Flashes of Panic

Back in October, I signed up for Facebook. This experiment has led to some interesting results, some of which I anticipated, and others which I didn’t.

• I expected I would wind up networked largely to “my” students, the CS undergraduates either in my classes or in the research group I’m a mentor for. Two of them have “friended” me, but the vast majority of my “friends” here at the University are from… the women’s cross-country team, through A.

• For someone who spends as much time as I do writing letters (e.g. weblog posts) to people I’ve never met, I shouldn’t be surprised that I have six “friends” I’ve never met in real life.

• I expected to see other adults-working-with-younger-people on my friends list (there are two coaches and an “academic advisor” there) but the rabbi was a bit of a surprise.

• This was the second of three “social networking” sites I’ve joined which are explicitly about the networking. (Some others, like Flickr or last.fm, aren’t centered around the network; I don’t really count them.) The first I joined at the explicit request of someone doing research, and essentially let it sit (I log in perhaps once a year.) I turn out to be a bad network node, because I hate sending friend requests. What if this other person has different standards for what counts as a friend? What if they haven’t used the service in months and hate the emails? What if we have a different concept of our relationship? So I wait for my friends to telepathically sense that I’m on the service, and send me a friend request. Because I tend to be friends with people like me, you can imagine that this doesn’t scale very well. (This whole paragraph is a passive-aggressive invitation.)

Related to another project, I also joined LinkedIn, which I like simply because the whole point of the service is “grow your network.” I’ve managed to ping a whole bunch of college connections, one of whom has provided some useful advice already.

Now Playing: Girl In The War from The Animal Years by Josh Ritter

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