Archive for the digital literacy category
February 1st, 2010
What do you do with the stacks of journals you amass annually as part of your professional memberships? Use them? All of them? Add them to the “free take one” stack in your department’s mailroom? I recycle them on a quarterly basis, after perusing the Table of Contents and any potentially relevant articles. Do we need to receive print copies?
I’m going to use the American Educational Research Association (AERA) as an example of poor practice. Members automatically receive Educational Researcher and have the option of 1-2 additional journal subscriptions added for free. AERA does not offer members the option to receive current journals digitally. Environmentally, this practice is irresponsible, but the following text indicates a larger problem with AERA’s access to scholarship:
AERA is pleased to offer online access to the AERA journal archive — including full-text search capabilities — to members through a joint project with JSTOR. Access may be purchased at the low subscription price of $40 a year and is available only to current AERA members.
Journals in JSTOR have “moving walls” that define the time lag between the most current issue published and the content available in JSTOR. AERA journals have a five year “moving wall.” This means that the most recent issues available to AERA member JSTOR subscribers are from five years ago. The “moving wall” shifts each January when new issues are posted.
I have a problem with their five-year “moving walls.” As AERA describes, there’s a time lag. To impose a five year time lag for scholarship that likely took two years to publish is unacceptable.
Basically, anyone doing research who does not have access to the print publications must wait five years to access the articles. AERA is not alone in this publication practice, many well-established academic journals delay online publication.
Why?
What threats to intellectual property exist if an academic journal publishes its contents online? While I’d like to see this information freely available, let’s consider the question within the current confines of subscription-only library databases. What is so dangerous about publishing research, within the context of a peer-reviewed academic journal, online? Libraries and databases have already established a functioning profit model whereby articles are accessed through subscription or one-time payments. The research is already published and widely available in print, so availability/increased access shouldn’t threaten the intellectual property.
In fact, other print-based academic journals that do publish their articles within the database model send quarterly alerts that include the Table of Contents and links to the articles (with a subscribe or buy option, of course). I’m actually more likely to read these articles because (1) convenient access, (2) I can read them the way I usually read articles, print, highlight, and/or highlight in Adobe Reader, (3) they’re portable, and (4) I can organize them the way I usually organize articles, on my hard drive.
So, AERA, why the five year time lag?
I think we often fear what we don’t understand. Judging from their website, their clunky conference submission system, and their year-long delay in posting papers from their annual conference, AERA seems hesitant to enter the digital space. Regardless of the excuses, this digital ignorance is threatening educational scholarship. True scholarship is a dialogue, a sharing of information that advances our thinking. By limiting access to only those who receive the printed copies of a journal, AERA is, in effect, denying many scholars the opportunity to participate in this conversation.
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January 27th, 2010
Well, Apple’s much anticipated tablet is here: the iPad. Without the benefit of testing it yet, I did a quick tour of the features demonstrated on the Apple website. It looks like a grown-up iPod or iPhone…larger screen and more functions. In fact, maybe it’s the future of laptops — touch screen keyboard, slim design, everything in one place.
I’m most interested in iBooks. I was wondering if vendors would sell a chapter at a time, or the entire book. As Brad Stone pointed out in yesterday’s edition of The New York Times, there is concern that Apple will deteriorate profits and presentation of books the way they have music by allowing users to purchase single songs, rather than entire albums. Already, Google and Acrobat make it possible to keyword search books and articles, so in theory, someone can read a section completely de-contextualized from the larger document. However, a spectre of the larger document is still present, whereas with iTunes, users can download a single song without any experience of the larger context. From the brief description on their website, Apple seems to be selling the book as a single unit, but we’ll see.
Of course, to access these fun features, iPad users must have an account with AT&T. So, our reading will be mediated by both Apple and AT&T. If we don’t wish to have an account with AT&T, we won’t get an iPad. More discomfiting, is if a book isn’t in Apple’s catalog, it won’t be available for reading on their tablet. True, this problem exists with Kindle, but Amazon has such a large catalog, it hasn’t seemed problematic.
Before these technologies, our reading was mediated by what was on our shelves, our libraries’ shelves, and the shelves of our local bookstores. Now, in theory, the world is at our fingertips. I have to wonder what we’re losing, though. I remember as a kid finding old books like Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators series serendipitously at my local library.
No one would have recommended it to me and I don’t think it will be a candidate for iPad, but Hitchcock told good stories and I much preferred his series to the more popular Nancy Drew because they were less predictable. What serendipity are we losing by relying on e-catalogs instead of local bookshelves? Definitely, a counter-argument can and is being made for increased accessibility, but I wonder if, the goal is ease of access rather than breadth and relevance of material. Taken a step further, are these new devices selecting popularity over quality, and if so what will we miss?
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January 16th, 2010
I just read William Zinsser’s beautiful address to incoming international students at Columbia’s school of journalism. Toward the end, he says:
“The epidemic I’m most worried about isn’t the swine flu. It’s the death of logical thinking. The cause, I assume is that most people now get their information from random images on a screen—pop-ups, windows, and sidebars—or from scraps of talk on a digital phone.”
In an article in the New York Times this morning, Anand Giridharadas claims that we are becoming linguistic utilitarians, treating language “as computers do, as a protocol: a code that machines use to communicate with other machines, a code that is not savored or loved, a code that exists to get the job done and works precisely because it is boring, standardized and pragmatic.” What an unfortunate description of current language use! This claim is pretty bleak and omits the most interesting part of the story.
As many scholars point out, the advent of computers, Internet, text messages, etc., have increased literate practice. Up until the early 80s, most executives dictated messages/letters for others to type. Phone conversations were the norm of business communication, rather than the exception. Innovations such as e-mail and texting, however, require us to think and communicate textually.
Recent additions such as texting and Twitter seem to move us toward less words, rather than providing a space to expound upon our thoughts. Often, these shorter phrases lead to impoverished communication, but they don’t need to. Zinsser’s address emphasizes a point that Nancy Duarte consistently makes in her book slide:ology (2008): the importance of message. A benefit of abbreviated communication is the pressure to condense our message into a sentence. We now need to identify the most salient part of what we’re trying to say and communicate it clearly and concisely.
Clarity and conciseness are a benchmark of good writing regardless of medium. Before Twitter feeds and Facebook statuses, however, we had the luxury of space that a page provides to develop our thoughts. Many abused this privilege. To be an effective communicator in this new space requires skill in condensing a message into a single, compelling sentence. Likewise, in longer pieces, each sentence must have a message.
Now, as Duarte and Zinsser point out, is where story is important. We no longer have the luxury of space for a data dump. Readers expect a lot from our single phrases or sentences and if there isn’t a story or some coherent theme tying our ideas together, we may be read, but we won’t be understood.
True, students are now expected to compose in new media. We assign them to create video, images, presentations, or blogs of their ideas. Rather than seeing these new media as a threat to literacy, especially to good writing, we should engage the possibilities these modes afford.
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January 12th, 2010
Responses to my earlier post about Google-proofing essays made me think about the purpose of “research” assignments in the primary grades. James Ford mentioned that when he was 8 years old, he would copy text out of an encyclopedia. I did, too. Of course, we were handwriting, so we engaged in a low-tech copy/paste.
Reflecting on this practice got me thinking about the purpose of the assignments: report on the state of Kansas, for example. I remember I needed to find out what the capital of Kansas was, the state bird, state flower, and a map. Report is important here. There’s no room for synthesis in this type of assignment. In fact, though the final product was a couple pages about Kansas, the assignment really could have been a fill-in the blank sheet.
State name:
State capital:
State flower:
State bird:
[Paste map here]
Instead, this assignment took the guise of a research report. I remember spending a couple hours on Saturdays at the library, dutifully copying directly out of an encyclopedia, not thinking I was plagiarizing, but instead believing I was doing good work. Given the limited variety of encyclopedias, I have to imagine my teachers were familiar with the texts, especially because 25 students each year would likely turn in the same reports.
So, what is the purpose of research reports in the primary grades? Are students demonstrating their ability to find information? When asked to report on something, they’re basically asked to repeat what they find. There’s really no room for much else.
Copy/paste is not a new phenomenon brought to us by the computer. Blair (2003) describes similar, low-tech practices in the 16th-18th centuries, though it’s likely existed since there were printed materials and means to copy them.
What do we learn from copy/paste? I think we learn more from copy/paste practices than the popular press would have us believe. Taking the example from James’ and my third grade copying efforts, we learned how to find relevant information in a reference text and we read the academic language and selected appropriate passages to use in our report. By reading the encyclopedia entries, we started to familiarize ourselves with a form of academic language. Including the texts in our report helped us practice the language. Imitation is a form of learning, no matter how elementary.
In his book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future, Bauerlein (2008) describes the copy/paste practices of fifth graders as an example of the erosion of learning and deep thinking: “go to Google, type keywords, download three relevant sites, cut and paste passages into a new document, add transitions of their own, print it up, and turn it in.” This description, however, does not consider the full story. Perhaps the fifth-graders do engage in the superficial stages described by Bauerlain, but how do they select the relevant sites? Which passages do they cut and paste into their document? How do they transition from one idea to the next?
In my dissertation research, I noticed that, even at the university level, students frequently copy and paste. I don’t believe that the thinking stops when they hit control+v, though. Savvy students use the pasted information as a starting point or mid-point, not as an end. While locating the information is made easy by the technological affordances of Google and other search engines, the task of sifting through this information, finding relevant bits, and making meaningful connections remains a challenge.
Perhaps copy/paste is the beginning of the process. As students gain sophistication and their assignments ask them to synthesize, rather than report, these practices complement or supplement the more challenging sense-making processes in which they engage.
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December 18th, 2009
In the New York Times last week, Michelle Slatalla wrote a reflection about reading and the loss of attentional focus possibly caused by technology. Her reading experience echoes Nick Carr’s description in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Basically, with so much information available online, she has a hard time focusing on reading a novel…so many questions and ideas compete for her attention that she finds herself putting the novel down in favor of pursuing answers to other tangential questions. About a month ago, another article in the New York Times, “Stop Your Search Engines” by Peggy Orenstein likened this online information seeking to the Sirens’ song: alluring, but ultimately destructive.
Orenstein makes an interesting case for not pursuing the information trail. With so much available, when is it enough? When is information-seeking focused on endless searching rather than finding?
In Slatalla’s article, she challenges herself to read a book and, upon the advice of a friend, re-reads Gilead. I decided to take up the challenge and read it, too. I blocked out a few hours and decided that during that time, I wouldn’t check e-mail or go online. Then, I came across a word that I knew, but just wanted to double-check, insouciant. I could have grabbed my dictionary, but I decided the temptation was too great to go online, so I skipped it. Then, a few sentences later, effulgence. Again, a word whose definition I’m nearly sure of and could certainly glean meaning from the context, but would have liked to look up…online. A few paragraphs later, begats appeared, which I immediately figured out, but found it charming, and wanted to know more. When I was a kid, I always read with a dictionary beside me (very cool, I know) and I was again tempted to grab it. A few pages later, I stopped at susurrus, feeling that surely the author was showing off or at least taunting me. Looking up words to learn or confirm their definitions isn’t pursuing a Siren Song, is it? If I looked them up in the dictionary, I might linger over their etymology or read the definitions of surrounding words, but it likely wouldn’t interfere much with my attentional focus on the novel’s text. However, looking up definitions online would likely mean also checking e-mail, a trip to Facebook, and then, who knows.
I suspect Nick Carr is right. When I came across the vocabulary words in Gilead, I automatically pictured how I would look them up in Google (define: susurrus). I also started wondering what Wikipedia would have to say about the term. Gilead is interesting, but slow. Oddly, Internet searching feels a bit more gratifying…instantly finding information, solving problems…and then, of course, its interactivity makes it seem more entertaining. Is it wrong to be thinking like a Google search? Google was developed to mimic how academics evaluate information, so technically, maybe Google makes our thinking more focused and organized.
When is information just noise? I wonder how much information clutter I subject myself to in my daily searches. I also wonder if all of this searching eventually leads to finding, or just more searching. I guess the insouciant searcher isn’t concerned with the results, but what about those of us really trying to learn something?
Regarding Gilead, it is such a beautifully written book, that I’m glad I took up the challenge to read it. That said, after spending so much time on Facebook, reading a book seems, well, lonely. To be honest, I tried to give Gilead away to an ill friend the other day and she wouldn’t take it, which made me decide to renew my commitment to finishing it, this time in shorter bits. So, now it’s your turn: pick a novel and block out an afternoon or evening for reading and let me know if you’re more successful… Unlike Coke and Pepsi, I think the difference between reading online and reading a novel will be more pronounced. That said, I remember reading a piece by Malcolm Gladwell that said that people preferred Pepsi in taste tests, but if they had to drink a full glass, Coke was the winner….so enjoy your novel.
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December 13th, 2009
I came across an interesting discussion on John Sowash’s blog this morning about Google-proofing essay questions. Sowash provides instructions for making questions Google-proof, using Bloom’s Taxonomy. I have mixed thoughts about this approach.
In defense of Google
First, in defense of Google, I think that educators should not discourage Google use, but instead provide guidelines for informed use. If a teacher notices that students immediately type an assigned question or essay prompt into Google’s search, take advantage of a teachable moment. Discuss, say, how different search terms yield different results. Ask students how they choose which sites to read and then discuss strategies for evaluating credibility. Compare sites that provide informative, documented resources with those that are based on opinion, or not thoroughly developed. Draw upon the findings of Leu’s (2007) study of seventh graders and the endangered tree octopus — ask how believable pictures and images make websites.
AP Photo/Herald Press Joel Phillippsen
Instead of creating walled gardens or entirely banning websites from students use, especially in a research context, educators should empower students to be informed users.
Smarter questions
I like Sowash’s suggestions to use questions that require responses beyond copy/paste or fill in the blank. He suggests asking questions that can begin with a Google search, but then require students to make connections between the materials they find, or draw some sort of conclusion, or move beyond the simple answers in some way. In this scenario, Google search complements students’ learning processes, rather than detracting from it.
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December 7th, 2009
Do you remember the prescient flash piece about Googlezon? If you haven’t viewed it, set aside a few minutes and check it out.
Created in 2004, it rather accurately describes customized content, crowdsourcing, and social networks. It also predicts the future of media, the fall of newspapers in favor of infotainment, the rise of bloggers. What really interests me in thinking about it today, though, is its prediction that Google, a seemingly benign search engine, would take over the world. True, there were already signs, for example, Google’s creation of their own mail service, but really, Google didn’t seem set for world domination yet. Since the Googlezon piece was created, Google has invested in too many services to name, including Blogger and Youtube, and just last week partnered with Tivo.
Google’s motto “don’t be evil” is puzzling. If a giant corporation says it’s not evil, does that make it true? I only wonder because they recently took over EtherPad, an amazing collaborative tool that most of you probably haven’t heard about. To be honest, I was excited to find a cool writing tool that wasn’t part of the Google franchise. I wanted to support the little guys I guess, and I didn’t want to be served adwords or have my behavior tracked in a not so transparent way. I have no reason to believe I was safer with Etherpad, but I’m beginning to wonder what price I’m paying for my free Internet.
Savvy Internet users should know that their behavior is being tracked on the Internet, but do they act accordingly? Does it bother you that Google serves Adwords related to the content of your e-mails when you’re reading your Gmail inbox? Sure, they’re just pulling text, they don’t really know you. In fact, some of the ads they serve are downright funny. But now I use Google calendar — I have a personal and work calendar. I also use Google docs for work, where I also manage two blogs on Blogger. Any Internet search I do is through Google. Why use AltaVista or another search engine when I like the way Google functions?
In the Googlezon world, magazine subscribers receive a magazine with a picture of their house on the cover, taken by satellite, and content served according to the preferences of each resident. Eerily possible?
I feel like a pretty savvy user–I study how people conduct research on the Internet, after all–but I’m not censoring myself on Gmail. The thing is, I don’t really know what information Google is collecting on me. Sometimes I care, but to be honest, I’m pretty complacent. I mean, their motto is “don’t be evil” and they were started by two grad students at Stanford…I feel like they’re like me…(mostly) normal, well-intentioned people. But I have to remember that Google is a company, a company that is quickly snatching up anything independent that competes with them and offering services that directly compete with mega-corporate Microsoft.
Why don’t I, a savvy Internet user, know what information Google is collecting on me and how they’re using it? Why isn’t Google more transparent? Am I a lazy, uninformed user, or is the company who does no evil being secretive and perhaps downright sneaky with my information? What price am I paying for Google’s free services? I find it interesting that a company that pushes for open source and general openness on their phone is so opaque when it comes to us, our information. Where is Google’s worth, after all? Is it in free searches, book previews, streaming video, news? I think its value lies in us.
What does “being evil” mean exactly, in Google’s terms? To write this blog, I did a quick Google (of course) search on its privacy policy. Google has privacy policy videos available, but how many average users view them? The terms don’t explicitly state how or if Google integrates our information across its various platforms or what exactly is shared with third parties. Understanding how our information is used (collected and shared) should be as easy as sharing our information is — perhaps a status bar similar to the one in the bottom corner of Facebook could subtlely appear and request that we opt in/out of information sharing. As Zittrain and others have asserted, more transparency is necessary. For example, Yahoo recently released an Ad Interest Manager that provides opt in/opt out of information collection/sharing. Similarly, privacychoice.org shows which companies collect information from sites you visit. Information collection isn’t necessarily good or bad, it’s a choice, but it’s a choice that we as users have a right to make.
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December 2nd, 2009
I’ve been teaching graduate communications courses for the past year. Evolved from a standard writing course, I teach students to think of communication beyond the page. The texts for the course are Duarte’s (2008) slide:ology and Zander & Zander’s (2000) The Art of Possibility. But, where’s the writing textbook, you may ask? It’s a controversial choice and initially a hard sell to both students and writing colleagues, but slide:ology is my choice for a graduate communications textbook. Like most Ph.Ds, I spent 4 years in undergrad and 6+ in graduate school writing many, many papers and no one ever told me to prioritize my message. As students, we get so caught up in demonstrating proficiency and competence and as teachers, we get so mired in correctness of method and form, that we often forget to consider audience need and our main communication purpose.
My students, of course, take it for granted because no matter what the lesson topic, my first questions for them are:
who is your audience?
what is your message?
A simple and obvious concept once it’s made explicit, but one that’s often forgotten in graduate and undergraduate writing. I know many students who desperately wish their advisors/committee members would comment on their ideas, rather than their grammar. Writing is such a challenging skill to cultivate and often the reviewers have their own hang-ups, which end up as feedback (or no feedback) on graduate papers. Duarte’s (2008) book inspired me to pay attention to the ideas in student work first and then focus on writing/presentation choices as a way to clearly convey these ideas.
During the first class, I talk about the importance of a main message, and then we discuss their target audience. I use an audience needs map from the Duarte Design slide:ology Workshop (which I highly recommend!) which prompts students to answer a series of questions about their audience. In graduate school, I had a vague sense of my audience–professors, people with more experience in the field–but I never really asked myself, why are they attending my presentation? or why are they reading my paper/article? As undergraduates, we often write for an audience of 1, the teacher, who we assume is familiar with the material and is reading because he or she has to. We’re not trying to interest them, we’re not trying to compel them to keep reading. Thus, our writing is often dead.
So, I started thinking about my audience. Why do they sacrifice their lunch hour to attend my brownbag talk? Why do they sacrifice weekends and vacation times to read my writing? What are they looking for? What are they hoping to find? Maybe the answer is still partially because they have to, but I think our readers are expecting more. At the graduate level, professors and other colleagues read our work because they are interested in the topic and maybe because they’re looking for something new…a twist on an old idea, a unique approach…whatever it is, they’re spending time on our writing in the midst of many demands on their time. They’re looking for our message, right? Oftentimes, student writing is lacking just that.
I tell my Environmental Science graduate students to write for a tired executive reading on a plane. The executive is deciding between reading the policy brief, completing more pressing work, sleeping, or watching an in-flight movie. Within a couple minutes, maybe even seconds, he or she is going to decide to skip the reading or turn to the next page. I don’t encourage my students to be sensational, but simply compelling.
Duarte’s book is an ideal resource for a graduate communications course because it guides audience analysis and offers strategies for engagement. I believe it’s possible, with practice, to learn to be compelling. My second text, Zander & Zander’s (2000) The Art of Possibility further complements the unusual focus of this course. I’m teaching my students to represent their data beyond graphs and charts, to communicate their message in beautifully connected paragraphs instead of following a formula, so I need a text that opens them up and makes them feel, well, possible.
My students affectionately call it “the little yellow book” and the day we talk about the assigned reading from it, I can usually tell who has read it, because they’re grinning. This past quarter, we discussed it mid-way through the course and I noticed a marked shift in our interaction: everyone was talking! Zander and Zander’s “lead from any chair” concept had certainly resonated with them. They seemed to finally get why I ask each of them to lead a discussion, post to our course blog, and share their writing materials…because they have a valuable and necessary contribution to make to our learning process. After this class, students become dependably more participative.
Of course, with any course, there’s missteps and material that doesn’t quite catch on, but for the most part, I find the course fulfilling to teach and receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from the students. University-level writing instruction needs to provide more than static writing assignments — we need to provide students with a strong understanding of their responsibilities as communicators and guide them in developing a toolkit that will allow them to be flexible in response to communication tasks in the workplace and life generally.
To view our course blog, visit:
http://www.brenmesm.blogspot.com
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October 9th, 2009
I just read an interesting article that reminded me of another interesting article that presented a counter viewpoint, but I can’t find it. I don’t remember the title or author. I returned to the site where I initially found a link to the article, a compiler-type site, and the listing is no longer available. All I remember is that it was a researcher’s reflection of spending a summer in the stacks at the Bodleian Library trying to unravel a mystery in French history. Without my remembering any specifics, the terms listed in the previous sentence are too broad to yield anything useful. I’ve searched the usual places, desktop folders where I put interesting articles, stacks of papers beside my desk, my del.iciou.us tags, even the download folders on the various computers I use. I likely read it in July and it is now October, so my browser’s history files are also of no use. In moments like this, I think of Vannevar Bush’s prescient memex, which for the most part has been realized by the Web, but still lacks trails, recorded paths that can lead us through our thought processes as we moved through online information.
While the back button, history function, tagging, and downloads certainly help, they are limited. The trails function described by Bush would re-create the serendipitous moment in which, by moving between certain contents, we understood, discovered, realized some new knowledge (see page 7 of his 1945 article, “As We May Think”). Interestingly, his description of the state of information warranting the memex is applicable post-Web:
“The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.”
Perhaps now information is not encased within stone walls, but I often find information based on search engine results, recommendations from friends, or recommendations from compiler-based websites. Often, these recommendations are ethereal, disappearing if I don’t remember the exact search terms, forget to tag it, or delete the e-mail. True, much of this is a user problem, but my struggles raise interesting concerns, (1) although information is certainly more accessible, are we finding the highest quality information, or simply the most popular? and (2) can trails be created that preserve our search and find processes?
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September 28th, 2009
We have an interesting relationship. Every time I want to leave, something pulls me back. Mostly, it’s our shared network of friends, the memories, and the promise of more to come. The truth is, I can’t pull myself away, as much as I’d like to.
Facebook is truly a seductive distraction. Psychologically, it’s interesting. If five years ago, someone said I’d trust a website enough to list most of my friends, announce where I’m traveling, and even post pictures, I wouldn’t have believed them. And yet I do, nearly daily. I’ve watched friends who began with noble resistance get sucked in. When it started out as just a place for college students, I thought it would be a fun diversion while I was in graduate school. Actually, I convinced myself that as someone who studies how people process information on the Internet, that I should really use it for work. I started out carefully trying to maintain professional distance; now, I have to stop myself from posting anything too personal.
Last year, Facebook opened up to everyone, no more need for a .edu address. At first, I didn’t want to friend my offline friends because I didn’t want to mix communities. Plus, Facebook was a place to stay in touch with people doing similar research, a place I could dip into when I wanted inspiration, say, from a few friends who always post interesting articles.
Back in April, I received a friend request from my mother-in-law. I didn’t respond, initially. I’m very close with my mother-in-law and she certainly knows more about my daily life than the majority of my FB friends, but I felt like it would be a violation of my privacy. Privacy? Facebook? It’s almost an oxymoron. People who really believe in privacy aren’t on Facebook. The rest of us are broadcasting the exciting minutae of our daily lives, collecting friends, posting pictures…sure, we have some control, but for the most part, we’re on Facebook to share not protect information. I accepted the friend request and am glad I did.
I know these aren’t new questions, but in what ways does Facebook mediate our friendships? I remember when talking on the phone was my preferred way to stay in touch with friends. It mediated communication, too, limiting the way we communicated (not face-to-face), when we communicated, where we communicated. Facebook seems different, though, because there seems to be more identity construction around the friendship given the very public space and the increase in loose ties (people we would probably never call to discuss our day, or even the weather for that matter) — first, we decide whether or not to friend each other, then we decide to what extent we are friends — full profile, limited? Are we close enough to comment on each other’s status? Do we use chat and e-mail to stay in touch, too, or are we just an extra in the friend count? Are we even interested in the other person’s status updates, or have we hidden them? We have a new way of communicating with each other, “poke” seems to have gone away, but we can “like” and “unlike” what each other posts, like we’re voting, or just supporting.
Do we feel more connected because of Facebook? A few months ago, an article in Adbusters cited Virginie Despentes, author of King Kong Theory, as saying “consuming pornography does not lead to more sex, it leads to more porn.” Is Facebook the same?
Does Facebook lead to more friends/social encounters or more Facebook? I’m still pondering the answer, though I suspect it’s the latter, or maybe that the two have become enmeshed. In the meantime, much as I attempt Facebook fasts, I enjoy keeping in touch with my geographically-dispersed friends too much to leave…for now.
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