Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Mugs Across the Curriculum

A group of Harvard students has fashioned a social network site for stimulating connectedness among coeds at several top-flight schools.  According to their site, 

You can use Thefacebook to:
• Search for people at your school
• Find out who is in your classes
• Look up your friends' friends
• See a visualization of your social network 

This has interesting possibilities, especially for its emphasis on institutionally centered networks as safe(r), inherently associational, loaded with potential for fruitful connections. The visualization feature is intriguing, too.  And although it's pitching the social dimension of undergraduate life (where there are, of course, other ways to "find out who is in your classes"), I can't help but wonder how Thefacebook could affect professional networks or whole fields of study, perhaps even the entire professorate (provided there is such a thing). For now, the group is playing on the kid-ish "poke" to name the contact gestures.  Pokes are kind of like trackback pings--only they're aimed at interpersonal, single-channel (removed from wide readability) communications; I suppose this brand of funning toward a sense of social connection and generated collegiality would doom Thefacebook to imminent failure in more formal (read serious, read professional) circles.  But it's fun to think about the potential, even to imagine how this might reweave the social fabric for community colleges or commuter-based institutions or large-scale distance learning programs (none of which appear on the list yet).  So far, according to the article on Wired News, nearly 250,000 students are registered for poking at 34 institutions.  Notably, the site limits poking to folks at one's own institution, which makes good sense considering that students at Harvard really shouldn't be poking students at UMich--and vice versa.

Posted by dmueller at June 9, 2004 10:16 AM to Technologia