The Power of Belief and The Current State of Social Networking

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Facebook is a failure waiting to happen, MySpace is a wasteland, and AIM is practically an artifact. O yeah! Did I mention Twitter is going the same direction? It is easy to play devils advocate, especially in retrospect. But Facebook is still a hot tamale in many peoples’ books. These internet ventures, and most others for that matter, share a common thread. They unify people for a moment in time with a new, well-structured technology, but they fail to foster a belief with users that supersedes their own corporate agenda - the belief that it is YOUR network.

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College Before Facebook, Part 2

This is a continuation of my previous post on “Growing up with Facebook, Part 1.” Where I left off at, I was explaining how . . .

“Nowadays, virtually all kids have cell phones, many of them have computers, and they’re now able to make and stay in relationships, using Facebook and other social+networking" rel="nofollow">social networking sites, which collectively will mean they won’t have to say goodbye to one another. Their list of friends can simply grow larger and larger and, for a lot of them, they’ll probably stay in touch… Not all, but let’s just say a lot of them will. And, years later, what will they be like??”

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College Life Before Facebook, Part 1

I’d like to pass on some things that have crossed my mind since I’ve gotten into Facebook. The more I thought about it, the more I wrote, so I’ve decided to break this up into two different posts. This is the first one, and it basically lays out a framework for the points I want to make later on.

Like most people, I’ve been adding new friends/ people from the past, people from college and high school. I’ve been looking at their faces, their profiles, and wondering what I would say to them after so many years have passed.

The main thing is that by engaging my memories about them, and what they meant to me — it all just reminds me of how much I’ve grown since then. I mean, we’re talking 30 years since high school and 25 years since college.

I got friends out there who are now grandparents, and interestingly — most of them, when I look at their profiles, have anywhere from a few to maybe a dozen so-called “friends.” Then, of course, there are the youngsters that I know also, nephews and nieces, people like that (they’re “20 something”), and I’ve noticed that a lot of them have anywhere from 200 to 300 friends!! Of course, they’re in college and they’re attacking it like any other fad.

For them, it’s cool to have a Facebook presence and to join hundreds of arcane Facebook “groups,” so their numbers will naturally soar as a result of their being involved with one another, in college, and let’s face it, Facebook’s only been around since 2004.

In other words, we didn’t have social networking sites like Facebook when I was coming up.

” . . . when I left the all-black east-side of Cleveland to attend an all-white prep school (St. John’s Prep. in Collegeville, MN) in 1969, Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been killed the previous summer, and race relations were tense, to say the least.” - Steve Maclin

When I graduated from Carleton College (Northfield, MN) in ‘76, our school had just snapped up its first computer. It was not exactly the “talk of the campus” (it was more of an “interesting oddity” at that time); it filled up a whole room that was always refrigerated, and no one that I knew had ever actually “seen it.” Still, it was apparently memorable.

Guess that goes to show just how much things have changed in a relatively short amount time.

What’s worth teasing out, is the idea that I grew up knowing that the “school trip” (i.e., the whole “going away to boarding school/ college experience”) involved getting to know someone for a couple or few years, and eventually, splitting up and going your separate ways — knowing that you’d probably never see each other again for the rest of your lives! Heck, I finished college, grad school, my doctorate and taught for 10 years and, for the most part, things were still like that! We didn’t make associations that were “that close” because we knew, in the back of our minds, that pretty soon, we’d have to split up. There were no “best friends forever” (BFF); in fact, nothing was “forever.”

I mean, that’s the way things were, we all knew it, and though we didn’t exactly like it, we accepted it and worked around it — by putting more into the time we had together.

Nowadays, virtually all kids have cell phones, most either own or have access to computers, and they’re now able to make and stay in relationships, using Facebook and other social networking sites, which collectively will mean they won’t have to say goodbye to one another. Their list of friends can simply grow larger and larger and, for a lot of them, they’ll probably stay in touch… Not all, but let’s just say a lot of them will.

So, I ask myself: what are they going to be like when they get to be grandparents??

10 Tantalizing Tips to Improve Your Facebook Etiquette

Insofar as Facebook has become a sprawling, social networking community . . .

. . . it’s (might as well say) inevitable that some people will act in ways that will annoy fellow members. So, based on online blogs, articles and using Facebook religiously, here are our Top 10 tips on Facebook Etiquette.

1. Don’t be Afraid to ‘Ignore’ Someone!

Probably the number one conundrum on Facebook is how to respond when you’re contacted by a blast from the past, who (for whatever reason) you don’t particularly feel like getting back in touch with.

Don’t let this worry you! If you ‘ignore’ them when they friend request you (by pressing your ‘ignore’ button), they won’t get a message saying you rejected them, or anything kinda’ awkward like that. Think of it as pretending you didn’t see them, while walking down the street — hey, it happens all the time, to everyone. Lighten up!

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What’s His Facebook?

Michael Jordan was a phenomenal basketball player in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Many consider him the greatest of all time, and he’s probably best remembered for winning championships and literally “hanging in mid air.”

However, I remember Jordan for something else . . . his head fakes. Never before had one player made entire teams look so foolish. A mere turn or bob of his head would send his opponents tripping over their own feet.
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