How is Facebook Changing the Writings of Students?

That's the question recently posed by Inside Higher Ed.

From the piece...

Facebook presents far more danger than the cultivation of lowercase first-person "i"s and emoticons :). The real threat posed by Facebook is not that it ruins writers' ability to punctuate or encourages them to replace words with pictures. The problem with Facebook is that it nurtures one of writing teachers' greatest foes -- the teenage fantasy that writers write only to themselves and to those who are just like them.

Although Facebook is properly classified as "social software," it is more accurately categorized as mirror-ware, a whole new kind of social that consists only of us and our self-projections. And it is that mirror, that seductive invitation to reflect us and only us back to ourselves that damns us.

On Facebook, we post pictures to represent ourselves: our best, shiniest, toothiest, happiest/sexiest ponderer/wanderer/adventurer. The fairest ones of all. Or we post some other person or object as icon. Puppy, baby, six-year old self. The poor person’s version of identity airbrushing. To deepen the portrait, we post our status, likes and dislikes — bananas, skiing, taxes — and photo albums of grand vacations, graduations and celebrations. To our walls we announce opinions, as they come. What we find good, stupid, evil, sexy.

Facebook writers expect homogeneity from their audience. All readers read the same observation, and insights in the same way, regardless of who they are, what they know, what they need to know or even what they seek. Facebook writers do not select, shape or color moments and thoughts for particular readers. They trade the pleasure of imagining the absent reader for the imagined adoring gaze of selves. And they expect their friends to "like" their posts, pictures etc. immediately, and to shower them publicly with praise.

With Facebook, we don't need to explain why Obama should be elected or gays shouldn't be allowed to marry or a hundred seagull photos merit viewing. If birds bore our friend Gerard, too bad. If Gerard didn’t vote for Obama or has a male partner, that’s too bad, too.