Does Being Powerful on Facebook = Powerful when 'Outside'?

Does Being Powerful on Facebook = Powerful when 'Outside'?

I first joined Facebook after a camp in order to stay in contact with the people I’d met there. I think the website has the same appeal for many people- the ability to maintain a ‘relationship’ with old friends, distant family and acquaintances (weak links).

Power on Facebook is about having influence on a large number of people, mostly through these weak links. The place in which power discourse occurs is the ‘Newsfeed’ of Facebook. If we are drawn in and interested by something we see, we will click the ‘Like’/’Wow’/ ‘Angry’ emoticons. This means that post will appear on the newsfeeds of some of the people we are friends with on Facebook. If we comment, even more people we are linked to will see it. This gives the person who created a post that garners such reaction enormous Technocratic power –they control the information their weak links may receive (Kuttainen, 2016).

There’sNoCryingInPR, (2011). The Exponential Like. Retrieved from https://nocryinginpr.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/the-power-of-the-facebook-like/

Someone can cultivate ‘referent power’ as theorised by French and Raven (1959) of being likeable, based on creating posts and sharing images and text that are easy to relate to. Or they can have power by being extremely unlikeable- for example the page “Aryanna Gourdin - Braids and Bows” (https://www.facebook.com/aryanna.braidsandbowshunting/home) has gained fame through posts of a young girl and her father with dead animals they shot, including many lions, giraffes and bears. Whichever type of power they have, they gain it by attracting attention. As Seth Grogin points out in his TED talk at https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_sliced_bread “The thing that decides what gets talked about… is it is remarkable?”

This influence may not translate to the physical world- in fact it often does not. A proficient poster and ‘tagger’ on Facebook, with a long friend list, may be seen as a ‘weird’ loner in their workplace or school. This is because power, despite how we often think of it, is primarily to do with the context and situation (Allen, 2003). Physical relationships require a completely different type of expertise to Facebook.

References

Allen, J. (2003). Lost Geographies of Power. Melbourne: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Kuttainen, V. (2016). BA1002: Our space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, Lecture 2: Power. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

Grogin, S. (2003, Febuary) How to Get Your Ideas to Spread (Video file) Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_sliced_bread

Aryanna Gourdin - Braids and Bows, (n.d.) In Facebook,                                                              Retrieved August 12, 2016, from https://www.facebook.com/aryanna.braidsandbowshunting/home