Yes, I have a Facebok profile. And My[Faux]Space as well. I’m not a huge fan of either. They wind up consuming the user’s time with creating a profile, reading others’ profiles, passing banal notes, finding and creating lists of friends, looking at photos, and engaging in the most surface-level communication possible. It’s hyper-pseudo-communication engaged with avatars, not real people. But it keeps me connected and up-to-date on the lives of friends, and increasingly, on the lives of acquaintances. I’ve gotten notes from people I haven’t seen in six years. It’s amazing. What’s most amazing is the feeling of shock and elation getting a note from “jon doe” from high school, and being oddly happy about it, before realizing (which hopefully I do) that I don’t really care. My life is no different whether jon doe messages me or not. Now that we’ve made contact, we’ll be listed as friends and continue to be, in reality, incommunicado from each other as we were before.
Sara Jameson sent me this Chronical of Higher Ed article about an instructor who goes on Facebook. The author’s assessment seems pretty accurate: chosing a good picture matters (though he doesn’t note that increasingly, an ironically bad picture or a picture that has nothing to do with anything matters more), and some users troll to have huge friends lists. It can get pretty startling how many “friends” someone can have.
What annoys me about this article is its blatant condescension towards student culture. You don’t have to read too far between the lines to see that student culture is depraved and a disgrace to academic culture, and if only a few of us “enlightened professors” came in, we could clean up Facebook through our mere presence. The students, like heathens, would clean up and become godly. Here’s some excerpts:
I’ve also posted pictures of our student majors on research trips and departmental outings. That promotes not only our program, but (I like to think) a sense of the intellectual culture of college in general. It doesn’t hurt to put more photos of our students being studious into circulation, since the vast majority of Facebook photos highlight their decidedly nonacademic activities.
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Facebook can be a medium for faculty, staff, even administrators, to be in contact with students, and maybe provide a little adult guidance. Individually one faculty Facebooker might not have much influence, but a collective presence could raise the tone and dial down the antics on this increasingly public student venue.
We can’t trust the kids to themselves — of course not! — we must step in with guidance, raise the tone of this banal carnival toward a more civilized discourse, and heaven help us, control those pictures of drunken partying kids.
