In class Professor Boellstorff mentioned that some students had come up to him after class saying that they didn't game, had difficulty following along with some of the discussions and/or didn't have Facebook accounts. I have to confess that I too do not game and it sometimes takes me a little longer to figure out what my peers are talking about in class. However, when it comes to Facebook I'm one of their millions of users checking my profile at least once a day with the frequency of my visits steadily increasing if I have to study. Farhad Manjoo wrote an article that talks about his interviews with people sans Facebook and some of the reasons why they abstain from the networking site. He concluded the article by giving an example of someone who eventually came around to using Facebook after expressing her disapproval of the site and learned to appreciate it.
I finished that piece thinking "Yeah, Facebook is awesome" and that more people should give it a try. I then decided to read the comments about the article to see if others like me were hyped about Facebook and was quickly slapped back down to reality. There were a lot of people hating on the site still which I do understand. There were claims that the young folk of today have a problem with face to face social interaction because of our dependence on communication through technology. There were also claims that social networking sites like Facebook can be more problematic than helpful when it comes to networking. After reading the many reasons why people are against Facebook, I can see why some wouldn't want to sign up. And I'm not saying that everyone should. For me, I've never known college without Facebook so it's been a regular occurrence to check my email and Facebook accounts when I log onto my computer in the afternoon. It hasn't taken much effort to maintain and hasn't caused me any problems and I'm going to make the assumption that my experience with Facebook is the same for many of my peers here at UCI as well. I find Facebook to be helpful and entertaining at times and I wish it could be like this for everyone, but that's rarely ever the case. So whether you're on the site or not, to each his or her own. And if you choose to not join, I guess I'll settle for just being your friend in the actual world.
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Nice post! What's strange is I never knew college WITH Facebook, being an undergrad back in the dark ages and all :) I also resisted for a long time, mostly because I was afraid of colleges and businesses that search social network site profiles during application processes. However, basically everyone I know at UCI has a Facebook account and it's almost as if I can't socialize with friends without one!
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