Abstract
This paper
looks at the development of Facebook as a Web 2.0 platform that has enabled the
expansion of online communities and delivered on the vision of the World Wide
Web developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. The paper not only defines the
meaning of communities and how that has changed over the decades with the
growth of technology but defines the meaning of online communities as used in Facebook.
It will also examine the relationship between the Internet, the World Wide Web
and the FacebookWeb2.0 platform to provide individuals access to online
communities and allow them to be able to produce and publish their content to
the Internet without the need for being code experts. The conclusion is that online
communities’ growth has expanded with Facebook service on the back of the Internet
technology and the development of the World Wide Web.
Introduction
Facebook is a well-known social networking service available around the world and boasts 1.52Bn daily users (Facebook, 2019) and 2.2Bn members (Statista, 2019) with the slogan “Stay connected with people around the world – anywhere, anytime” it has become an integral part of everyday life for many of its members. The concept of a Facebook service starts back with development of the World Wide Web domain in 1989 (Romano, 2019). While there are many negative aspects of Facebook today in the headlines with issues such as privacy of data, fake news, content management this paper does not intend to address these as it will concentrate on how a service such as Facebook was inevitable as Internet technology evolved.
This paper will show the development of Facebook as an enabler of online communities and will emphasize that as a service it has developed in line with changing societal definitions of communities from the 1960s through to the 2000s and the evolution of technologies of the internet from the 1990s. In 1989 the world wide web was designed to meet the needs of online collaboration for communities of users and a service such as Facebook was inevitable.
Facebook provides a Web 2.0 platform
enabling the strong growth of online communities based on the World Wide Web conceived
in 1989 and facilitated by the reach of Internet technologies.
What is a Facebook community?
Facebook has grown by providing a Web2.0 service that members join as individual’s and then connect with other users such as friends and family to form a community and also join other online communities where likeminded members can share their thoughts and experiences. So, what is an online community and why does Facebook facilitate it?
The term community has a large and varied number of definitions and many theorists have their own point of view. A definition of community offered by. Aresnberg (Aresnberg, 1965) identify the elements of a community as an environment of social form and patterner behavior only. Sanders (Sanders, 1996) added a fourth element being a place to live, a spatial unit, a way of life and a social system. While these definitions are from the 1960s there is an evolution of the term community through the 70s as society changes Effrat (Effrat, 1974) views a community as distinct residential groups. In the 1980’ the Hillery’s (Hillary, 1982) definition expands to include social interaction, common ties and physical colocation, this last point shows that they still based the views on community by the technologies available to everyone at the time. The Internet was not in everyone’s hands worldwide but as the technology expanded to the individual the definitions of community expanded as well.
Baym (Baym, 1995) in the 1990s used the term virtual community describing communities that were mediated through electronic communication technologies such as mobile phones, text messaging and emails others such as Rheingold (Rheingold, 1993) viewed virtual communities as purely online through multiuser domains, Internet Relay Chat and Usenet. Either way the term virtual community referred to users being linked together to share information, ideas, feelings and desires (Calhourn, 2002).
As the definition of community changed across the decades Katz (Katz, 2004) brought together the definition of community types and the theorist’s information to develop a 4 quadrant analysis of community definitions. These 4 quadrants are Traditional Community, Social Network, Pseudo Community and Imagined Community. Facebook can be viewed as being able to meet the requirements for each of these types. The Traditional Community aka the physical community is represented by residential areas and villages. Jacobs (Jacobs, 1961) goes as far as saying that only physicality can produce the group to focus on each other and exclude outsiders. The traditional community concept, while pushing back against the virtual community concept, is still provided for by Facebook especially in that the individual member and can join a number of community types with members that are in the same location or not such as family and friends can be within the same local or in distant locations area but still use Facebook to communicate with each other. A Social Network community is the closest to what a virtual community is often thought of being. Wellman (Welmman, 2001) introduces the concept of networked individualism where each person can voluntarily pick their own community rather than being forced into a specific community. A Social Network community is not localized and fits into a larger social structure. Facebook is designed around the Social Network community type by allowing individual members to connect with each other regardless of geographic boundaries this was the basis of the World Wide Web where individuals could connect and communicate with each other no matter where they were located. A Pseudocommunity is a type viewed as a traditional community but with no geographic boundaries Rheingold (Rheingold, 1993) held that the important concepts about a community transcend the geographic boundaries of a locality. An Imagined Community is one that shares the attributes of a virtual community but still links to a spatial location. Suttles (Suttles, 1972) suggest that the local community face to face nature creates a community of sentiment based on not allowing outsiders to be part of it.
No matter what the community type is a Facebook member can be part of it anywhere and anytime as described by Rheingold (Rheingold, 1993). This is made possible by the advances in Internet technologies and the development of the World Wide Web on the Internet.
The Internet, the World Wide Web and Facebook communities.
The Internet Society paper (Leiner, 1997) describes the evolution of the Internet from its technical beginnings in the 1960s, with the development of computers through the 1970s, with internet protocols developed by Cerf (Cerf, 1974) to standardize communications and the first email utility that allowed users to communicate with one another. Cerf (Cerf, 1974) had put forward the concept of distinct networks with no global control connecting devices but having unique addressing for these devices. Leiner (Leiner, 1997) described how the internet is really collection of virtual communities and its success has been its attribute of “satisfying basic community needs as well as utilizing the community in an effective way to push the infrastructure forward”. Facebook provides their individual members with unique addresses as part of the global community and as the internet grows each device also has a unique address which expands the reach for Facebook membership growth.
Facebook has been enabled by the developments of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Researchers and technologist were, from the beginning, working as communities sharing ideas and concepts to develop technology of the internet. The resources needed to work closely but they were also geographically spread apart but working in close communication with one another to create the Internet technology. In 1989 one of these community members Tim Berners-Lee (Berners-Lee, 1999) jotted down the idea for the world wide web that sits on the internet technology but is the basis for everything we do on the internet today and foreshadowed the Facebook service of individuals being connected to communities and being able to produce and publish their own content. He proposed an information space on the Internet where documents and other web resources are stored and accessible to anyone by utilizing a special piece of software called a web browser. Most users of the internet would recognize that this is the way we access information today by typing in a location name into a web browser and getting pages of information back to the device. Without the world wide web Facebook would not be possible and again we can see how Facebook is not independent to the development of the world wide web and relies heavily on the expansion the internet technology to grows its membership reach which in turn grows its online communities.
Facebook as an online community facilitator.
First Facebook serves any community type definition in use today by providing individual members the ability to create and/or connect to any community they want to and not be forced into any communities of convenience. Secondly as the Internet grows in its reach Facebook membership grows and therefore online communities grow. Third all this has been based on the is based on the original concepts of the World Wide Web proposed in 1989.
Facebook is described as a Web2.0 service but what is a Web2.0 service? Web1.0 provided documents on the internet that was accessed by using a web browser and/or a static web site, this type of web site provided the links to specific documents that then may link to other documents in other words you would may need to follow a trail of links to get what you originally wanted. These documents and web sites were usually created by people that know how to write computer code and therefore were not easy for any user to be able to publish their own content although blogs were an early form of publishing user based content they were still mainly a publish and read not comment document. Web2.0 is first used in 1999 by DiNucci (DiNucci, 1999) and then popularized by O’Reilly (O’Reilly, 2005) the main difference of Web2.0 from Web1.0 is really about users becoming their own producers and publishers of content and other users being able to make comments about the content, this user publish and comment was envisaged by the World Wide Web concept. Facebook is a Web2.0 platform that allows any member the ability to produce and publish their content and for other users to be able to make real time comments of the content all without the need to understand computer coding.
The Facebook platform was initially developed in 2003 for a small select community to be able to dynamically interact with a web site. Niels Brugger (Brugger, 2015) provides a history of Facebook from the point of view of a user starting his journey. In 2004 the origin of Facebook started as a closed web site for an allocated community of Harvard students where each student could add and manage their own profiles, network with friends and share and comment on published content. In 2006 Facebook stopped being just an education-based service and was opened to employees of some businesses where you could add your status, news feed and marketplace to your profile. In 2008 as the Internet technology expanded with mobility Facebook expanded from just a web-based service to a mobile based service, Smith (Smith, 2019) summarizes that 43% of Facebook members are mobile users only, where you could upload your location with pictures and videos allowing members to produce more and more content and publish it in real-time. Neils Brugger (Brugger, 2015) compares Facebook with the World Wide Web as proposed by Tim Berners-Lee (Romano, 2019) in 1989 with the major differences being that Tim Berners-Lee did not want to commercialize the World Wide Web but instead released the source code to everyone. On the other hand Facebook is a large technology firm with a market cap op $US546Bn (NASDAQ, 2019) and performs like a mini version of the World Wide Web where you can stay within Facebook and not go to other software sources to recover information. The interesting point is that Facebook is a technology firm and not a media company although this debate is hotly raging it is not part of this paper and Facebook will be regarded only as a technology firm.
There is some confusion about Facebook Groups, Pages and Communities a lot of it is caused by Facebook itself trying to define a group a community page and a business page but the simple answer is that Facebook has always provided online communities they have just been called groups Tiffany Black (Black, 2018) defines a Facebook Group as a place where people can share their common interests and express their opinions. Anyone can setup a group and anyone can join up to 6,000 groups which was envisaged early in the development of the World Wide Web and in the definition of Social Networking communities as previously discussed, where individual members have the choice to join a group/community and publish/comment content to the community. Facebook Pages is more about a controlled environment where the owner will post content for others to comment on. Facebook groups exemplifies the concept of an online community with members able to join any group/community and add their own content anytime via their individual profile and that any other member can comment on.
Facebook, from the beginning has been able to expand online communities with the ability for individual members to be able to setup and join communities as they want to also members are able to publish their own content in real time that other members can also comment on in real time. Facebook has adhered to the concepts of the World Wide Web vision with users being able to publish their own content to the web although it does commercialize the member data which was not the original intent of Tim Berners-Lee. Currently it is estimated that Facebook has over 2.2BN (Statista, 2019) users worldwide with the majority of those being in multiple online communities. To round off what Facebook is in terms of size Smith (Smith, 2019) has 53 statistics as of January 2019 these key ones are; 2.2Bn members, 1.5Bn active users per day, average member is online 20 mins per day and its members produce 4 petabytes of data per day
Conclusion
Facebook was inevitable as the technology of the Internet evolved and the world Wide Web was developed.
Facebook has enabled the growth of online communities by enabling an individual member to join and or create a community which could be composed of family, friends, likeminded people, the local area or just a social community, these communities expand as Facebook membership expands which can expand as the reach of the Internet grows.
Each Facebook member becomes a producer, publisher and consumer of content as proposed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and called the World Wide Web it took a while for the Internet technologies to be able to reach this goal that we now call Web2.0.
Facebook provides a Web 2.0 platform
enabling the strong growth of online communities based on the World Wide Web proposed
in 1989 and facilitated by the reach of Internet technologies.
References
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Facebook is an interesting platform in the way that it has become so commonplace that people expect others to be their ‘friends’ however once added to the list those people can also see what you’re doing on the site.
For example, previously if you were embarrassed about a hobby or interest you could find a corner of the web to discuss it with other people however as Facebook has grown larger and more popular there seems to be an expectation from others to communicate on Facebook, like an entry level gateway of sorts for some web users who want to communicate with others.
It is not stopping anyone from using other services but I’m sure all of us have experienced people who are a bit shocked that they haven’t been ‘friended’ on Facebook. Those people still talk to you, they still go out on the weekend with you but they may not want to see a constant stream of political posts of yours every day on Facebook, for example. It is a bit strange to me that people rely so much on this one website but at the same time I can understand how it has made it easier to connect people together, maybe some people rely on it too much though?
Hi Graeme,
An interesting read, it’s clear you’ve done your research! I appreciate that your paper delves not only into the history of Facebook, but also of community.
Following on from JEastcott’s comment regarding the politics of Facebook and pressure to add friends and family with whom you might not wish to share all of your regular updates, I’m interested to know whether you think there is still a sense of community within people’s individual list of friends or if you think communities on Facebook are more limited to interactions within joined groups and pages?
Hi Jaden,
My view is that they are all communities but the family and friends can be where you share a lot or a little and tends to be adhoc communications with this community where as if you make the effort to join a community group that is of interest to you I find that you tend to be more active with the group and check in regularly and communicate more often. The important point for me though is that I can get out of a group if the interest wans whereas I stay with family and friends no matter what.
I do agree with the comment about not being ‘friended’ but I check all the friend requests for, do I know the person, does the person actually know a friend they say they do and is the profile an actual person. I learned to try and check on the validity of the person from being on LinkedIn many requests come in but they are from people that don’t exist.
An important item I learned when working with Microsoft is that your Facebook security depends a lot on the security that your ‘friend’ has you may set all your security settings but a friend can bypass them so a friend of a friend can also bypass your security settings.
Yes I’ve noticed this as well. Their friends list may be invisible to you but their good friends will post a lot of comments on their posts so it’s not hard to work out who’s who in the zoo.
Hi Jason,
I am an occasional user of Facebook, in that I have an account and I use it from time to time, but I rarely post any content (although I am about to put up a post about running in my very first fun-run (still dont get why they call them that!) on the weekend). I use it more as a way to follow what my friends and family are up to, especially the ones that are separated by distance (another city, state, country).
Initially I joined as a way to monitor my children’s use on the app: they had to make me their friend and if they ‘unfriended’ me, they lost priveliges and the right to use the app until they rectified the situation. In this way I could monitor their online interactions to make sure that they were safe etc.
These days, I use Facebook for work more than anything else, with a number of Pages connected to our main account and all fed through my personal account.
Hi Graeme, interesting read. “Facebook as an online community facilitator”, I too am fascinated by the evolution of Facebook as a complementary feature of community. I was first introduced to the concept with the example of “Little Monsters”, Lady Gaga fans who have their own world wide, non-geographically boundary, community. Now there are literally hundreds of thousands of communities and even every small tennis club or seniors chess club are utilising the Web 2.0 features of Facebook Groups or Whats App. Thanks for the link to the Brugger article, very interesting.
Hi Meryl,
Thank you and glad you got something out of the references it is interesting that there is so much written about Facebook it is difficult to pick and choose from it I think for every positive three is a negative story as well. One thing I have been following is the idea of it being a media or a tech company I did not realise all the issues they would face if Governments classed them as a media company and what it would mean to their future.
Hi Meryl,
For the town where I live in regional Victoria, ther have been a number of ‘community’ Facebook pages developed to facilitate discussion.
I intially requested to join the residents group three years ago when I lost my keys and someone suggested that it may be a good way to find them. I had a quick flick through the feed a little while ago and could see that people were use the page for things like looking for recommendations for service providers like carpet cleaners and skip bin hire, as well as pointing our current traffic hazards and roadworks and trying to find out if there are any charity bins in the town. Lost and found pets seem to feature pretty highly too.
This particular group is moderated and has a clear set of ‘rules’ set out for participation on the page.
They do not allow slanderous, bullying or hate speech. You can only advertise a business for a limited number of days, or if you have a special event coming up. They do not allow people to denigrate local/public services and are quite firm in calling out poor behaviours.
Overall, this particular Facebook group is a very good online community facilitator.
Facebook is no doubt the biggest online community in the Internet. With its size there are bound to be some negative aspects to using the service. I think Facebook has become so big that it is becoming too difficult for people to navigate around. I, for example, still have Facebook installed on my phone but I hardly ever open it let alone post anything on there. I think in recent years there are other community based online platforms that are becoming more popular for people to find likeminded people. Platforms such as Meetup is a good example of this. Having said that, I still feel that Facebook is still the number one web platform for people to go and find online communities and groups to join.
Hi Frederick,
I agree that Facebook is becoming too large and there does not seem that the safeguards are keeping up with the growth of the information flowing on the platform. I did read that many people use Facebook as their news feed and while there is a lot of instant news, I still go back to the media companies for verification of that news. I also do not use the Facebook app on my mobile devices, but the interesting statistic was that there are over 40% of Facebook users only using the mobile app.
Hi Graeme,
Before Facebook became ‘a thing’, there were magazines, online social chat groups, MSN chat rooms and gaming chat rooms. These online networks connected everyone digitally where it blew our minds away. Now with Facebook, it connects everyone together who have the same interest or who would like to share their thoughts on a particular topic. Businesses use groups to grow their connection to form a database, where family and friends connecting online use Facebook to keep up on what’s new within their communities. I find Facebook and social media as a whole is a powerful tool engages the community to stick together, regardless of the topic.
Graeme, your paper was a good read and made me wonder what the statistical data would be like with the groups I am following on Facebook.
Hi Amanda,
Thank you for your comments, I was not able to source statistical information down to the group/community level nor even find how many groups there are on Facebook although one interesting point that I did find was that a member can join 6,000 groups which I think shows that it is setup for groups/communities from the start although 6,000 would be incredible one stat said a a member would have an average of 1-5 groups.
That is an incredible number – I wonder if some have joined 6,000 groups of even close to that. I have a quite few and I also have groups/pages I have joined when Facebook was first introduced which I believe have been taken down or are not active. Facebook is an incredible network.
Hello Graeme
Your paper on Facebook has some similarities to my paper in as much as we agree it is a community in the very sense of the word. It is interesting that you explain the early days 1960 – 1970 before Web 2.0, as I was in my late teens and the internet hadn’t been available to the public. Today it’s hard to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg launched “The facebook,” in 2004 while in Harvard University named for sheets of papers given to freshmen, profiling students and staff, it took only 24 hours for 1200 students to sign up and one month for half the undergraduate population to have a profile. Facebook in 2019, over 15 years there has been a phenomenal growth and I’m sure most of the world population is connected in some way. Brilliant writing Graeme, thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Phillips, S. (2007.) A brief history of Facebook. The Guardian.
Retreived from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia. Accessed: 05/05/2019
Hi Robin,
Thank you for your comments I do find the history of these platforms and the growth of the internet fascinating subjects probably because I worked in Telecommunications and in the IT industry so I look at it from the fact that new communication technologies and social media platforms grow together. The growth from a student information platform to a 2.2Bn user platform is phenomenal and while there are many others trying to emulate Facebook it seems to have the first mover advantage. It will be interesting to see when 5G becomes readily available if the social media landscape changes with new entrants and capabilities though to challenge Facebook.
Hi Graeme,
Thanks for sharing the information on Facebook and how they are focussed on expanding their communities. I have been on Facebook now since around 2009 which seems like only yesterday. It has changed and evolved quickly in 10 years. I think that slowly, it has changed so much that it has eroded the intimacy of the content through the feeds. At times when I haven’t interacted or posted regularly, all I get is feeds of sponsored information and other stuff that is connected to pages I have checked out through targeted marketing algorithms and cookies. I think it’s been a great tool for connecting with old friends and networking, but it is losing its relevance as personal networking and connecting tool. Facebook messenger is a great tool though for sending messages or to video call etc. What a world we are living in right now. To dig a little deeper though, where do you see Facebook in the next few years. Will it fade, or will it evolve further? If so, where will the evolution lead us and how we use it?
Thanks again,
Luki
Hi Luke,
First off I want to say that messenger has grown on me over the last few weeks as my daughter is travelling and keeps in contact via Messenger so I have gone from not using it a lot to using it every day and it is interesting the company she works for users it to keep in contact with their staff and it is a Fortune 500 company. I wish I did have a crystal ball about the future of Facebook but my view is that it will be broken up and maybe have part of it as a media company under media regulations in different countries while another will be the advertising use of the data and a third component being the generic social media Facebook. The concern I have if it stays the same is something quite topical, the India elections where millions of people say they only get their news from Facebook and cannot tell what is real and what is fake this I think above all must be a break point for Facebook but a lot will depend on American politics while they see Facebook as an advantage to them they will keep it the way it is.
Thanks for your comments
Graeme
It’s a pretty interesting time for social media in general. There hasn’t been any new big players in recent years that have become giants like Instagram and Facebook. What will be next I wonder? Will it be something that we can connect with other people through a virtual portal nature of some sort? Holographic communication perhaps like those in science fiction movies. Interesting times ahead.
Hi Graeme,
Do you think that Suttles’community of sentiment would be equivelant to a closed Facebook group?
Hi Vivian,
Yes I you could look at Suttles’ community concept as being reflected in the closed Facebook group in that the closed Facebook group reflects the idea that you must be invited into the group and no one else can read the posts but the group is visible to see and a person can request membership. Suttles’ was of course writing in 1972 so his community was was a local one whereby Facebook is a non geographic form with technology capabilities of today my view is that no mater what the community idea is then Facebook has a capability within it to enhance it with technology.
Thanks for the question.
Graeme
Hi Graeme
Thank you for your interesting and informative essay. I think we all have a lot to thank Tim Berners-Lee and other early innovators for. We may not have the www and internet that we have today if not for all their hard work and technological skills. Web 2.0 introduced internet users to a whole range of useful creative tools so that anybody could produce and upload their own creative content.
Facebook has changed and grown so much over the years. I used to play the old pirate game when I first signed up, and it seems so primitive in comparison to games like Candy Crush Saga and Farm Heroes Saga. I remember adding a few of the pirate game players to my friend list and they are still on there with friends, family, and friends that I met at online message boards prior to Facebook. I really like the fact that Facebook does provide the opportunity for people to join different groups and like dedicated pages.
I do not like the data collection aspect, but I do enjoy the online social interaction.
Hi Michelle,
Thank you for your comments, I must admit I did not play any of the Facebook games and after the Cambridge Analytica issue I certainly will not interact with Facebook surveys or pass them onto any one else.
Candy crush is interesting as I have seen it used by a company I have done some work with as a training brain training exercise for senior executives, the way they use it is to have people developing their strategy from it and not just a game so a simple fun game becomes a way of developing strategies.
Thanks again for reading my paper and I do think that people don’t understand what Tim Berners-Lee actually developed nearly in his spare time.
Graeme