Our social lives: before and after Facebook

Blair Rogers was nervous about starting at IU and moving several states away from her home in Arizona. However, she was able to meet friends beforehand on Facebook, many of whom she considers close friends today.

Junior Jeff Schinella said one of his good friends at IU was discovered by accident on Facebook. Another one of his friends was searching for someone he had just met when school started, but he got the name wrong and messaged someone else – someone who is now a good friend.

As Facebook turns 5 years old with over 175 million users, many students are joking about life before the social network: How did people do it?

Whether it’s meeting new friends, keeping in touch with old friends, hearing about parties and other events or staying in contact with members for a class project, Facebook has become a social staple for college students.

However, some wonder how this new technology affects social behavior.

Assistant journalism professor Emily Metzgar, who teaches a course called Issues in New Communication Technology,  said that online social networks haven’t made us less social, but “differently social.”

She said new communication technologies like Facebook can be a social process, but they raise questions about how users develop the same social skills.

Sophomore Elisabeth Wurm said she likes Facebook a lot, but she could survive without it. During a weekend trip with friends, Wurm didn’t have the Internet and said it was strange not to have that form of communication. On the other hand, she also enjoyed the face-to-face interaction.

“We’ll become a socially awkward generation,” Schinella said.

While Facebook makes it easier to stay in touch with old friends, he said, it also makes it to easier to avoid hard conversations in person, such as a breakup.

Relationships can be easily ended over the social network by the click of a mouse, and Wurm joked that a relationship isn’t official until it’s on Facebook.

Assistant telecommunications professor Mark Deuze, who teaches a course called Media Life, said Facebook and other social networking sites havearger social trend of shorter, less serious relationships compared with 20 or 30 years ago, “which is amplified online.”

He agreed that Facebook has made us more social, but in a different way. He said online social networking has become widespread because of the technology and availability of the Internet, but also because there was a demand – it was “built on an existing social pattern.”

“It was like wildfire (when Facebook started),” IU law student Tim Flowers said.
Flowers said that he got Facebook by his junior year, however many other students already had it.

As an undergraduate at the all-male Wabash College, he said Facebook was a good tool to find parties and “before that, we all used AOL (instant messenger), and we found out about stuff from people’s away messages,” he said.

Deuze said Facebook grew quickly on college campuses because the college experience became “mass scale,” with students more likely to be in class with 300 or 400 people, as well as many students taking classes off campus.

Facebook is a way around the anonymity, he said, similar to the reason the greek system was set up.

As far as the classroom, he said professors have to provide more than information because its already easy to find on the Internet – making sense of the information is the professor’s job. 

Metzgar agreed that “what we are expected to know what is changing – do we need to memorize, or can we just know how to find it online?” She said that universities will have to grapple with defining this difference between knowledge and learning.

Despite some professors’ dislike for surfing the Web in class, whether for information or Facebooking or not, Metzgar, who attended college in the 1990s, said she was guilty of working on  crossword puzzles during class.

“The fact that students aren’t paying attention is not new,” she said.  

Deuze also didn’t seem to think students are less attentive because of Facebook. However, he worried about what profiles say about us.

“We want to be social, create groups, have many friends – it’s great, a lot of fun but it makes us walking billboards,” he said. Facebook pages create “a public persona,” which isn’t natural, he said. 

Schinella and Wurm agreed that there are superficial aspects to the online friendships.
“There are some things I won’t put on Facebook, like relationship status,” Schinella said. “The people that know me will know that.”

“When people send you 200 birthday messages, you wonder who’s sincere, but it’s still nice,” Wurm said.

While the pessimistic outlook is that we’re now more socially isolated, her outlook is more optimistic.

“If we’re more connected,” he said, “we can have more of an impact.”