Working in Facebook
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.
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Observations like Sarah's are why we're planning to integrate IM into DrProject (www.drproject.org), a classroom-oriented software project management portal (think SourceForge for beginners ;-). Lots of young grads from CS use IM instead of email for "real" team conversations, then switch to email to talk to their managers; as a result, most of the "why we built it this way" is lost, because the IM conversations aren't archived, searchable, integrated with the project's ticketing system and wiki, etc. The major hurdles we're facing in this aren't technical, but social --- I'll post to http://www.third-bit.com/blog this fall as the experiment unfolds.
Thanks for the interesting post Peter. I'm fascinated by the culture shifts we're starting to see with Web 2.0 services as the kids who grew up taking this stuff for granted use it in more institutional contexts.
A religious group I'm loosely affiliated with recently launched a social networking site for its youth program and I just yawned and thought "why bother." Clunky registration with little flexibility and not much to do when you're signed up? EEERNN. Just start a Facebook group and tell everyone to go there.
It's not much of an exaggeration to say that everyone in my social circle under 30 has a facebook account and no one over 40 does. I'm 40 myself and when I registered a few months ago I was only the fourth person from my college graduating class of 1600. When I recently evesdropped on a Facebook "Wall-to-Wall" conversation and heard 20 year olds complaining how hard it was to organize things because the old people don't do IM I determined to start doing IM more. There's quite a generational divide brewing.
What's socially interesting in all this is that people are able to easily communicate and organize outside of official channels. Tasks like newsletter publications and conference organizing have taken staff and relatively deep financial pockets but an amazing amount of it can now be done by IM, newsgroups and sites like Facebook. Organizing that took months can now take weeks. I think we're going to be seeing a lot of shifting within these kind of associations as younger members shrug off the bureaucracy to organize directly. I talked a little bit about this in my own part of the online world.
In your post, you didn't mention what value was added? Was it purely networking? Did the facebook group add to information/learning exchanged? Were ideas from the classes discussed in your newly created group? Do you think over time, the group will foster continued discussions?
I guess since I work in a large company that uses various IM products for support and communication (and for years now), it doesn't strike me as so revolutionary. I know for us it makes some exchanges much easier but for education, can you really study when you get interrupted at random times? Do kids/adults/students know when to turn it off?
oh boy, oh boy...
Any time MySpace and Facebook come up at the same time, it's very important to consider danah's investigation/review of the sociology behind the sites:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/06/24/viewing_america.html
I just finished a summer internship as an application developer at JPMorgan Chase and instead of leaving contact info with fellow interns, the most common thing said was "I'll facebook you and get your info there." It's amazing how facebook has really revolutionized the way we communicate.
I just posted about the NYTimes article on the "Over 40 is Facebook Creepy". I was searching around for others and came up with this post. I want everyone to know that those elders (like myself - a day over 40 or so)are gaining momentum with facebook involvement. I have over 60 facebook friends, most of which are around 40. So you are not alone...
http://svmomblog.typepad.com/silicon_valley_moms_blog/2007/10/over-40-is-face.html
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Sarah Milstein [07.10.07 10:41 AM]
Great post, Peter. One note: before they get to college, many if not most students don't use email regularly. They text and IM but consider email a formal communication. Colleges are thus finding that they need to teach email skills, because that's today's business communication norm.
It'll be interesting to see if email fades as more people who are comfortable with other electronic forms of communication start graduating into the workplace.