Street Level

So this is what it feels like to write on a wall.

It’s addictive. I want to stop but I need to keep doing it, all thanks my friend Angela, in Calgary, who suckered me into joining Facebook.com.

And I hate her for it because, try as I might, I can’t ignore the darn site.

Yup, I snuck on it this morning to see if anyone had written a message on my wall, which I gather is the terminology the programmers use when they mean “send a message.”

Guess it’s trendier to call it a “wall.”

Anyhow, there it was, a shout-out (I’ve learned that word recently, too) from Dustin Fuhs, a friend who moved to the Coast and sort of vanished off my radar.

This was neat. I had to reply.

Of course, I had really nothing to say to Dustin other than “Hi, how are you?” and “What’s up?”, but that was enough.

Got an invitation from Coun. Arjun Singh to become one of his Facebook “friends” and I jumped at it, too.

Then I had to check out all of his other “friends,” and wasted some time trying to figure out who they are and why they know Arjun.

And I readily agreed to a couple of other Facebook “be my friend” requests. Didn’t even hesitate — just clicked the link and went for it.

The addiction has gone even further, though.

I actually flipped through 500 Facebook members who went to my high school.

I didn’t know any of them because it seems the young’uns are jumping on this bandwagon a lot faster than us old folks.

But, this is how this 50-something mother of five has been spending time recently — and no, boss, not all of it was on office time.

But some was because I had to do research for this column, of course.

That research turned up some fascinating information.

Facebook isn’t just a website.

It’s a cultural phenomenon that is shifting society.

It’s changing the way we communicate and adding an entirely new educational discipline, the study of computing with “real-life applications.”

A professor at Cornell University said computing has become social, and that aspect needs to be the focus of study.

He must know what he’s talking about because he’s heading a multi-year research project, Getting Connected: Social Science in the Age of Networks, that was given $2 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and another $60,000 from Microsoft.

All to study how we “socialize” through out computers.

A professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology got $150,000 from the NSF to create a course in social media.

Her students will be studying blogs and wikis (which I have just learned are websites that allow visitors to add, remove, and edit content. Not sure how they differ from a blog, but apparently they do).

Even the Washington Post is a Facebook fan, adding it to its own website with an eye to helping people become more engaged in politics.

So, of course, the people behind this site, who probably were just computer geeks like many others of their age, are sitting on a billion-dollar gold mine which they haven’t bothered to sell yet.

It’s scary to think what they might get when they do decide to retire from the business.

Kind of makes me glad that my oldest son took a job over my objections and is now a techie for Hewlett Packard learning html, java and a lot of other stuff I don’t understand.

Our conversations now go like this:

“How’s work?”

Followed by a lot of wows, ohs, unhunhs and absolutely nothing that indicates how confused I am by it all.

Gotta be nice to that kid.

He may be my pension plan in coming years.

In fact, probably should invite him to be one of my Facebook friends.

Right now.

Posted by Dale at 9:04 a.m. Comments