"Egocasting" on facebook.com

Another facebook article, this time in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Monday, January 23, 2006)

Facing the Facebook

by Michael J. Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, is author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press).

....snip....

Facebook.... is a Janus-faced symbol of the online habits of students and the traditional objectives of higher education, one of which is to inspire critical thinking in learners rather than multitasking. The situation will only get worse as freshmen enter our institutions weaned on high-school versions of the Facebook and equipped with gaming devices, cell phones, iPods, and other portable technologies.

Michael Tracey, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado, recounts a class discussion during which he asked how many people had seen the previous night's NewsHour on PBS or read that day's New York Times. "A couple of hands went up out of about 140 students who were present," he recalls. "One student chirped: 'Ask them how many use Facebook.' I did. Every hand in the room went up. She then said: 'Ask them how many used it today.' I did. Every hand in the room went up. I was amazed."

Christine Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, believes experiences like that are an example of what she calls "egocasting, the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one's personal taste."

"Facebook is an interesting example of the egocasting phenomenon," she says, "because it encourages egocasting even though it claims to further 'social networking' and build communities." Unlike real communities, however, most interactions in online groups do not take place face-to-face. "It would be more accurate to call it 'Imagebook' rather than 'Facebook,'" Rosen says, "because users first see an image of a face, not the face itself, and identities are constructed and easily manipulated (and often not truthful)." It's no surprise, she says, that "people who use networks like Facebook have a tendency to describe themselves like products."