"Anti-Social Networking?"

This past week at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, students ran an experiment blacking out social media networks. While on campus students still had access to email and search engines, but when trying to log on to Facebook and Twitter their access was denied. This experiment started due to a report that said web users in the United States spend more time socializing on Facebook than searching on sites such as Google or Yahoo.[1] What would happen if college campuses across the United States decided to ban these social media sites?

The majorities of people across the United States and throughout the world have facebook or twitter pages, especially college students. In February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook as a social networking site strictly for educational institutions. By 2006, Facebook became so popular that it expanded to anyone that had an email address.[2] Now, not only college students have a Facebook, but so do middle school and high school students, parents, and even some grandparents have Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is the new way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home. Instead of picking up our phones and calling someone on their birthday we just post it on their wall. Is this really what the world is coming to?

I am one of many people who is constantly checking my Facebook to see what my friends are doing or what pictures they uploaded from the weekend, but it is a bad habit that most of us have. I find myself sitting around my dorm room on Facebook posting on my friend’s wall instead of doing my homework or studying for an upcoming exam. If there was a blackout of these social networking sites at Loyola, I think it would be hard, at first, to not be able to go on Facebook right after you got out of class or before you went to bed, but it would break everyone’s habits of constantly updating their status or tweeting about what they did during the day. Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief of the social media news site Mashable.com, said he’d be interested to see if the university collects any hard metrics from the ban, such as better class attendance or more assignments turned in on time.[3] Everyone is so focused on Facebook, Twitter, and what everyone else is doing that if we could no longer had access to these sites it would give people the chance to focus on their school work and it would give people the chance to actually communicate face-to-face.

In the long-run, I do not think we could completely get rid of Facebook or Twitter because they have both become such a huge communication device. Many clubs and organizations on campus use these websites to inform their college communities about ongoing events on campus, club meetings, and study sessions. Facebook and Twitter are both good ways to communicate with our peers, but many people, including myself at times, have taken it to an extreme. We need to learn how to better manage our time spent both online and offline.

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[1] http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/technology/sns-ap-us-social-media-blackout,0,1973503.story

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia

[3] http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/technology/sns-ap-us-social-media-blackout,0,1973503.story