Facebook: A student/stalker's ideal networking tool - is it really beneficial to us?
In case you hadn't heard, www.Facebook.com is the latest phenomenon to sweep Universities in the UK. To access it, you have to enter your University email address and make a profile, where you can put your full address, mobile phone number and email address. There is also space to write your interests, favourite films and music and even a section entitled, about me, so you can write as much as you like about the most important thing in your life! Then you add friends, and people can write you wall postings for all to see or private messages just for your eyes, and you can join groups and upload photos. Facebook differs from other communication sites such as MySpace.com and the ever-popular blog sites because it is exclusively for students.
So is Facebook a positive tool to bring students closer, or is it simply replacing face-to-face interactions? There is the small fact that three Harvard students created it, adding the American-popularity-contest element to it, with many people adding randoms to their friends list to achieve the buzz of increasing the crucial number. However, I don't see the great problem of meeting like-minded people on Facebook, it's not as if we're logging onto the dangerous chat-rooms that paedophiles use to get their kicks. Everyone you see on Facebook goes to the same University as you. And it was certainly a minority of students who didn't catch on to the addiction, with 6,000 students joining within the first three weeks of its launch.
Facebook is a useful tool for seeing events going on at your University, arranging nights out and catching up the next day, and uploading pictures so your friends can see the night (just in case it was a blur for them!) And the fact that people are arranging events and putting photos on the site must mean that they are actually seeing each other. That is surely evidence enough that Facebook enhances social life rather than replacing it?
Facebook reports that its users spend an average of 18 minutes a day surfing profiles which isn't really that bad, considering students are well known-procrastinators. The only time you have to start worrying about it is when you go on a 10 minute study break and check Facebook, then 2 hours later you check the clock only to realise you have been looking at some strangers photos all that time! It's interesting to find out who knows who and how you are linked with people, and I definitely disagree with Michael Duffy, who calls Facebook one giant time vortex. He is overestimating how much time students spend on the web-site. I would say that my friends, myself included, check Facebook as you would check e-mails and if we have no new messages or wall-postings we log straight off.
30 English Universities and over 70,000 users have succumbed to the lure of Facebook, and it continues to grow with new users signing up every day. There are definitely more benefits than drawbacks of this craze, so if you don't have a profile, get with the times!
Author: Alison Bramley
Manchester iJourno group
In case you hadn't heard, www.Facebook.com is the latest phenomenon to sweep Universities in the UK. To access it, you have to enter your University email address and make a profile, where you can put your full address, mobile phone number and email address. There is also space to write your interests, favourite films and music and even a section entitled, about me, so you can write as much as you like about the most important thing in your life! Then you add friends, and people can write you wall postings for all to see or private messages just for your eyes, and you can join groups and upload photos. Facebook differs from other communication sites such as MySpace.com and the ever-popular blog sites because it is exclusively for students.
So is Facebook a positive tool to bring students closer, or is it simply replacing face-to-face interactions? There is the small fact that three Harvard students created it, adding the American-popularity-contest element to it, with many people adding randoms to their friends list to achieve the buzz of increasing the crucial number. However, I don't see the great problem of meeting like-minded people on Facebook, it's not as if we're logging onto the dangerous chat-rooms that paedophiles use to get their kicks. Everyone you see on Facebook goes to the same University as you. And it was certainly a minority of students who didn't catch on to the addiction, with 6,000 students joining within the first three weeks of its launch.
Facebook is a useful tool for seeing events going on at your University, arranging nights out and catching up the next day, and uploading pictures so your friends can see the night (just in case it was a blur for them!) And the fact that people are arranging events and putting photos on the site must mean that they are actually seeing each other. That is surely evidence enough that Facebook enhances social life rather than replacing it?
Facebook reports that its users spend an average of 18 minutes a day surfing profiles which isn't really that bad, considering students are well known-procrastinators. The only time you have to start worrying about it is when you go on a 10 minute study break and check Facebook, then 2 hours later you check the clock only to realise you have been looking at some strangers photos all that time! It's interesting to find out who knows who and how you are linked with people, and I definitely disagree with Michael Duffy, who calls Facebook one giant time vortex. He is overestimating how much time students spend on the web-site. I would say that my friends, myself included, check Facebook as you would check e-mails and if we have no new messages or wall-postings we log straight off.
30 English Universities and over 70,000 users have succumbed to the lure of Facebook, and it continues to grow with new users signing up every day. There are definitely more benefits than drawbacks of this craze, so if you don't have a profile, get with the times!
Author: Alison Bramley
Manchester iJourno group
posted by iJourno at 5:33 pm
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