By Robb Murray
Free Press Staff Writer
February 14, 2006 08:12 am
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One need look no further than the words of this Minnesota State University freshman to see the impact of something called Facebook, the online site that is state of the art of college socializing:
“I don’t know where I’d be without Facebook,” said Amanda Puckett. “I’d be so bored.”
That may be stretching it. Take one look at her Facebook page and you’ll see she has plenty to keep her busy. But her point is well taken, and its spirit is undeniable.
It is almost its own world. A world full of information and scandal and, most of all, faces.
Faces of young women. Faces of young men. Faces of college guys having just vomited in house-party trash cans, faces of girls mugging it up for the camera, making out for the camera, posing seductively.
But unless you’re already in, or already know about it, chances are you’ll never get in. Facebook is the online phenomenon — where friends are made, personal information is shared and party photos are posted — that has become the center of the social scene at many colleges and universities, including Minnesota State, Gustavus Adolphus College and Bethany Lutheran College.
Pair that with the meteoric rise of the Internet site MySpace.com, and the host of other online sites that cater to the average
young person’s tendency to kill time via the Internet, and one thing is crystal clear: Whatever rules you thought governed the social structure of youth are very much obsolete.Face time
How popular is Facebook? Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes says there are 9,536 students signed up for the MSU Facebook site, nearly 70 percent of the university’s student body of 14,000. The numbers at in St. Peter at Gustavus are, proportionately, even more staggering. They boast 2,700 students, yet there are 3,137 Gustie members of Facebook. Astonishingly, 94 percent of this year’s incoming freshmen at the University of North Carolina signed up.
The Free Press, using a student’s account, took a spin through Facebook and found that of the several dozen student names we plugged in, only a few didn’t have Facebook pages. That informal survey included well-known athletes, student leaders, student rebels and randomly selected names from the student directory.
But don’t try getting in. You need to register with a valid college e-mail address.
MySpace.com is even bigger. In terms of sheer numbers, its 54 million dwarfs Facebook’s 12 million. But there are no restrictions at MySpace.com. Anyone with an Internet connection and some free time can set up their own MySpace account and start meeting people all over the world.
Originally started as a place for independent musicians to post their music, it since has exploded into the world’s largest free-for-all social scene, and there really aren’t any rules. Just like Facebook, MySpace allows you to post information and photos about yourself, engage in online discussion groups, send instant messages, etc. Most college students say, however, they typically ditch their MySpace account once they can get in to Facebook.
Beyond the two big ones, there are a host of other risqué Web sites — which cater almost exclusively to male hormones — that merely offer content, and this content ain’t for kids. Collegedowntime.com is popular, as is KillMyDay.com and Kontraband.com.Why?
Without being a member of the Millenial Generation — ages 18-24 — something such as Facebook may be difficult to understand. Certainly, there’s nothing new or unique about human interaction and the desire to meet new people and mingle with the opposite sex and occasionally partake of an alcoholic beverage. But the degree to which students are loyal to Facebook borders on the odd.
“Every time I go to do homework,” says Corie Korin, a freshman from Princeton. “I go, ‘I wonder if anyone has e-mailed me’ (through Facebook), even though I know nobody has.”
Adds Puckett, “That’s the bad part of Facebook. Sometimes you don’t really get your school work done.”
For Amy Wodicka, a 4.0 freshman from White Bear Lake, Facebook is about meeting new people and keeping in touch with old.
“You can go through and it’s interesting to see how people you used to know have changed,” she said.
Hughes says that unlike on MySpace, Facebook users’ profiles are available to a few thousand people who already share in that person’s “real-world” community. Because users must have a college e-mail address, he says, no one is ever anonymous. Each page can be traced back to a real person, and that creates accountability.
“Users can choose exactly who they want to see their profile, whether it just be their friends, friends of friends, only students or various other combination of users,” Hughes said. “At the end of the day we’re interested in giving as much control to our users as possible.” Other uses
The list of who else uses Facebook is a growing one.
• Last fall, North Carolina State University disciplined several students for underage drinking after a resident assistant found party photos of them on Facebook.
• A few days after students rushed the football field following a Penn State win over Ohio State, campus police found pictures of the incident containing identifiable students on Facebook.
• Northern Kentucky and the University of Kentucky both have disciplined students they’d seen drinking in pictures posted on Facebook.
•Ca;mpus police at George Washington University use Facebook to find underage drinkers.
• Employers and the career center at the University of Kansas use Facebook to evaluate students being considered for KU jobs.
The list of incidents spurred by MySpace.com goes beyond college drinking. Police arrested a Connecticut man accused of raping a 14-year-old girl he’d met through MySpace.
“I’ve never heard of anybody having an issue because of Facebook,” says Korin, the MSU freshman.
“Can’t you see though, some stupid girl puts her whole life story out there, shoe size, lipstick color,” Wodicka says, “and then some guy starts stalking her?”Birth of a phenomenon
Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard, who thought up the idea in 2004. It took off at Harvard, and spread quickly throughout the Ivy League and the rest of the East Coast.
Today they expanded to all schools in the nation and have now more than 12.4 million unique users who come to the site each month. Facebook comes in seventh in terms of overall traffic on the entire Web, one spot behind Google. Hughes says users are spending an average of 18 minutes per day on the site, although the students contacted by The Free Press say their Facebook time is much more than that.
According to Facebook, 67 percent of its users log in each day. Each day the network gets about 300 million page views.
And anyone who’s not in now, probably will be soon.
“There was this girl who just moved here,” Wodicka said. “And I asked her if she was on Facebook and she was like, ‘Facebook? What’s that?’”
Within days the girl had found out, logged on and created her page.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.
Photos
Corie Korin (left) and Amanda Puckett are two of the 9,536 Minnesota State University students signed up for Facebook.com, an online social scene. John Cross The Free Press