Media Response 1

After reading the articles for this past week, especially the one on social networking, I decided to spend some quality time with my Facebook account. Really and truly, I probably log on twice a week for an average of about 5 minutes each, so spending a significant mount of time on the network is pretty abnormal for me, and it was an interesting experience.

First of all, as I logged on, it brought up the News Feed home page, where I noticed right off that my sister had changed her status and her profile photo. The little picture that shows up on the page showed her with our youngest brother, Brayden, in a photo taken over the break—a photo which I was initially in as well. Offended that she’d cut out her older siblings (me and our other brother, Landon) I immediately clicked on the picture without paying attention to anything else. It was when her profile showed up, complete with the entire photo of the four of us together, that I noticed what her status update said: Lexy Newby it's nice to have siblings, they're almost always on your side and by your side even when they're not physically there. Now, without being overly sentimental or sappy, I was touched, because I know she was talking, at least partly, about me. The thing that I think is most interesting, though, is that 1-I had known that she was having a hard day and I had talked to her repeatedly on the phone that day, but 2-it took looking at Facebook, a public forum, by CHANCE to find out that she appreciated it. It doesn’t change the fact that it made me feel good, though.

The second thing that I did was to start looking at pictures of members from my mission…I know that the article we read last week said that there isn’t one solid global networking site, but Facebook has made its way to France, at least a little. It was quite interesting to flip through images of activities at the church; pictures really do say a thousand words, and you can learn a lot about even more than the person whose profile you’re currently examining. For example, I learned that a couple of the members who were there while I was serving got married. The Valence branch is now a ward, but it seems that they’re still in the same rented space, even though there was a ward-building planned when I was there 6.5 years ago. I wonder what happened there. And, it seems that a couple of people who were recent converts when I was there so long ago are still attending activities at least. That’s comforting.

So, what are the implications for teaching? I really have no idea. Last semester we did look at the Pride and Prejudice and Hamlet Facebook pages…for me that wound be an interesting activity, to have students use their “Facebook discourse” to summarize novels. I think, too, that there are lessons that need to be taught regarding how students present themselves on these types of sites. As I was looking through things, I thought about how Amy felt like she had to alter her profile a bit when her niece added her as a friend. I’ve heard of (and they mentioned in the same article) that prospective employers and admissions committees have sometimes made decisions based on these profiles. There’s a life lesson that needs to be taught somewhere along the way.