This document discusses how Facebook has become a dominant social networking site and part of everyday life. It analyzes Facebook through a postmodern lens, noting how it allows for self-reflexivity through personal profiles, mini-narratives through status updates, and instantaneity, though loading can sometimes be slow. It has also broken down distinctions between high and low culture. Additionally, Facebook enables a hyperreality and cult of celebrity, as users can curate idealized versions of themselves and follow celebrities.

2. facebook is a social networking website, which has an international audience that exploded into a dominating website not too long ago. It has become part of our everyday life. But to when will we realise that it is taking over our life and turning into a postmodern phenomenon.

3. Postmodernism in The Book of Face Self reflexivity – You create your own facebook page for people to look at. It is not about anyone else but yourself, you are showing other people on this website who you are!! You are reflecting your everyday life through a Web 2.0 format....Documenting your life. Mini-narratives – Every user’s page has a story to it, with status’ and comments on the user’s wall it begins to create a story of their life.

4. Instantaneity – Social networks, have a service of being right here right now, it’s easily accessible and very quick, people are still having the problem with confusion over time and space how some people find that ‘Facebook Chat’ takes a long time, how the loading of pictures takes forever, there is still that sense of impatience even if Faceboook is instant. The Breakdown between high and low culture – Everyone before we knew about facebook had Bebo, it was the youngster’s social network, until people started calling it a chav fest. People went to Facebook, it was signed as class as it was linked to universities. People of all different classes joined facebook and it has broken the distinction between high and low culture.

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVA047JAQsk This user generated, web 2.0 video on Youtube is an example of the general public having the opportunities to become producers or celebrities outside of the mainstream entertainment business. Furthermore, it represents how a “culture is no longer viewed as art mirroring life but a reality in itself” a theory from Strinati. Parody – Since facebook has become so popular, more and more people have decided to mock it, people have made up songs and posted them onto YouTube, people have made pages onto Facebook – “Join if Facebook has made you fail you’re A Levels”. We all find Facebook so addictive and a good website but people can take the mick out of it because they have received so much money and it’s just too popular, it’s like The Simpsons mocking Fox. We all find jokes about Facebook funny because they are true however, we just can’t manage to get off Facebook it’s part of our everyday life.

6. Cult of Celebrity Our postmodern society is highly celebrity obsessed, with it becoming slightly obsessive. Through Facebook celebrities make their own profile pages and therefore the public can follow these celebrities and what they are doing. However, many pages are “fake” and are generated by members of the public, creating a vicious circle; because of our celebrity obsessed culture we make up hyper-real profile pages based on their idols. This also links into the development of new technologies allowing people to become producers. States of hyper reality Baudrillard was a theorist who developed the idea of the simulacra; where he argues that states of reality are not truly real and we are experiencing a version of reality. Facebook is a hyper real concept. Users of Facebook can manipulate how their page is perceived and what appears within this webpage. As a facebook user you only see an edited version of someone’s “life” and this allows the social networking site to be hyper real.

7. No single definition – 350 million people on facebook, everybody with different ideas and thoughts on how things are done or how we can define things. There are many groups which we can join to show what we believe in, or to join if we are against another group. People will share their thoughts and argue them on facebook. Everyone has the right to what they want to say …. And they are all different showing that today there is NO single definition. They have so many different groups for celebrities …. who is the real David Beckham? Since there are 350 profiles of him. They all define him in a different way, use different pictures and use different facts about him, some true and not true, creating us to think for ourselves, we can believe it’s him if we want to or maybe not.

8. Photoshop – The Edited Profile Pictures!! We are waaaaay to obsessed with our looks. It is mainly in the younger generation, at home on your own, taking a million pictures of yourself, uploading them onto your computer and just editing away, getting rid of the features that we don’t like, then maybe brighten the picture and have weird writing at the bottom with their middle name instead of their last name ‘OliviaGeorgina (: xx’. This picture isn’t the real you. You have edited it to create something that you want to be. It doesn’t show who you are. Facebook creates us to believe that everything on this website is real and that we should believe it. They take down the pictures that show offense but surely they should take down the pictures that are not really you. People in some ways have created a simulation for themselves. Making a story up about this character who is supposedly to be themselves, how can we 100% truly think that it is you unless you know them in real life.