When your parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, coworkers and almost every person in your life is on Facebook, you realize the impact of the site on your life and so do your professors. Most of them view Facebook as a distraction from their courses, but one professor has decided to make Facebook the focus of her lectures.
This spring semester, students will have the opportunity to Facebook during class in the sense that they will be learning about the social network’s impact on “areas like relationships, advertising, public relations, politics and entertainment.”
Cheryl Chambers is an instructor of communication who has looked at how “personality attributes and attractiveness [are] related in social networking” and how “emotional expression and egotism are affected by things like Facebook.” The class will meet on Fridays at noon and be one credit hour, to both communication majors and non-majors.
“Most young people use social media, and for many it’s one of the major ways they communicate with others. Understanding how and why social media is used should be interesting to many types of people. Also it could be beneficial to their social life and future work life,” Chambers said.
Students can expect the class to be discussion-based with readings, short writing assignments or video clips, a paper and a couple of projects using social networking sites. Facebook will be the main focus, but other sites like Myspace, Twitter and Blogspot will be discussed.
Chambers hopes students will learn about the course being offered and sign up.
“I think it should be [a] fun, casual class. We will explore a lot of pop culture, which most students enjoy. It will be what the students make it, since so much of it is what ideas they bring to the table,” she said.
When asked what other professors thought of a class on Facebook, Chambers said.
“Sometimes people laugh a little at the idea. I suppose a class on Facebook may sound a little silly, but most also realize how much of an impact it has had. Things this big can’t be ignored by academia,” she said.
So far, it seems that Facebook has become a booming topic in college classrooms and research across the United States. Stanford University offers a course on creating Facebook Apps for marketing. Harvard University, where Facebook was started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg along with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, has done research on Facebook sociology.
With the release of the movie “The Social Network,” which details Facebook’s creation and rise to power, the site has increased even more in popularity with over 500 million users and is taking other countries by storm. BBC recently paid for a class for its employees to learn how to use the site to the company’s advantage, and countless politicians including President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron have accounts.
Yet Facebook may be headed for a “Myspace ending” with the creation of new social networking sites that allow for users to connect in personal, professional and educational ways, along with keeping loads of privacy. Imagine separating your Facebook account so only your personal friends could see a set of statuses, your boss and coworkers could see another, and you could communicate with classmates and professors (who you would rather not “friend”) on another, all while having encrypted backups keeping spam and hackers from interfering. This is what prototypes like Diaspora hope to accomplish.
No matter what your personal poison, social networks have become the new newspapers, political gateways and novels of our generation. To not embrace the change is to openly accept a missed chance at communication that hasn’t been seen since the advent of the telephone and television.