I’m finally learning about Facebook and I’m writing about it in my blogging book. I knew I was out of the loop on this one but I never realized just how out of the loop I was. 85 percent of US college students are on Facebook but it’s a world professors know little about. Some 11,000 plus current and former LSE students are registered in the network but no full-time academic staff. Facebook is a party organized by kids while the parents are away.
If 90 % of going to a university is about socializing and hooking yourself up and 10% is about academic pursuits, it makes a lot of sense for students to spend 9 hours a day on Facebook and 1 hour in the library. It’s a perfectly rational use of one’s time.
Still, I’m embarrassed by my ignorance. I thought you were taking notes on your laptops during my lectures. Only now do I realize that you were facebooking each other. Sigh.
Students take to the internet like drinkers take to pubs. The web allows them to explore what the world has to offer but above all it allows them to socialize. To stay in contact with old friends, to make new ones, to network, flirt and tease. The web, in sharp contrast to their campus existence, is informal, low-pressure, irreverent and fun. Not surprisingly students often have more of a presence online than they have in their class rooms.
Many students have their own blogs of course, but blogs are only part of the story. Often bloggers are regarded as pretty lonely and pretentious characters. And blog entries are uncomfortably similar to a professor’s lecture. If nothing else, students tend to be weary of university provided blogging sites. A majority of the Harvard blogs seem to be defunct and the Warwick ones are not as active as they could be. Why trust your university to provide you with a site when it’s so easy to set one up for yourself?
In order to break out of the isolation of your blog many students rely on more social media — bulletin boards, chat rooms, discussion forums, and networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Here the lecture format is replaced by often racuous conversations; instead of holding forth, people are hanging out. But there is no absolute difference between blogs and these other, more social, formats since they often can be combined.
The best example is Facebook. This is a web site where you present a profile of yourself, together with photos, lists of interests, whatever comments you want to add and extracts from your blog. You then go hunting for friends and for groups to hook yourself up with. Once you’re connected, it is easy to communicate back and forth across your network and to expand it to include more nodes. It’s more sociable than blogging, less intrusive than chats, and far less subject to spam than email.
What’s truly amazing is Facebook’s saturation rate. Started by Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, he had half of Harvard undergrads signed up within weeks. And from there Facebookwent on to conquer the world. In the U.S. some 85 percent of college students use it, there are 11 million users world-wide, and 20,000 new accounts are created every day. In 2006 it was the seventh most visited web site and the world’s largest site for photo sharing. Some 60 percent of students log in daily and over 90 percent log in once a week. Lots and lots of people check their accounts continuously throughout the day. According to a survey conducted by Student Monitor, a market researcher, students regard Facebook as the second coolest thing after Ipods.
What’s so cool about it? It’s simple. Facebook hooks you up. If you’re looking for people at your school who share your political opinion, or your sexual proclivities, you’ll find them on Facebook. If you’re curious whether that hunky guy is in a relationship, check out his profile. Want his cell phone? Of course, it’s in his profile too. If 90 percent of university life is about hooking up with people and 10 percent is about intellectual pursuits, it’s easy to explain why students spend nine hours a day on Facebook and only one hour in the library. As the Urban Dictionary warns, Facebook causes “procrastination, swollen fingers, dropped grades, irritation of the eyes, increased need to add more friends to your friends list, and skipped classes.” Compare expressions like “It’s been 3 hours since I facebooked – I’m having withdrawls!” or a term like “Facebook slut” — “A person who spends an inordinate amount of time on thefacebook.com, consistently adding people they don’t know as friends, joining groups, stalking people.”
The funny thing is that university professors know so little about Facebook and next to no one uses it themselves. The LSE in London, where I worked, had some 11,000 current and former students registered in the network, but no full-time academics. Facebook is a party organzed by kids while the parents are away.