When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook.com in 2004, he could not possibly have foreseen all the uses it would come to have. The website had its genesis in a need to break down the barriers between residential colleges at Harvard. “Harvard is a fairly unfriendly place,” Zuckerberg said in a November 2004 interview with Current magazine. “While each residential house listed directories of their residents, I wanted one online directory where all students could be listed.”
From Harvard, Facebook expanded to serve the same purpose at the other Ivies, then to nearly every college in the country and then to workplace and geographic communities across the United States. Everything from NBC Universal to Atlanta, Georgia now has its own Facebook network.
But pretty rapidly, Facebook’s uses started changing. Clearly, it is no longer just a written directory of students. With the inclusion of the Facebook Newsfeed, it is at the very least a mechanism for staying up-to-date with (if not stalking) your friends’ whereabouts. Its uses can be trivial: every Sunday morning, for example, the site floods with new pictures from weekend.
The site’s uses can also be more serious: the most e-mailed article on The New York Times’ website for weeks last June was about employers looking at Facebook to screen job applicants. Employers turn to the sites to look for “red flags”; they are looking for things that “might go against the core values of the corporation.” Ironically, research in Cornell’s Department of Communication suggests that such behavior has, in turn, encouraged more deceptive Facebook profiles rather than creating a window for insight into people’s lives.
This week at Cornell, Facebook has served as a key mechanism for campaigning in the student trustee races. 11 of 13 trustee candidates have Facebook groups in support of their candidacy (certainly more effective than chalking, given the lovely Nor’easter we’re currently experiencing). Many have included campaign pledges in their user profiles. Almost all of the potential trustees have friends who sent out Facebook messages on their behalf and most are using the “Status Update” function to provide a handy link to the uPortal voting site. Will the next student in the position to vote on tuition be elected by Facebook friends? Perhaps.
But yesterday, Facebook may have found one of its most important uses of all. In what has been described as the deadliest shooting rampage in American history, Virginia Tech lost at least 33 members of its community. When students were locked in West Ambler Johnston dormitory and the 25,000 plus students did not know if one another were alive, they did something that would surely put a tear in Zuckerberg’s eye: they started a Facebook group.
The group, “I’m okay at VT” started yesterday afternoon after the shooting became public knowledge and the sense of panic set in. According to CNN, students joined by the hundreds to let their friends know that they were not one of the dozens murdered or the many injured in yesterday’s events.
For better or for worse, we have become the Facebook generation.
According to Prof. Jeff Hancock, communication, the turn to Facebook after the Virginia Tech shootings points to three main things. First, in every major recent crisis, from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, communication has been a tremendous problem. Where cell phone service collapsed in both those events, the University website and e-mail both crashed yesterday at Virginia Tech. Facebook provides an alternate means of communication that may work when other means of communication fail.
Moreover, when disaster strikes, you immediately want access to your social network. Social networks facilitate communication — they enable you to tell others that you are O.K., find out if they are O.K., and allow you access to those with necessary resources.
“Facebook tracks, maps out and links your social network; it’s the perfect thing for students when crisis hits,” Hancock summarized.
Finally, Hancock explained that Facebook’s position as an independent service becomes incredibly important in emergency situations. Again turning to the University communication systems that failed, Facebook remains unaffected because it functions as its own entity. Events occurring at the locations of any one of its networks will not likely destroy the site.
Essentially, Facebook has become key to crisis situations on college campuses.
Zuckerberg had noble intentions when attempting to unify the social scene at Harvard. But in the process, he may have created a new 911 for the undergraduate population of America. Nice work, Mark.
Erica Fink is the Sun’s former Editor in Chief. She can be contacted at ebf6@cornell.edu [1]. Fink Again appears Tuesdays.
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[1] mailto:ebf6@cornell.edu