the Sam Jackson College Experience

Karine Joly, who writes the must-read CollegeWebEditor blog about higher education marketing and PR, interviewed me a few months ago about my experience with Facebook and other social networking sites for an April 2007 piece she wrote in University Business titled “Facebook, MySpace, and Co.” Karine and I were talking about my experience using social networking tools to socialize online with the other 2011 prefrosh early actions kids and that led into the interview where I formally answered some of her questions on the topic.

An excerpt from the e-mail interview:

1) As an early admit of the class of 2011 at Yale, you got a chance to interact with your peers as early as December. Why is it something important to you?

Some Yalies who had dabbled with online networking when they were pre-frosh stopped by the online groups and pointed out that they ended up awkwardly removing a lot of their mysterious online friends once they got to school and started to make connections in the flesh; all the same, everyone seemed to agree that communicating online was a worthwhile use of time. The allure here is not so much the possibility of making friends before the start of the school year as it is the opportunity to get a taste of your future classmates. These messages back and forth offer illuminating glimpses, however brief, into the character and composition of the future class.

If you want to see the rest, you’re going to have to click through to read the full interview on her site! Although the bulk of my response got left on the cutting room floor, don’t miss the article in UB and check out the other interviews on her site, where she has full responses from the other interviewees, all very interesting.

I hear she’s also got a neat new social networking site of her own, Higher Ed Experts, for higher education professionals. Not being one, I can’t report much on it, but check it out–sounded neat.

I am back at school now, and will try to be writing as much as I can without unduly jeopardizing my college process for lack of studying. Thanks for your continued readership. (At this rate, my Google Ads will buy me half a textbook by the time I’m a sophomore in college, which is better than nothing!)

I have never been particularly fond of Mark Zuckerberg’s online stalking machine, nor has his creation made me particularly proud to call him a fellow Exonian. At the same time I knew that those among us who are apt to be “Facebook creeping” had to invest some serious effort into their unhealthy tracking of their peers. It was comforting to know that in addition to future restraining orders, these creeps would have carpal tunnel to enjoy in the future.

Then Zuckerberg went along and, without any community input or consultation, implemented a feature which made large amounts of information disturbingly available in one convenient fashion. It is true that this does not represent a loss of privacy because no new information is being pushed to other Facebook users, but it deviated from the past in that Facebook was brazenly enabling this sort of activity.

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