Facebook: Personal Branding Made Easy | Magazine. Illustration: Shout Think about the last time you updated your Facebook status. You probably edited that snippet of text a dozen times to get every word just right. And then, right before you posted it—cursor hovering over the Share button—you likely considered how your friends were going to react. “People are going to Like this,” you thought. “Maybe I’ll even get a few comments.” Now, how many times have you run that same internal monologue before blurting out your opinion during a face-to-face chat with your best friend? Every time you post something on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram, you’re influencing—or trying to influence—how the world views you. Real conversations don’t happen in public. Mostly that means telling them interesting bits that are designed to make them like you. The idea that we’re having a “conversation” online gets even more absurd as your network gets larger.
Dunbar isn’t the only one who believes that managing relationships on a large scale is impossible. The Importance of Unwritten Postcards. A former student interviewed me recently for an audio journalism project about the dangers of undergraduates being online, a perennial topic for faculty, students, and administrators alike, not to mention for newspapers and cultural hand-wringers at large. Her project arose in response to recent articles about social networking being harmful to student health and emotional well-being, and her questions to me concerned the impact of Facebook and Twitter on classwork and grades. It’s an important conversation, but one that too often stops at the level of panic, so I tried to go in another direction, toward an aspect of digital culture that seems as important as bad grades and lost sleep.
When I teach, I jump from YouTube to Delicious to Google docs on the classroom screen. I allow—even encourage—my students to use laptops in class, and I don’t worry if they’ve got Facebook in one tab while the day’s assigned reading is in another. (Image: Postcard wall from eperales’s photostream)