I’ve been attending the Scholarly Communications Institute 05 (SCI) in Charlottesville, VA over the last couple of days. This SCI has been on visual media – images, animations, film and video – and their use in scholarship and artistic expression. It has been a fascinating conference, and the flood of ideas and tidbits has been rich enough that I need a couple of days of random idle thought to clear wheat from chaff.
But a sideline surfaced there that I though was quite remarkable. Among the 30-odd participants, I happened to be sitting at a corner where some of the younger folks, primarily grad students, were sitting. Somehow, Facebook came up in the conversation, and within minutes, there were a flurry of invites, acceptances, and the creation of a SCI group for our own internal communication. Like a fast moving blizzard, the formation of our new micro-network was over almost as quickly as it began. Notably, none of the older SCI participants – not a Luddite among them – had Facebook accounts, nor were they carrying portable electronics that would have permitted real-time participation.
What I learned, and what was new to me, was just how intrinsic the use of Facebook is today among younger scholars – grad students and junior faculty – in their scholarship and teaching. Facebook, for now, is often the place where they work, collaborate, share, and plan. Grad students may run student projects using Facebook groups; they may communicate amongst each other in inter-institutional (multi-university) research projects; they may announce speakers and special events to their communities.
I’ve been enmeshed recently in increasingly agonized conferences that concern themselves with “re-thinking scholarly communication” and grappling with understanding what tools might be used to facilitate new models of peer review, or facilitate research collaboration, or teaching — and all the while – of course – it has been happening anyway, using widely available tools that provide the flexibility and leverage that scholars have been seeking.
There are two things that strike me as most important about this trend:
First, this is a fundamentally important shift generationally in what we expect from our software productivity tools. The grad students and young faculty using Facebook have used MySpace, and been Facebook members through their whole adolescent and adult school experiences. They are taking this experience with them into their work. The work of the people that I see most often is in research and teaching. But the lesson is broader: this generation will be working collaboratively in tools like Facebook. In schools, in corporations, in small non-profits, in community centers – people will collaborate and work together in social applications. And that is going to be as natural to them as email and text messaging.
Second, regardless of the ultimate fate of Facebook, the set of characteristics that it has established – the sense of community; user control over the boundedness of openness; support for fine grained privacy controls; the ability to form ad-hoc groups with flexible administration; integration and linkage to external data resources and application spaces through a liberal and open API definition; socially promiscuous communication – these will be carried with us into future environments as expectations for online communities. Facebook is an empty wasteland for people who have not climbed over the hump of use. For those who have active community within it, it is this generation’s Lotus 1-2-3.