By Santino Higgs
BlackFood.org News Reporter
FACEBOOK can be a great tool to socialize, advertize, and quite frankly waste time.
In The Bahamas, on one hand Facebook is being used by Bahamians to keep in contact with family and friends both locally and abroad. And on the other hand, Facebook has become an advertising, money making, time wasting, news spreading, and profile watching paradise.
Facebook’s creator intended it to be a college/university social site. Its now the largest social network in the Bahamas, but is second in the world to MySpace. It was originally called “thefacebook”.
In 2006, Mark Zuckerberg, a former Harvard student introduced this online social network to the students of Harvard University and instantly this phenomenon spread through the dorms of the college.
The new social network quickly reached other schools such as Yale University and Stanford University and it was highly endorsed. The main purpose of Facebook was for college/ university students to communicate and network regularly via the internet. Creating study groups on campus, posting on-campus jobs, or simply meeting new students within your region were some of the original features that Facebook offered during its first few years of operation.
In The Bahamas, established local businesses such as Batelco, Furniture Plus, and Dairy Queen have decided to advertise their goods or services on this networking site where the number of Bahamian users increases each day.
Marketing and advertising experts have stated that purchasing ad space on Facebook is an excellent advertising tool that’s very much inexpensive compared to the typical advertisement within our society via radio, television commercials, yellow and white pages, or the daily newspapers.
In addition to advertising and promoting goods and services, Bahamians have also used this ‘network heaven’ as a way to promote social events such as parties, meetings, discussions, debates etc., attracting users within the Bahamas network both locally and abroad.
By posting your event on Facebook, it sends an invite to the friends on your list modernizing the invitation and flyer distribution process. Events such as ‘Wet N Mad’ and ‘Night of Love’ received a great response, where thousands confirmed their attendance days before the actual event.
Teenagers in our society use Facebook as habitually as doing their homework every evening. Groups such as, “If I fail my exam its Facebook’s fault”, “If 500,000 join this group I will change my middle name to Facebook” and games such as Farmvile, Fishville, Sorority Life, and Mafia Wars are just a few groups that Facebook offers to consume the time of the average Bahamian between the age of 17-30.
Instead of our future politicians, lawyers, farmers, fishermen, and Prime Ministers, focusing on ways we can become more independent as a country, they would rather plant, water, and grow acres and acres of ‘Facebook fruits and vegetables’, whiles millions are spent each year on the importation of crops for means of survival. Hypothetically, if the Bahamas was faced with a famine, would we be able to eat the millions of facebook fish, shrimps, lobsters, and crawfish caught each day on the game Fishville?
Groups such as, “If I fail my exam its Facebooks fault,” and “If 500,000 join this group I will change my middle name to Facebook” are “groups”/ money making schemes that enables the group’s creator to reap a percentage on each member that joins such groups. To some, Facebook is said to be an addictive program that waste the time of many on a regular basis. Many feel that fFcebook is a way to put a face with a name without having to physically meet the person.
In addition to that, “Facebook is a great place to find out the latest gossip,” according to a current co-worker. This social news media is said to have more local gossip than the notorious Punch newspaper. “After a long day of work, I’ll go on Facebook to get more information of top story’s and headlines” my co worker said. She also added, “This is where people post news every other minute on the most talked about topic.”
According to a Facebook group, “I refuse to pay $3.98 monthly as of July 10th, 2010 to use Facebook,” as of July 10th, 2010 the social network will charge all account holders $3.98 per month as a service charge. After realizing the potential revenue that can be generated, the owners of this social ‘heaven’ have decided to charge their customers calculating to approximately $1,592,000,000 monthly if everyone agrees to the conditions (according to Facebook Statistics, 2010 there’s 400,000,000 active users).
Last year our national grade average was a D-; I’m hoping Facebook hasn’t made that much of an impact on our students causing our national grade to decrease even more this year.♦bf