THE WONDERS OF FACEBOOK

Mark Zuckerberg must be the "Big Man on Campus". The guy who created an online directory network for Harvard students has watched his creation, Facebook, become the biggest phenomenon on the Internet among young people across North America. If ever he decides to sell the rights to Facebook, Zuckerberg (who is only 358 days older than I am) will make a ton of money, and probably will be set for life.

I've been on Facebook for over a year now (way before it started to get really big- I'm a seasoned veteran), and it's interesting to watch how new features are added to make it more and more "exciting" for students. There is a lot you can do with it, which is probably why a lot of people find it addictive. I admit that I check my account pretty much every day, and almost every day I hear someone mention Facebook, or I hear/read some reference to it. Even national publications and websites refer to it. One of my favourite websites, SI.com (Sports Illustrated) gives you the option of "sharing" articles with your Facebook friends.

Facebook is cool because you can post pictures and leave comments for friends. You can join interest groups and "poke" people (whatever that means). You can discover long-lost friends from high school or even elementary school. From a ministry perspective, I think there are some neat opportunities to advertise outreach events, or even to mobilize/gather contacts of students on campus. In fact, I somehow attained national notoriety among campus staff (okay, maybe that's stretching it a bit) for some of the ways I used Facebook. The Hinz was excited and pointed it out to everyone, so when I showed up at staff training in December, a few people referred to me as "the Facebook guy".

I think there are several drawbacks to Facebook though. When the whole "mini-feed" thing came out this past fall, it opened up a whole new dimension of opportunity for stalking. You can easily find out what other people are up to and what is going on in their life without contacting them. The fact that you can be on an entire network of thousands of students means that you can at any time look at random people's profiles to see what they did on the weekend, and even keep their pictures for yourself. Today I was talking to friends who had heard instances of people recognizing faces in their classes without knowing where specifically the familiar face would be from, and it turned out that the faces belonged to random people that they had stalked on Facebook. Yikes.

I really think that it's a commentary on where society is going. We think we "get to know" our peers by looking up their hobbies, musical interests, and weekend habits, rather than spending time with them in person. Do we really though? Shoot. We were created to have relationships. It's how we were designed. But I don't think this level of interaction is as healthy for maintaining solid friendships. I understand if it's a long-distance thing, but honestly, I'd rather have conversations on the phone (and I hate talking on the phone), or better yet, in-person, than carrying them out on Facebook walls.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about Facebook is that it was designed for students, yet when students are asked what some of their biggest distractions from studying/causes of procrastination or time-wasting are, Facebook is hands-down the top choice. I wonder how much it would affect my studies if I was just starting out in school.

I think I've ranted enough on Facebook for now. It must be time to go check my profile, to see if anyone poked me.