If you're reading this and you're older than 25, you're about to learn something important. If you're younger than 25, I'm about to sound soooooooo old. I have a sister who's in college, and I'm terrified of growing old, so I have her tell me about what's hip, and then I don't feel so bad. She's the one who turned me onto FaceBook.com. Let me explain:
I took Samantha to her freshman year orientation at Vanderbilt last summer. She was a very social girl in high school, and was understandably nervous about starting from scratch with finding and making friends. When we first arrived on campus, she was never further than arm's reach from me all morning. We ran into a nice young, southern boy who was incredibly gregarious and great with names. He started introducing Samantha to everyone he met, and it didn't take long before I heard my first "Hey, aren't you on FaceBook?"
This is a social networking website, not unlike Friendster or MySpace. I've discussed these before, and I'm facinated by them. It's exclusively for college students, which is enforced by requiring a valid college email address to register. When I was in college, the school asked all entering freshman to submit a photo, which they would collect and publish with our names. We called this the "Mug Book", b/c the pictures were awful, and there was no other content. But this book was like gold, because I was always trying to place a name to a face or vice versa. That's the nature of college. So it's not hard to understand why this website would take off. It provides students a little control over how they are presented in the online equivalent of the mug book. In addition to having authority over which picture represents you, you can also include presonal details like your favorite music, nicknames, instant messenger handle, etc. You also can tell it who your friends are and use it to discover who someone else's friends are. They even have online cliques (called groups). It's difficult to stress how absolutely revolutionary this website has become in such a short period of time.
As Samantha made her way through two or three sessions of orientation, she encountered one person after another that she'd "met" already through this site. See, the school gave her an email address at the start of the summer, and she immediately registered on Vanderbilt's FaceBook page. She connected herself to the handful of people she knew at the school (through high school or from Boston). From there, she saw which groups her friends were in, joined those groups, connected to new friends. Before long, she had over 100 online acquaintances. Now, as we strolled around campus, she was seeing these friends in person for the first time. She got excited. You're dying for some commonality in a situation like this, and this website was just saving all of these kids. By the early afternoon, I was dragging her out of conversations to make sure she made it to her advisor meetings on time. She bailed on her dinner with me, because she had better plans. She'd been in town 10 hours and already had a busy social calendar. The schools must love this site, right? Not so fast.
A school does not run it's FaceBook site, it's managed by an independant company. This site is used by well over 90% of the students at many of it's schools, and as student adoption increases, more and more of the community is shaped through FaceBook interactions. A candidate running for a student government post has no choice but to set up a "group" promoting himself. Maybe this is perfectly democratic, bcause all students have an equal voice on the web, or maybe this will evolve into a tragic popularity contest, based purely on looks. Well, college interactions are often pretty shallow anyway. Students must also consider just how honest they want their online personality to be portrayed. Schools have been disciplining students for underage drinking if their FaceBook photos depict alcohol. The Brown Daily Herald (the newspaper of my Alma Mater) ran a thought provoking article on the topic, including an anecdote about a Fisher college student who was expelled for joining a controversial group within the site. If you were a business, looking to hire rising university seniors, wouldn't you peruse this site to gain as much information about a student as possible before making a critical employment decision? Me too.
In case I haven't yet succeed in alarming you about the rising use of this simple website, here's two final nuggets I'll leave you with:
- In a time when identity theft is rampant, college students with preciously little awareness of the state of their credit are fighting to get as much personally identifying information as possible onto a publically accessible directory. Seems like a recipe for disater, right?
- FaceBook.com is a developing a version for high school students.
Here are some links if you'd like to learn more:
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