Facebook has significant utilitarian and emotional functions. As a genre, Facebook provides an essential service that is important to many individuals. Particularly, one if its use values is that it maintains a “real-time” interaction so users may access updates on their friends and family members the moment they are shown. This online service is a well-received addition to this digital culture. While the world unravels itself in variable and mysterious ways, this program allows its users to rekindle old friendships, create important relationships, and maintain close relations with family and friends that would otherwise be made difficult with older traditional media such as telephony. To fully analyze this genre, it is important to consider its form, style, themes, and content matter, each of which are vital in explaining the genre and cultural significance of Facebook.

Facebook is characterized by both image and text-based content. The form is a technological convergence of television, video, and music. This genre enoucrages user participation, giving users the opportunity to include among their updates the music, video, and images they upload to their profiles. The form can also be subject to a user’s specifications–allowing particular applications into their profiles and not others. This encourages other application designers to produce devices that individuals can use into their profiles. In this way, the structure of facebook is unique to that user and is constantly subjected to customizations suited to benefit that particular user.  Facebook has adopted the concept of a “note”, which is a section of a user’s profile that gives the user the ability to create content. This note-taking oftentimes resembles the modern-day mode of life-writing, highly similar to diaries and journals. The form also encourages group involvement on certain issues that may be significant to them. In this way, group pages have a similar structure to that of a public forum. Furthermore, the form constantly goes under constant update by its Facebook staff and is also subject to certain changes that may benefit users.

The linguistic style is highly informal. Individuals write to each other as though they were texting messages to each other by cellphone. This writing style is mostly shorthand, as this is much more convenient to its users. Essentially, colloquial language is a Facebook norm. A section of an individual’s profile called the “wall” encourages brief, sporadic conversations between users.

The themes that are enveloping Facebook today are highly akin to the desires of humankind. Facebook is largely successful because it recognizes that human affiliation and maintaining/creating friendships are central to the development of a user. These themes are reproduced in many ways: 1) notes, 2) status updates, 3) group pages, and 4) images and videos. An important theme is the fact that group pages produce this unification for a cause mentality. This mentality is an important theme because it pronounces Facebook as a utilitarian service with ethereal human value–this is why Facebook has become so successful.

As a genre, Facebook has certain certain content matter that is highly significant to a user’s needs. Firstly, the interface is immensely personal. This genre produces a platform that individuals can organize their individuality based on certain applications, join particular group pages, and interact with other friends in order to maintain close social networks. Although it is immensely personal, any user (of course within an individual’s network) may be able to view seemingly priviate details of another user’s life. This way users are able to fully understand and know each other (although it may create paranoia).