In order to effectively create a book that tells people from the ages of 40 and 60 how to use facebook, it is important to use framing in order to give them a good connection to things that they are familiar with. To do that well, you first have to contemplate what makes facebook what it is. All the different features relate to different generations of a technology.
First and foremost facebook is a weird combination of a phone/contact book and a yearbook. A yearbook usually has a picture of a person and the organizations that person was apart of, while a contact book has contact information (adresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses). When you are friends with someone before you graduate you usually ask them to sign your yearbook, usually with personal anecdotes for insight into that person's personality. When explaining a basic facebook page I'd say a profile is basically all the information that is found in a yearbook of a particular person. There is the profile picture, the contact info, list of organizations they are apart of as well as an about me section that is used to personalize each persons profile. Of course, the more people use Facebook, the better feel it has to those two different frames. If all your friends were on Facebook it would be like looking at an old electronic yearbook.
After you explain a basic page it becomes a lot easier to explain the other features. Photo albums, the messenger, wall posts, statuses and then added applications can be explained through other technologies. Photo albums can be explained through photo albums/digital cameras, messengers by phones, wall posts through answering machines etc. Any way you look at it framing is an effective tool.
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I find it interesting that you mention considering Facebook as a yearbook. As obvious as it may seem, in practice I would almost never think to consider it like a yearbook based on my usage of it. Part of this may be due to the fact that I never really pay much attention to my own yearbook. But when I think about it, I find it interesting that at least for me, Facebook sort of has a dual purpose. I mostly use it for day-to-day communication with my friends, but I also use it to look up information about people I haven't been in contact with recently at all.
ReplyDeleteI also find it interesting that your take on Facebook was to compare it to a yearbook. I think this is a good representation of it because people of this age range may be able to relate to it better in this way since they can compare it to their yearbooks. It does get easier to explain the rest of the applications Facebook may offer, but I think once you sway away from applications that relate to a yearbook you may have to find other things you can compare it to and that they can relate to.
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