (blog.eloqua.com, February 1, 2012, PARA 1). Company Value/Net-worth
On October 24, 2007, Microsoft gave Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion by purchasing a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million. Microsoft’s purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook.According to Second Market Inc in November 2010, an exchange for shares of privately held companies, gave Facebook a value of $41 billion which slightly took over of eBay and eventually made Facebook third largest U.S. Web Company after Google and Amazon (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 12).
Based on recent news the ownership percentages of the company are as follows: Mark Zuckerberg: 28.4%,Accel Partners: 10%, Digital Sky Technologies: 10%,Dustin Moskovitz: 6%, Eduardo Saverin: 5%, Sean Parker: 4%, Peter Thiel: 3%, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners: between 1 to 2% each,Microsoft: 1.3%, Li Ka-shing: 0.75%, the Interpublic Group: less than 0.5%. A small group of current and former employees and celebrities own less than 1% each, including Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, Adam D'Angelo, Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Natta, while Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus have large holdings of the company. The remaining 30% or so are owned by employees, a private number of celebrities, and outside investors. Adam D'Angelo, chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began fighting, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company (Wikipedia, n.d, PARA 17).
Sales Projections
While Facebook is growing fast (revenue grew 88% from a year earlier) Zuckerberg decided to gain some financial benefit from an IPO by letting Facebook to go public (online.wsj.com, February 2, 2012, PARA 14). As reported he is going to gain billions from this IPO. Right now, he makes a base salary of $500,000 per year but soon enough his annual salary will come to $1 million in January 1, 2013 (blog.eloqua.com, February 1, 2012, PARA 1).
Private purchases pushed Facebook’s valuation past $100 billion in, probably limiting immediate gains for IPO investors, given the social network a value between $75 billion to $100 billion and placing the company on a position for one of the biggest U.S. stock-market debuts of all time. The company is optimistic to have a $10 billion rise in 2012 spring when it begins selling shares. Reports shows that the company made a $1 billion profit last year from $3.71 billion in revenues that 85% of those revenues coming from advertising, and the rest from social gaming and other fees.( online.wsj.com, February 2, 2012, PARA 1-2)
According to reports even though Facebook sales are at the top this year, Google will overtake in 2013.
Conclusion
Facebook is an enormously successful social networking service that grew in a short time and plans to make the website one of the world’s most successful social networks. Primary idea was very simple but the result is billions of dollars (mashable.com, August 25, 2006, PARA 25)Reports show that, at least; each Facebook user spends 45 minutes facebooking in one day. Based on recent surveys most of the users get aware of news and many new products and services through facebook .Once you register for Facebook you get attached to it for the rest of your life. Nowadays living without having access to Facebook is similar to live without cellphones. Facebook made life easier and more interesting by its mission "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected".

References

Wikipedia. (2012, February 28). Facebook.
Retrieved February 28th,2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook. blog.eloqua. (2012, February 5). What Does Facebook Get Back for Every Sales & Marketing Dollar?
Retrieved February 28th,2012, from http://blog.eloqua.com/facebook-marketing-roi/. blog.eloqua. (2012, February 1). 10 Fast Facts About Facebook. Retrieved February 28th,2012, from http://blog.eloqua.com/10-fast-facts-about-facebook/ online.wsj. (2012, February 2). Facebook Sets Historic IPO.
Retrieved February 28th,2012, from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204879004577110780078310366.html mashable.com.(2006,August 25). Facebook – The Complete Biography
Retrieved February 28th,2012, from http://mashable.com/2006/08/25/facebook-profile/

.

Similar Documents

Free Essay

Facebook

...Facebook James L. Horton Should your company have a Facebook page? Do you have a choice? Facebook started as a way for college friends to get to know each other, but it departed academia a while ago. Many well known and not so popular brands have Facebook pages -- whether they know it or not. Friends and fans have put up pages using brand names and logos. Consider company D (purposely left nameless). Dealers of this company’s branded goods have Facebook pages dedicated to company D with as many as 80,000 fans. Hundreds of individuals also have put up Facebook sites using Company D’s name. Or, consider Company X. Company X has an active Facebook page with a wall filled with press releases and information that are probably posted on its web site as well. X claims 779 fans. How many are employees, how many clients and how many people looking for jobs? Company Y claimed 297 fans at the time of writing. However, beyond links to the firm’s web site and a brief statement about the company, there is little of interest for friends and fans. There were only two items on its wall, one a photo posted five months before. The company apparently has little idea of what to do with its site and is making no effort to keep it up. On the other hand, Company Z, a major auto manufacturer, had 39,600 friends of one its autos at the time of writing. This active site has fans, employees, critics and potential purchasers posting on the company’s wall. However, the firm makes and sells more than two...

Words: 1883 - Pages: 8

Free Essay

Facebook

...Facebook Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected. -Mark Zuckerberg A social networking service launched to the public known as Facebook, changed how we keep in touch today. Facebook connects more people then any other single network. Posted in the office, fingers on the keyboard, anticipating and waiting, on September 26, 2006, Facebook was open to anyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address. Suddenly, I was a Facebook member and the feeling felt so great. Mark Zucherberg wrote a program called Facemash in 2003, while attending Harvard University. Zucherberg didn’t think much of his newly found creation. What Zucherburg thought would be something unextraordinary, in a matter of minutes, throughout all of Harvard, Facemash, what later turned into “Facebook”, attracted 450 students and 22,000 photos uploaded in the first four hours online. Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Harvard took action in the commotion and dropped charges against Zucherburg. Initially, Facemash was restricted to Harvard University students only, eventually opening to all Ivy League schools and many more to come. Facebook has affected me substantially. Having a Facebook before having a phone gave me the access to connect with friends by posting photos, thoughts, and sharing...

Words: 564 - Pages: 3

Premium Essay

Facebook

...of the times, the network has become one of the most important parts of people's lives. The network has changed our world. People can reduce their distance through the internet. They can communicate with each other directly on the internet no matter how far away without the limitation of region. In the network, there are many virtual communities. What is a virtual community? It is a social network of individuals who interact through specific social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and MySpace, etc. In the virtual community, people can suggest their ideas; people can share their experiences and photos; people can trade with each other. Facebook is one of many social networking tools available which is considered popular due to its versatility in what can be shared-everything from installing and creating fun applications (e.g. movie quizzes) to posting photos of your recent family reunion (Bernadette 8). This is correct format for an MLA in-text citation. Facebook gives us a lot of benefits in our lives. Facebook has changed our...

Words: 1139 - Pages: 5

Premium Essay

Facebook

...Topic : Facebook 1~ Introduction 2~ The positive and negative sides 3~ How people use Facebook 4~ The reason why I choose it 5~ Conclusion 6~ References Introduction Facebook was created in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg. The website was intended to be an online version of the University's printed Facebook, a directory of new students. At that time, membership to the website was limited to Harvard students only. In a month's time, Facebook grew to include other Ivy League students as well, and within a year had over 1 million users. By the end of 2005, Facebook expanded to include, first, a network of 800 colleges and universities, then high schools, and then international students. In time for the fall semester of 2006, Facebook began accepting membership of anyone over the age of 13. According to Facebook's press room , the social networking site currently has over 90 million active users. Facebook is a privately owned company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Mark Zuckerberg, age 24 and a Harvard drop-out, is ranked 785 in Forbes Magazine's list of the world's billionaires, with a net worth of approximately $1.5 billion. 2. The positive and negative sides: Although Facebook was created with the concept of allowing students and young adults to share their common interests, but with time it has lost its true essence. Started often as a time pass, it becomes an addiction which is annoying...

Words: 1038 - Pages: 5

Premium Essay

Facebook

...Facebook: A great privacy issue It is said that the opposites attract each other. However, this fact does not apply to the social media giant, Facebook. The idea of publicity and privacy do not comply with each other. There are millions of people who use Facebook to socialize with their family, friends and relatives, share photos, and connect to various events and causes and to foster their business. Currently, there are 845 million active users on Facebook and the number is constantly increasing because this social networking site enables people to socialize and serve other purpose at an ease and free of cost. However, it does cost users to share valuable and sensitive information regarding their personal lives, their contact information and so on. Facebook collects data and other information to find old friends and relatives and users also find it helpful. But not many users understand that how their personal data is being used or to what other sources is this data being distributed. Many users on Facebook are unaware of the use of privacy settings that the Facebook provides. A study shows that nearly 13 million users have never set or did not have any knowledge regarding privacy options. It means whatever data is shared by them, be it their personal information or photos that they share can be accessed by many other people apart from their friends. And the recent studies and research also show that these privacy settings are not even safe enough to keep personal data protected...

Words: 1941 - Pages: 8

Premium Essay

Facebook

...Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term Facebook came from Zuckerberg’s high school (Phillips Exeter Academy). The Exeter Face Book was passed around to every student as a way for students to get to know their classmates for the following year. It was a physical paper book until Zuckerberg brought it to the internet. With this success, Zuckerberg, Moskowitz and Hughes moved out to Palo Alto for the summer and rented a sublet. A few weeks later, Zuckerberg ran into the former cofounder of Napster, Sean Parker. Parker soon moved in to Zuckerberg’s apartment and they began working together. Parker provided the introduction to their first investor, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and managing partner of The Founders Fund. Thiel invested $500,000 into Facebook. With millions more users, Friendster attempted to acquire the company for $10 million in mid 2004. Facebook turned down the offer and subsequently received $12.7 million in funding from Accel Partners, at a valuation of around $100 million. Facebook continued to grow...

Words: 685 - Pages: 3

Premium Essay

Facebook

...Facebook and Identity Construction Khadija Ali Introduction Background of Facebook Identity Construction Identity Construction through Facebook The birth of the internet has changed the traditional conditions of identity construction. As the corporeal body is separated from social encounters in the online environment, it becomes possible for people to interact with one another through the Internet in text mode alone that has nothing to do or does not reveal anything about their physical attributes. Furthermore, even in situations where the audiovisual mode is used in contacts via the Internet, anonymity can be maintained through withholding information regarding the personal background, like the name, residence and institutional affiliation of a person. The combination of disembodiment and anonymity result to a technologically-mediated environment where a new mode of identity construction emerges (Tennyson, 2008). The model of identity represented in social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace was criticized by Alice Marwick. Marwick argues that the finite profile options in this social networking sites are greatly too limiting than with the diverse open-ended ways that people express themselves in face-to-face contact. According to Marwick, “the rigid profile structure encourages the user to present him or herself in a way that is partly constructed by the application, not the user”. She emphasized that the type of identity performance...

Words: 830 - Pages: 4

Free Essay

Facebook

...Facebook Facebook is one of the most successful social networks ever made. What ever happened to one human being going up to another and using face-to-face interaction? Over billions of people have a Facebook account, including myself, and spend countless hours on this addictive website. This website has caused a lot of controversy with adults who have kids that are absolutely obsessed with their Facebook. In “Dad’s Encounter with the vortex of Facebook,” written by Michael Duffy, he discusses some issues he has with Facebook. He explains that the site Gives teens an illusion of privacy, has a dark side, where stalking and cyber bullying takes place and most of all that it’s a waste of time. I couldn’t agree more with Michael issues about Facebook. Michael Duffy claims that teens have an illusion of privacy on Facebook. In other words, as he states in his article, “Teenagers think their lives are private just so long as their parents aren’t tuning in.” Since these teenagers have this illusion that their Facebook is private, they think they can say and post statuses as well inappropriate pictures and they think there won’t be any consequences from this. For example, I had a friend who went to a party and took pictures of herself drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, and dancing inappropriately on numerous guys. She then posted the pictures she took from the party from the other night, thinking her parents would never see the photos. It turns out she had an older cousin who...

Words: 1124 - Pages: 5

Premium Essay

Facebook

...Facebook, who became a publicly traded company in May 2012, has seen a struggle in the ability to meet financial market’s expectations. The well-established social network is struggling to meet investors’ expectations and has a stock rate of -11.70%. For at least the fifth consecutive quarter, the social network’s revenue growth has shriveled while costs continue to rise. Facebook had an initial IPO of 38 dollars, but finished the regular session down 8.5% to 26.84 dollars. This document will conduct a critical analysis of the key issues facing Facebook, which include relying on advertising, increasing operational cost and difficulties increasing growth, shifting to smart phones, and increasing competition. ​One key issue contributing to Facebook’s struggle is that they heavily rely on advertisement for revenue, but are having issues maintaining that revenue. When looking at the first quarterly report for investors, 83% of its revenue comes from advertising (Elstone). Zynga, a social gaming company, provides about 14% of Facebook’s advertising revenue, but they have seen a 37% decrease in their stocks too (Elstone). Major companies who have been using Facebook for advertisement are beginning to question if their ads on Facebook are working. For example, General Motors Co. believed that the ads were ineffective and that there was no evidence to believe otherwise. This led them to pull $10 million worth of ads from Facebook in May (Raice). Limited Run, another U.S. based company...

Words: 829 - Pages: 4

Premium Essay

Facebook

...Teenagers and Facebook - has it gone too far? Social Networking hasn’t been around for that long, the first one ever was launched in 1997 called SixDegrees.com. It allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in 1998, surf the Friends lists. Nowadays the most popular Social Networking site is Facebook, with over 400 million active users, and a large percentage of them being teenagers. Almost every teen has their own account because it has become a very convenient way to communicate with one another, share pictures and even now play games. It is no doubt a very fun site to go on, but after all the hours spent, it is clear to say that Facebook is a huge distraction for teenagers and used to a way too high extent. Before 2006, Facebook was a website strictly for college students and the user had to have a college e-mail address in order to use the website. This policy changed when the website gained popularity and became available to everyone over the age of 13, giving high school students access to it. When an average high school student returns from school, he or she will immediately log on to their Facebook, spend hours updating their status, uploading pictures, commenting on them chatting with friends and beating their friends scores in games. By the end of the night, to themselves they have made quite an accomplishment, yet in the real world they have done absolutely nothing. Their homework still remains untouched and now, being all tired...

Words: 880 - Pages: 4

Premium Essay

Facebook

...Facebook Facebook started off as a Private Limited Company (LTD). This means that the public are not able to buy shares into a company. In early 2012 Facebook decided to turn itself in to a Public Limited Company (PLC), a PLC is when the public is able to buy shares into a business. Facebook is a social media website and it was launched in February 2004. It was founded by college students from Harvard University; the founder was Mark Zuckerberg and some of his roommates. A benefit of being LTD is that they are not able to lose control of their company. However this means that they have to rely on their own money to invest into the business or they will have to get capital investment. A disadvantage of a LTD is that the shares which are sold to friends can’t be sold or transacted to another person. After being a LTD for almost a decade Facebook decided to change to a PLC. A benefit of this is that the business can be funded by the public, also this means that other people own the business. However a disadvantage of this is that it means that Mark Zuckerberg could lose the whole business if someone buys more than 50% of the shares, this means they will have total control. Facebook started off as being a Private company as because it meant that they couldn’t lose control of their business. Also they used this to get through the ‘survival’ stage of a business; this was when they were progressing from Facemash to Thefacebook.com to then what we know it as Facebook. AS it was...

Words: 800 - Pages: 4

Free Essay

Facebook

...3. How will changing your Connection settings on Facebook help protect your privacy? The business model of Facebook is to sell the users information to the advertisers to form the target group for the advertisements. Facebook publishes the ‘likes’ of various advertisers’ product in sponsored stories. The published information includes the name, profile picture and the other basic personal information. Though the new policy of Facebook states the users’ ‘own and control their information’, the privacy policy is so complicated with over 170 information category that the users defaulted to ‘share’ because of which there is personal information flow in and out of Facebook. But changing the connection settings, you can avoid the sharing of your personal information and activities by default. Adding to that, these settings changes will also allow the users to choose which information of theirs can be shared with whom. Facebook is an encyclopedia of information and in general we follow certain pages, people and interests to know the progress and to learn information accordingly. By changing the connection settings, we can hide this information to protect our privacy. In certain situations where we would like to maintain our future plans a secret but still would like to have access to information on Facebook. Changing the connection settings on Facebook will help protect our privacy and share information with the targeted audience only. 4. Why are Facebook’s facial recognition...

Words: 442 - Pages: 2

Free Essay

Facebook

...Could the Internet communication websites (Chatting, Facebook, Twitter…etc) lead to family destruction or marriage break? As we embraced the 21st century, online communication has dominated any other type of communicating methods around the world. It has become an addictive as many people spends hours of their time on the internet. Although Internet communication websites are very effective tools of social networking, they have many negative effects on society and can lead to family destruction and marriage break. The internet has increased the number of opportunities to have outside of marriage affairs available to men and women. There are many statistics from different countries such as the UK and the United States, where the word Facebook has been mentioned in many of the divorce cases. Utilizing Internet communication website is a great idea to connect with other people, but it could also be a nightmare for many families. Your friends can post something inappropriate or embarrassing about you. Sometimes you can disable the function where people can’t post something about you, but not everyone does that. Many relationships develop when person is going to spend a lot of time with another person online. It usually starts by building an innocent communicating, and then you will start feeling more connected with that person. This may eventually develop into an intimate relationship. In different cultures such as the Arabic culture, it is absolutely not acceptable...

Words: 2028 - Pages: 9

Premium Essay

Facebook

...For the last decade, social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook have been gaining popularity. They are free, easy to join, and easy to message its members. Teenagers chat about everything from school, to sports, to what they were doing last night. It all seems like innocent fun, and it can be. But many teens are unaware there are hidden dangers of social networking sites. Some say that Social Network Sites are going to be the next social phenomenon. Usually, we have to meet a person to find out what they look like, what their interests are, or to just figure out what kind of person they are. But by using Social Networking Sites, such as Facebook, you can learn all about pretty much anyone just by going on the internet. The only fault of Social Networking Sites is that the information that you receive may not be true. It is hard to keep people from posting false information on social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace. All someone needs to do is click edit and create their own little character. It is tough to say when the issue over Facebook arose but within the past year debates have been coming up more frequently. The controversy over Facebook ignites debates among many because there are both good and bad to the site. Many people believe that Facebook is dangerous for users because of the amount of information that can be added on to one’s account. Also those who oppose the use of the site feel that time should not be spent online because it...

Words: 489 - Pages: 2

Free Essay

Facebook

...Using Facebook to Teach Rhetorical Analysis Jane Mathison Fife The attraction of Facebook is a puzzle to many people over the age of thirtyfive, and that includes most college faculty. Yet students confess to spending significant amounts of time on Facebook, sometimes hours a day. If you teach in a computer classroom, you have probably observed students using Facebook when you walk in the room. Literacy practices that fall outside the realm of traditional academic writing, like Facebook, can easily be seen as a threat to print literacy by teachers, especially when they sneak into the classroom uninvited as students check their Facebook profiles instead of participating in class discussions and activities. This common reaction reflects James King and David O’Brien’s (2002: 42) characterization of the dichotomy teachers often perceive between school and nonschool literacy activities (although they are not referring to Facebook specifically): “From teachers’ perspectives, all of these presumably pleasurable experiences with multimedia detract from students’ engagement with their real work. Within the classroom economy technology work is time off task; it is classified as a sort of leisure recreational activity.” This dichotomy can be broken down, though; students’ enthusiasm for and immersion in these nonacademic literacies can be used to complement their learning of critical inquiry and traditional academic concepts like rhetorical analysis. Although they read these texts daily...

Words: 7879 - Pages: 32