Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche

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Software Review

Facebook and Collegiality: A Serendipitous Social Niche

7/2/2008

By Trent Batson

The best thing about Facebook for academics is that it's not e-mail. It's not a phone call, either, nor a date for lunch, it's not chat, nor -- of course -- US mail. However, it is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. It's staying in touch with minimal commitment. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.

IT as a Humanizing Technology

Information technology is always surprising us in ways like this. It's the serendipitous discovery of new ways to interact that makes technology ever fascinating: All predictions about the human use of technology have been wrong; most popular uses were serendipitous discoveries. A commonly accepted perception of technology is that it somehow de-humanizes us; instead it is infinitely humanizing.

It is in our own discovery of ourselves and how complex we are that technology has gifted us. We found out that our natural speech was not as easily programmed as we thought 40 years ago. We found out that our cognition is not so easily replicated in artificial intelligence. And, we have found that human personality and character expressed communicatively can be infinitely nuanced.

Finding Old Friends

My having changed fields a few years ago meant I lost track of dozens of colleagues who I used to see regularly at conferences. But in my Facebook pages, slowly these old friends began to re-appear. With these re-discovered colleagues, I haven't had to explain all the intervening years but just let them know I'm still around, doing ok, and happy to hear from them again. They can look at my friends, see my social and academic context now, and therefore become part of an extended social milieu not possible a few years ago.

For we, ahem, Facebook habitués, we don't put up formal studio shots, but informal pictures taken by relatives. My current photo features my granddaughter while I'm a shadowy smiling presence behind. I am embedded. Just the context says so much about me that I don't need to spend much time writing messages.

An Existential Challenge in a Simple Question

One of the options that Facebook offers is to say what you are doing right now and update that frequently -- in about 20 words.