Assignment 2 : I Liked Everything on Facebook

Facebook tells me I’ve been a user since November 19, 2007, the first couple of years I was very active, posting pictures, liking comments, interacting with friends and all those fun things. It was a very “cool” thing to do, being on Facebook rather than Myspace. As time passed and it became more popular I stopped commenting and became less active to the point of becoming a stalker, as I feel like I’ve been lately. I know just get in when I get a chance to see what my friends are posting. I rarely like or comment on anything. For this past week, for my class assignment I started to like everything I saw, from pictures of babies to Coca-Cola ads and a couple of infamous memes. 

About 5 minutes after I started liking every single post in my feed I received a text message from a very good friend I haven’t spoken to in a couple of weeks. It was a screenshot of me liking a video titled “Shoulder Smashers  - The Way I do It”, it was a very attractive lady working out her shoulders, although I think I liked everything I saw while I was scrolling down, I can't remember liking such video. Less than five minutes later I received another text message, it was another friend sending me another screenshot of me liking a Flour Box Bakery post titled “Braiding hair in the bakery today!” again, I don’t know how this got to my feed.

The feedback I received from my friends, two screenshots in less than 10 minutes was very interesting and made me want to keep on doing this. After 3 minutes of liking posts and refreshing the page it got to the point where I couldn’t keep up with the number of posts in my feed, posts were dramatically increasing as I hit the like button and these were all posts from the same people that I had to stop liking things from the same person, as much as I wanted to do this experiment I didn’t want to annoy any of my friends, or even worst, for them to think I was stalking them.

I liked a picture of a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a few years and that turned into a comment from him which then turned into a very good conversation. The posts I liked kept showing in my friend’s feed, I’m pretty sure I annoyed a couple of them, and I even lost a couple of Facebook friends, my list went from 478 to 475 after the two days of liking posts. 

The changes I noticed after I liked almost everything I saw on Facebook are the following.

• Advertisements increased
• More posts of the things/people I liked showed in my feed
• People unfriended me
• Feed on my phone had more ads than on my computer

According to one of my friends I made this up because I liked a picture of a girl while I was drunk and was trying to cover this up from my girlfriend, but reality is that this exercise helped me to experience in a more clear way how Facebook’s algorithms work, it made me loose a couple of contacts and I probably annoyed a few more of my friends with my likes, perhaps I was even blocked by some more people but it also helped me reconnect with other friends. Now I only wish everything will go back to normal after I leave the like button alone and unlike a couple of pages.

#NewToTwitter

It has been over five years since the first time I posted something on twitter and yet my number of tweets is less than 50, this is because I had never really been interested in twitter until now when I’m having to do this for school assignments. It has always been very clear to me that there are many advantages that come with having a twitter account and with twitter in general but I am just now seeing the benefits of twitter firsthand.

One of the greatest advantages of having a Twitter account and following news accounts such as The Associated Press (@AP) which I follow, is the speed in which you can get the news, one does not necessarily needs to follow the account posting the news but with the retweet  function you can share this tweet with all of your followers. An example of this is when I retweeted a story they tweeted about two half-brothers who were just released from prison after spending 30 years for a girls slaying they “committed” in 1983. News stories like this always catch my attention as I’ve always been interested in cases were the persons convicted are later found not guilty.

An interesting tweet worth mentioning is a tweet from Valeria Jarrett (@vj44), Senior advisor to President Barack Obama (@BarackObama), which the mere president retweeted which showed a graph and stated that female unemployment was falling to pre-recession leves, this is very interesting because if it was not because I follow the president on twitter this would be something I would probably never hear of.

It amazes me how you can get informed on important topics on twitter in so many ways; a good example of this is a tweet I saw from Pope Francis (@Pontifex) whom I follow, with a simple tweet like the one he posted on June 23rd which reads “Let us pray for the Christian communities in the Middle East, that they may continue to live in the land where Christianity was born” he not only encourages his followers to pray on tragedies like this one but also creates intrigue to want to know more of what’s happening in those places and get informed. I am glad I will get to engage more with twitter thanks to my classes this semester and this will definitely become a habit and a tool that I will use in my favor.