McLuhan's Tetrad: Photo Sharing on Facebook

Enhancements:

• Ability to share information about social events, family, etc quickly and easily.
• Allows sharing of artwork, projects, and other personal work without necessitating a separate web source.
• Photo albums allow photos from the past to be stored for future reference and continued viewing.
• Photo sharing on the news feed lets pictures be shared in the moment:
  -Cell phone uploads
• Lets family members and friends keep in touch over distances in a more meaningful way
  -pictures bring a better perspective into the lives of loved ones.
  -if someone had to miss an event, they still get to enjoy viewing the pictures.

Reversals:

• Oversharing-overload of repetitive and irrelevant information, especially on the news feed:
  -i.e. Pictures of Justin Bieber's new haircut.
  -Rather than carefully selecting what gets shown to the world, people take advantage of ease that facebook presents and upload all photos from everything.
• Privacy:
  -Misuse of privacy features sometimes results in photos that end up in the wrong hands.
  -You have no way of keep track of who has your photos. Something uploaded once might circulate on the internet forever or end up on a strangers computer without your knowledge.
• The "if there aren't pictures of it on facebook, it must not have actually happened" mentality:
  -photo sharing sometimes becomes a way to validate events, parties, etc, to the extent that the pictures that exist on facebook prove that the fun really ever took place.

Retrievals:

• "Village" mentality:
  -the ease of sharing information is like chatting with your neighbor over a back fence and showing them pictures from your wallet.
• Polaroid:
  -instant gratification, casual, mostly utilized for social purposes.
• Art galleries:
  -photo sharing allows people to browse your work as though they were actually standing in front of it.

Obsolesces:

• The way that photos used to be saved and shared:
  -Physical photo albums, scrapbooks
  -Social gatherings that included sharing pictures
• Traveling in order to stay in touch with family and friends:
  -when photos of your nieces and nephews are so readily available on facebook, the impetus to go see them in person in order to feel in touch with their lives might be less compelling.
• Other methods of photo sharing or storage: Photobucket, Flikr, email, etc. Facebook allows users to keep everything in one place.