Sarah R's report.

October 20, 2010

Emerging Media Research Report

The author of this current research paper is making the assumption that the reader knows and understands what Facebook is and does as a social networking site.  If the reader does not have this basis of knowledge the author would like to direct you to Neil Selwyn’s introduction in the article below.  Selwyn gives background information on the use, history, and development of the Facebook social networking site.  In the article entitled, “ ‘Screw Blackboard… do it on Facebook!’: and investigation of students’ educational use of Facebook,” Selwyn discusses the academic use of Facebook at the University of London in the United Kingdom. 

Facebook offers perhaps the most appropriate contemporary online setting within which to explore how social software applications ‘fit’ with higher educational settings and communities of educational users and, therefore, investigate the current assumptions surrounding social software and education. (Selwyn)

Facebook is the opportunity that Selwyn had been looking for to see how social networking sites are used in the educational system, more specifically the educational system within universities.  The debate among educators seems to boil down to whether or not these social networking sites actually help the students in their studies or if they really just impede the student’s pursuit for an education.  Selwyn proceeds to do a study to try and make some conclusions in either direction on the matter at hand. 

The group studied was undergraduate students attending Coalsville University in the school of Social Science. With 909 students in the Social Science School only 694 had active Facebook accounts, over the course of a four month period of data collection, and 68,169 wall postings over a five month period of analysis this study appears to have been supported with evidence. 

The evidence directed toward educational-related postings on the 694 profiles within the study brought forth five main themes including:  recounting and reflecting on the university experience, exchange of practical information, exchange of academic information, displays of supplication and/or disengagement, and exchanges of humor and nonsense.  As a college student the author of this paper certainly can agree that these are the most common themes in her own experience with Facebook and the educational posts she herself has made.  If a Facebook user were to log on right now they would very likely find all of these types of postings among their networks. 

Selwyn comes to the conclusion that, “…in terms of education-related interaction, Facebook was used primarily for maintaining strong links between people already in relatively tight-knit, emotionally close offline relationships, rather than creating new points of contact with a ‘glocalised’ community of students from other courses or even other institutions.”

In Marshall McLuhan’s book, “The Medium is the Massage,” he makes the following statement:

At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective. … Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.  As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. …We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of the experience coexist in a state of active interplay.

Technology, specifically social networking, has given us the ability to be a part of individual’s lives without necessarily investing in their lives.  The Facebook postings that Selwyn observed kept a few strong bonds between close friends.  Visual means of apprehending the world are just too slow; so instead of meeting face to face students are becoming more dependent upon social networking sites.  This transfer to technology based communication could be seen as a good or a bad thing depending upon the circle of critics involved.      

And yet Selwyn states that the data shows that students are doing the exact same thing they have always done only now it is instantly spread to more than just the small group in the back of the lecture hall. Students are still investing in their close friendships only in a new medium. In a sense the data listed shows,

How Facebook has become an important site for the informal, cultural learning of ‘being’ a student, with online interactions and experiences allowing roles to be learnt, values understood and identities shaped. … Facebook should therefore be seen as an increasingly important element of students’ meaning-making activities, especially where they reconstruct past events and thereby confer meaning onto the overarching university experience.

As an avid Facebook user the author of this piece would have to agree with much of what Selwyn states in his article, but cannot say that Facebook has not wasted hours of her time.  As one of the opening remarks to Selwyn’s article states, “We're all going to fail university. It's not because we're stupid, or because we don't do any work. It's because of an uncontrollable addiction to Facebook and msn. When we're not drinking, or being hungover, or thinking about drinking while being hungover, we're talking about drinking and debauchery on msn or Facebook. This has got to stop. It won't, we all know that, but it should,”

Introductory statement from the ‘Facebook is Sucking Out My Soul and MSN is Feeding on the

Remains’.  Although there may be benefits to Facebook such as networking, keeping in contact with classmates, and all the other reasons it is helpful, it seems that the average student is not using Facebook as a medium to pursue those benefits.  Rather Facebook is used as a distraction from the work at hand.  The author of this piece has in the time it has taken her to write this 1,000 word paper has gone on Facebook at least thirty times. 

 But is method of distraction really any different than what students did in the past?  Is this generation ignoring the professor and causing distractions for themselves any different than the students in the ‘90s that didn’t have laptops in their classrooms.  Those students surely made diversions for themselves, procrastinated, doodled, or spaced out in a classroom or lecture hall. The conclusion to the Facebook dilemma is this:  there is no conclusion.  As McLuhan put it on his opening pages,

The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Facebook is by no means an exception to this statement.  Academic conversations that happened in the back of the classroom before now happen online and to a much wider audience.  Society will continue to be wrecked by social networking and technology.  Technology will increase, and there will be a time when Facebook will be accepted just like the printing press was accepted.