During a recent lunch break I sat with a group of fellow graduate students and full time faculty members as the conversation turned to New York City children and the degree of independence they seem to have at increasingly earlier ages compared to their non NYC counterparts. Walking or even taking the subway or bus alone to and from school by age 11 is not uncommon among NYC kids. Because of this, having a cell phone at that age or sometimes even earlier is also not uncommon. One of my colleagues remarked that some of her child’s friends have not only had cell phones, but have also had Facebook accounts since the age of 8 or 9. This baffled all of us. “What do they DO with it,” I wondered out loud. “What does anyone do with it,” pleaded one of the faculty members. Everyone laughed, nodded and moved on to a new topic before I had the chance to articulate my response to that question. So here is my attempt an answer.
I have spent a good deal of time thinking about what people do with Facebook. I have spent a good deal of time thinking about what I do with Facebook. I have spent a good deal of time on Facebook. Yes, it can be a great tool for procrastinating. It is possible to spend hour upon voyeuristic hour peering into the lives of new acquaintances or old high school classmates you have not seen in person for more than a decade (thereby making that anxiety-inducing social event known as “the high school reunion” completely unnecessary and obsolete). For many of us, Facebook is a much bigger draw that compels us to sit down at the computer than our dissertations will probably ever be. But, as I have come to appreciate, it is so much more than that.
Firstly, it occurred to me recently that it’s how I get the majority of my news – political, cultural and otherwise – and news from a wide variety of sources. I suspect this is true for many of us. Who has time to peruse the NY Times, the Guardian, Salon, CNN, the BBC, PBS, The Rumpus? Not to mention all the blogs there are in the world to keep up with – literary blogs, parenting blogs, food blogs, the list goes on. And why should we spend our time “surfing the net” (as it used to be called), when two or three hundred of our friends will find the highlights and link us to them via our “newsfeed”? Also, given that nearly everyone in my life, past and present, is now “on Facebook,” my newsfeed is often filled with tidbits from the perspectives of people from every walk of life, every political persuasion, and many different religions and spiritualities. (Of course, I have blocked the racists and the homophobes, so that I don’t have to look at their “news” on a daily basis). But this isn’t even what I like best about Facebook.
The best thing about FB is that it elicits all kinds of conversations that would never or rarely take place anywhere else. For instance, the wall conversation I recently witnessed between my father, a vegetarian and compassionate animal-rights activist, and one of his brothers, a gun-toting, deer-hunting woodsman on the issue of gun control. A few others joined in on the conversation, weighing in on both sides. And I’m pretty sure that neither my father nor my uncle changed his mind on the topic, but both were engaged and respectfully dialoguing with each other in a way that I have never seen happen in person. These two brothers speak to each other occasionally, but have little in common and when they talk in person it rarely goes beyond small talk.
Another conversation I just participated in happened when I posted this video from Feministing.com, which is a response to the recently released single from R&B sensation, Beyoncé, “Who Run the World (Girls).”
My post admitted that I had been trying for days to articulate to myself just what it was exactly that irked me about the Beyoncé song and possibly more so about the video. I was excited when I came across this vlog, posted by another FB friend, and I just had to “share.”
The friends who left comments on my post included a twentysomething Mormon housewife who lives in the Midwest with her husband and infant son, one of my college students from last year who spent the early part of her childhood in Guyana, and later in Queens, and a fortysomething documentary filmmaker originally from Bosnia by way of San Francisco. When or where else on earth would a conversation between these three people ever have been possible? That this sparked a wide range of responses from a diverse group of people is not even the most important part for me. What I think is also tremendously notable is the way that FB allows for critical dialogue on… pretty much anything. Sure these kinds of conversations happen in academia all the time. There is nothing remarkable about analyzing a Beyonce video from a feminist perspective in a liberal arts classroom or in an academic journal on pop culture. But Facebook is a unique space outside of the university where the masses have sought to gather and do something very communal, very democratic. They have endeavored to think together. And to share this thinking in a forum that does not privilege one type of discourse over another. From the political to the personal to the academic, anything goes. When you post something on your wall, you open the conversation to anyone who wants to join in (unless of course you’ve decided to block them from being able to see your posts, but most FB users, I’ve found don’t even know how to use that function). I think it is possible to say that, to some degree, this type of space also exists in other non-academic crevices of “the internets.” But how many of those spaces do you share simultaneously with your romantic partner, your co-workers, your midwife, your old therapist, your dad?
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