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Students Plug in to Web Sites

Posted on: Monday, 16 January 2006, 18:00 CST

By Michelle Theriault, The Bellingham Herald, Wash.

Jan. 15--Nearly every night after dinner in Chelsea Wessels' college room, all attention turns to four glowing computer screens as Wessels and her three roommates peruse Facebook, an online social networking site.

They delve into an ever-deepening treasure trove of details about their classmates: pictures, favorite music, quotes, message board comments, even relationship status.

Sometimes the treasure trove is more like Pandora's box.

"It was pretty much all we did every night in my room," Wessels recalls with a laugh of those months last year when Facebook first became available at her school in Oregon.

For the 2002 Squalicum High School graduate and others, online social networking Web sites are becoming an increasingly large part of high school and college students' social interaction, and time.

Just ask Harold Hamilton.

"I spend maybe like five or six hours per day on it," says the 16-year-old Ferndale High School student of MySpace, the most trafficked social networking Web site.

Hamilton uses it the way millions of other high school students do -- to banter with friends, broaden his circle of acquaintances and connect to the social scene.

"If you didn't have it, it would limit your social contact."

Though solid numbers are sparse, Hamilton believes that 90 percent of Ferndale High School students are on the site.

There are dozens of social networking Web sites with different target audiences -- from invitation-only aSmallWorld.com, which counts Paris Hilton as a registered user, to QuePasa.com, which is targeted at Hispanics. Still, MySpace.com and Facebook.com are the undisputed heavyweight champions.

They operate on similar principals: Users can make a profile and communicate with others, sharing messages, pictures and forming groups.

For the 14- to 24-year-old demographic, they're wildly popular.

Facebook has 11 million registered users, and MySpace boasts 47.3 million, according to Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes and USA Today reports, respectively.

Facebook, which is popular with college students, has experienced massive growth since its February 2004 launch.

"In the beginning, Mark was just playing around with the idea for Harvard kids, but a few months in, it became clear that we'd created a monster," Hughes says.

"It's transformed itself from a small, Harvard project to the ninth-most trafficked site on the Web."

The online atmosphere of the sites mirrors their main users.

MySpace, most popular with teenagers, is a high school parking lot filled with innuendo and gossip.

Facebook, ubiquitous among the college crowd, is a messy dorm room, cluttered with endless pictures of smiling co-eds performing drinking feats and quoting movies like "Zoolander."

The sites after all, reflect the lives of their users.

Facebook is changing the college experience, says Wessels, a senior at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., where more than 1,100 of the school's roughly 1,500 undergraduates have Facebook profiles.

The subtle tweaking of a Facebook profile to include the hippest bands, quirkiest interests and funniest quotes is a consuming pastime for some, says Wessels.

"It's all about projecting an image," she says. "For some people, it's a new way to define themselves.

Facebook's Hughes agrees.

"In general, it's clear that Facebook is providing much more information about students to other students at their college."

Facebook has even managed to redefine the famously ephemeral world of college relationships.

Now, the hopelessly archaic concept of "going steady" is best signified by which category you click on your Facebook profile: single, in an open relationship, or the big heavy -- in a relationship.

"It's really changed the way relationships progress," says Hughes.

"The question isn't so much any longer 'are we dating?' It's 'are we serious enough to put that we're in a relationship on Facebook?'"

Wessels admits that she checks Facebook almost as often as her e-mail -- several times a day.

She's not alone.

"About two-thirds of our users log on to the site every single day, and most of the time multiple times daily," Hughes says of Facebook.

After Facebook came to Wessels' college, she held out for three days before making an account. Just over a year later, the site has changed the social fabric of university life.

"It's hard to imagine life before Facebook," Wessels says.

It can sap social connections, as well as make them. Wessels wonders if people talk less and Facebook-message more now that it's such a primary form of communication.

And it can be an academic downer: Just witness a library of term-paper writing students clicking between Facebook screen and Microsoft Word document at a fever pace.

"I kind of wonder if GPAs have gone down," Wessels says.

What makes the sites so appealing?

Plenty of information is available without any face-to-face contact.

"It's a way to not actually have to talk that to that person in person," explains Hamilton.

Social networking Web sites are reshaping students' views on privacy, communication and socialization in ways that many adults don't fully comprehend, says Traci Logan.

Logan is vice president of information technology and vice provost for academic affairs at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass.

For this generation, says Logan, the Internet has been a fact of daily life since elementary school.

"They spend their lives in virtual communities," she says.

"Their notions about personal boundaries and privacy are fundamentally different than our own."

She recently wrote a Boston Globe opinion piece about Facebook and MySpace and the epidemic of "willingness to share TMI -- too much information."

Students at Bentley, which has a technology and business focus, were analyzing Facebook profiles of their randomly assigned roommates for hints of incompatibility, then calling the college to complain.

Logan also worries about a cavalier attitude toward posting everything from incriminating photographs to cell phone numbers.

"A lot of these students are putting this information in thinking that it is just fun, that this is just something they share with each other," Logan says.

"But they don't think about the long-term implications."

But that doesn't bother Ferndale High School's Hamilton.

He's using MySpace to help organize a skate park in Ferndale -- and there are other benefits of being connected.

"I met one of my girlfriends on there."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Bellingham Herald, Wash.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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GCI,

Source: The Bellingham Herald, Wash.

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