“Facebook should change its name to Baitbook”

Participatory Culture(s): Write about your involvement in a participatory culture (gaming, social networking, knowledge community).

I hate to admit it, but I am a Facebook addict. It’s pretty embarrassing because sometimes I’m on Facebook for no apparent reason, and I find myself looking at photos of people I don’t even know. You might be laughing right now, only because you know you do the exact same thing.
I’m currently looking at my profile, and see that I am in 41 groups, and I am a fan of six different pages. I also see that I have 248 friends, most of which I don’t talk to, and some whom I don’t even know. The connections that I have with the groups, the pages, and my friends, are all acts in the participatory culture known as social networking. Everyone who has a Facebook account, or MySpace, Twitter, etc., are apart of a large social networking culture; meaning that we all act together to serve a social network, and keep it running.
In Chuck Klosterman’s book, “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs,” he writes about the two ways that he looks at life. “The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone’s life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we don’t realize it” (Klosterman). His second view completely relates to social networking; even though we might not realize it, using a social networking tool, like Facebook, connects each individual who uses it together.
For instance, I am in a group titled “Facebook should change its name to Baitbook.” The group, which was created by a former high school classmate (who was relatively funny, but just down right dumb), was created as a petition for Facebook to change its name to Baitbook (pretty self-explanatory). Every person in the group didn’t really expect that Facebook would change its name; rather, we were just in it because it was a big inside joke type of thing. The group is completely ignored by anyone important, but, nevertheless, we stand strong, together.
Because that is what social networking is all about: togetherness. It’s about finding people from elementary school to see how ugly they’ve become; it’s about joining groups, and becoming fans of television shows, movies, and music; and, most importantly, it’s about creeping profiles of people you don’t know, because you know that one day you will end up meeting them in Brampton.

Klosterman, Chuck. Sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs a low culture manifesto. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.

"Face book should change its name to baitbook." Facebook. Web. 19 Nov. 2009. .