MS 190: Authorship is the course website for the Fall 2006 Media Studies senior seminar at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
some facebook love
I was resistant against Facebook at first, I still am slightly, but I am getting over it. I feel like social networking is there for you to engage with it at any level. That is what is great about it. Either you can turn it into a major source of communication, one that you rely on for social interaction (of some form) ,or you can just put up a profile and check it once every two months when really you just want to stalk someone.
I did however witness an instance this week in which I saw proof of the benefits of social networking in terms of making ones academic life easier through quick and easy access to friends. I am in a research methods class for Psychology and we have to conduct these surveys. It is really about all we do in that class. So I put my big’ol survey together and was like, “cool, now I just have to go give it out”. Right yeah, that took forever, I was sweating by the end of my three hour jaunt to get like 50 survey’s filled out. So anyways, I talk with my friend Sean, and he says, “oh I just put my survey on line and sent out an invite on facebook”. He had around100 responses after just two hours of it being up. Imagine that, life made easy by a computer. I think that something like that shows the benefits of having social networks like facebook. By just sending the survey out to all of his networked friends he was both being less invasive than I was going door to door and getting more responses. I can see how this type of access could be helpful on many academic and professional levels. So perhaps while facebook might be hindering some scantily clad drunkard users from getting jobs, I think it has the potential to be helpful in many other respects.
- Leesoid's blog
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counterpoint
i have loved facebook for a long time, but i just wanted to present a counterpoint to your blog entry. although your friend got more surveys, his participants were not completely randomly selected; they self-selected, and they are those more likely to engage in online social networking, which might skew their answers in some way. i realize it is impossible to control all variables with random selection, but still...
WildCherry15
i heart facebook
it's interesting to see how it, in such a short amount of time, is being incorporating into people's everyday lives and their frameworks for the world. facebook has become a way for people to come out of the closet (what gender do you list for who you're interested in), a way for people to contact each other, etc. one particular way that it's impacted me, is that now i automatically think of it as a way to advertise events when i'm organizing it. also, in aspc elections last year, people used facebook groups, and having different people put photos of the canditate as their profile pic, as a way to campaign. also, i used it as a directory a lot, to find phone numbers...
however, the negative aspect, is that now stalking people has also become a regular part of my day. i don't even want to but it's just so easy!!!