Thoughts on Facebook

The 23 Things lesson for this week will be easy for me since I’ve been using facebook for a very long time. It was only open to college students with an .edu email address when I created my profile in 2005. Over the past 5 years, facebook has turned into a sort of digital diary of what has happened in my life. When my old laptop fried and I lost all of the pictures on the hard drive, it was a relief to know that I had posted the best ones on facebook and they weren’t completely lost. Facebook has been a good way to keep in touch with my high school friends when I went away to college, and now my college friends after everyone graduated. It’s strange to think of facebook as a professional networking tool after using it for personal reasons for so long.

I have a personal facebook account- Lena Wolf, and a separate one for the YA librarians at TSCPL to interact with local teens- Lena YALib. It has been a successful way to reach teens and I’ve found a lot of music performers for our Open Mic Night programs through facebook. It is by far the fastest way to reach the teens and they respond to messages more quickly than email.

Since I work with teens, I’m very interested in the ways that they use social networking tools. The immediacy and magnitude of facebook reshapes traditional teen experiences in a lot of ways. When I was in high school, I remember looking at pictures of the boy I had a crush on in the yearbook and imagining what his life was like. Now a teen can add their crush as a friend and see hundreds of pictures and a vast amount of information with a click of the mouse. Instead of doodling “me + dreamy boy” on a personal notebook, teens can declare their love online for everyone to see. There is also extra pressure to make your profile look good and look cute in all posted pictures. I hear teens going to myspace or facebook profiles and making fun of the person all the time. Cyber-bullying is a problem that is much harder to detect and stop than name calling in person, which is one of the reasons that it's important for parents and educators to become familiar with the tools that kids use.