I signed up for facebook. I was curious, I suppose. it reveals more deeply than ever that I really don't so much like the people. I'll find people I used to know and I think: huh, s/he looks good. good for them. but contact? ha! no way.
and: it's eerie how happy everyone is in their little pictures. eerie and wrong. it has a sort of uncanniness to it. I'm sure some grad student is working on this busily in some cultural studies department somewhere in the midwest right now. does not detract from the fact that facebook: uncanny. and me: misanthrope. this facebook thing may not work for me. we'll see. here's my uncanny pic.
5 comments:
I signed up for Facebook last year, as I was told it was good for establishing/developing relationships with my students. I do find it makes for a moderately interesting window into their lives ("Huh -- she's seeing her? I didn't even know they were gay"), but so far it has mostly resulted in invitations to join groups that I couldn't possibly, mostly for professional reasons, sign up for.
So far, the most useful thing it's done for me is provide an invitation (complete with directions)for a funeral. After which I discovered that in the day between the onset of the person's illness and his death, his sister had been using his Facebook account to try to make contact with his friends to have them come to the hospital. Which I find morbidly fascinating. Would certainly never have occurred to me...
I kind of love facebook. In part because of the contrast to MySpace, which is just an awful, clunky, offensive, ugly mess. Facebook:Myspace::OSX:Vista or something. While FB is a good way to keep in touch with people that you don't often see or e-mail (little posts on someone's wall are very different than dropping someone an e-mail...you can actually just say "hi" or "I thought of you today when I saw a yellow fire hydrant" or whatevs), it works particularly well, strangely, with a more immediate group of people that you see every day or every week. So for me, that would be all the other grad students in my department (less than 50) -- at least, all the ones who have FB profiles. You can find contact info, look at photos they posted from the party this weekend, drop a note that says hey...I don't know, it just feels like a community in a way that e-mail does not. Maybe it's everyone's smiling, happy profile photos.
I do not, however, allow access to undergrads and have a "no friending students" policy, but that's just me. I want to feel like I can be myself and not give students so much access to my personal life. God forbid the mystery be revealed.
PS: I have students! :p
Yeah -- since basically the only people I know on Facebook (or so I thought, until this exchange) are my students (or my much younger cousins), my "friending" policy is that I can't ask a a student to be my friend (potentially coercive) -- and that I have to accept any invitation to be a friend from a student (avoids favoritism). So you see it's got a very different, work-oriented focus for me.
I deal with the giving-students-too-much-personal-info issue by just not letting it get too personal. Perhaps subverting the entire purpose...
(speaking of which, Tekne -- I looked for your profile, and couldn't find it. Too many people
...with the same name (I meant to say).
yes. the ol' name not exactly unique in my case. I suppose that oddly protects me in an anonymity of numbers... I'll 'poke' you/invite you instead. What is with poking? Is it in fact one with the sexual implication it embodies? I haven't done it yet, so I suppose I'm a poking virgin...
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