The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C., Dan Barkin Column: Facebook Gets ‘E’ for Efficiency

By Dan Barkin, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.

Dec. 8–I wanted to talk to Fred Stutzman, a UNC doctoral student, about Facebook and other social networking sites, and I ended up learning something about my kids.

It would be OK, I guess, to describe the 29-year-old Stutzman as one of the leading experts on Facebook, the wildly successful Web service where millions of people — mostly college students and younger — have created their own virtual communities. But that would be incomplete. He’s really a sociologist and communications researcher, even though he lives in UNC-CH’s School of Information and Library Science. He is one of those interdisciplinary types whose work sprawls over a number of fields.

I found out about him over coffee with Paul Jones, who runs ibiblio.org and is a professor at UNC. One of his students, he told me, was someone I should know. This student was carving out a research niche on social networks such as Facebook. At that time, Stutzman was still finishing his doctoral classes. He hadn’t even started his dissertation, and already he was becoming something of a rock star among the folks who are trying to figure out the larger significance of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

So I looked up Stutzman. And I asked him: Based on what you have learned, couldn’t you make a lot of money selling your services to companies who are trying to figure out how to plug into the social networking phenomenon? Maybe he’ll do some consulting, he said, but what he really wants to do is teach and do research.

What he also told me is something that ought to be of comfort to parents who worry that their kids are spending too much time on Facebook. His research is focused on the role of social networks during the transition periods from teenage years to adulthood, transitions such as from high school to college and from college to the work force.

“When college students make that transition from high school to college,” Stutzman says, “they leave their social networks behind, back home. Even if they don’t move away, they’re still forced to renegotiate a new social network on campus.” (Renegotiate a new social network. So that’s what I was doing Rush Week in 1971.)

Stutzman says that before the rise of Facebook and other networks, this was a slow, hit-or-miss process. You’d meet people in classes, at the student union, and get only the barest details about them. You would “have to meet hundreds of people, see if they are compatible, make good judgments.” Today, if you’re allowed to “friend” another student, you can learn a tremendous amount online — biographical information, favorite movies, bands, activities, friends you might have in common, etc. “Some of the inefficiencies of social interaction are being taken away,” he says.

But the larger question is: OK, so what? As Facebook nears its fourth birthday, what does it mean that millions of the site’s devotees have begun to enter the work force? Stutzman says it’s hard to predict how their favorite mode of communicating will change the way, say, that corporations operate. The problem is, it may be years before these new graduates get their hands on the levers of power, and so it may be years before organizations listen to them.

The other day, I was talking with a smart public relations strategist who was wrestling with a problem: More and more of his clients are looking for help in Web 2.0/social networking area. I reflected, after that lunch, boy, you oughta look up Stutzman.

dan.barkin@newsobserver.com or (919) 829-4562

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