Strategically Communicating

I came across this blog post on Thought Catalog while skimming my Twitter news feed and thought, no pun intended, that it really captured the essence that IS Facebook. It’s crazy to think how little privacy you have as a social media user even if you have privacy settings. How many people are truly good friends with all of their Facebook friends? That being noted, how many of your “friends” do you really want looking into your life, and why? There are few users that delete friends as the fade out of their lives. Although you may not be directly communicating with them and letting them into your life, you provide them with photos, status updates, relationship updates, etc., to be able to read into what is happening in your current life. Do we do this for nostalgic purposes? Or are we doing this so we can creep on those friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, hookups, that have a different lifestyle than you do? It kind of reminds me of reality TV, we watch it so we can live vicariously through the life that TV provides, but in the case of Facebook, it’s that much more real because you actually know these people. As Chuck Palahniuk wrote, “”The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.” I think this quote parallels with the function of Facebook. I feel like a main reason why we upload information to Facebook is so other people can look into our own lives. So is FB a form of strategic communication or just really creepy?