"The greater the power, the greater the abuse" (Burke 1729). So often we see this being the case when looking at celebrities as well as the government and how they run their social media networks.

I have decided to blog about the social network site Facebook in weeks 3 - 8 for my assessment. This week's blog focuses on power and how certain social groups use power to their advantage through Facebook.

Allen (2003) relates power to manipulation and domination, is it too much of a stretch to think that this is the case for celebrities on Facebook? But is it just celebrities or other various stars that have all the 'power' on Facebook? The Washington Post ran a story on the NSA and the FBI tapping directly into social networks including Facebook in order to invade people's privacy. This raises the issue of Panopticon which involves the idea of how people act if they believe they are being watched or in this case tracked by surveillance. Turkle (1995).

Shirky (2011) uses examples of how social networking (particularly texting and Facebook) have led to mass protests of certain political parties and how in some cases Politicians have been overthrown or major decisions overturned because of this. This is a clear example of how people with little power can group together to create large groups with huge amounts of power.

This proves that through such social networking sites like Facebook, there can be many different types of power identified. It will be interesting to see how Facebook is policed by the Government in months and years to come.
"With great power comes great responsibility" (Lundberg 2012).

REFERENCE LIST

Allen, J. (2003). Lost geographies of power. Malden, MA.: Blackwell.

Gellman, B. Poitras, L. (2013). U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program. Retrieved 12 of August 2013 from http articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-06-06/news/39784046_1_prism-nsa-u-s-servers

Lundberg, A. (2012). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, Lecture 2: Power. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

Shirky, C. (2011). The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the public sphere, and Political Change. Retrieved 12 of August 2013 from http://www.bendevane.com/FRDC2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/The-Political-Power-of-Social-Media-Clay-Sirky.pdf

Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.