Facebook

I was just scrolling through my newsfeed on Facebook, before starting on this blog post. I just had a realization; that Facebook is similar to the pieces, processes and patterns in ecosystems and the environment. Individual people or pages for organizations and such are the pieces. The processes are methods with which we can interact with each other - a poke, wall post, private message, or group message - and the patterns are the continuous ways in which we interact with the same people. For example, if there's one friend that you always post comments on their wall versus someone else where you share memes in private messages.

In addition to that rather basic connection between the two systems, I was considering how interesting it is when you look at someone you're friends with or accept the friend request of someone, and then examine the mutual friends you two have. It's crazy when you find someone who knows the same people as you do, but you didn't know that they knew each other. It gets weird when it's a mixed bag of people that you both know because then you get to wondering how the other people met, how they know each other and how well, etc. Maybe this makes me sound a little bit creepy, but I think it's a natural reaction to have; I'm just curious. I like understanding how and why things work or go together, and that's especially true with people.

All of these ideas can be linked back to ecology though. I think we don't fully understand the processes or pieces or even have note of the species in an ecosystem. They have so many interactions that we probably have no idea about at all, which complicates restoration, or even basic understanding of our role and effect on the environment. So crazy, but still so true.