Facebook-ing Phenomenon

According to Cashmore (2007) currently there are more than 15 millions people in the world have been registered as active members on Facebook and mostly of them are teenagers. The trend of facebook-ing becomes more and more bombing, enthusiasm of society regarding to this new communication tools are really surprise. Actually what is the function of social networking site? 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, those features are provided by social networking sites are really attracted audience to getting involve. As stated by Walsh (2006) that today’s society are 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.

So that, the huge number of social networking sites member 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 has mentioned earlier by Walsh (2006) people choose multimodality because its provides tools to people getting information easier and unusual moreover it have 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.