On Facebook: Real, Everyday Life

Last week, DC contributor Robin Wagner-Pacifici commented on how Facebook and other social networking sites have changed the language of social interaction. (link)

I find that the change in descriptive language about social connections that she observes is more in the eyes of the beholder than in lived experience.  Life continues as before, full of human connection, with new tools to carry out the same processes.

When Facebook was founded in 2004, I was a senior in high school and accepted early to college with the prerequisite educational e-mail address to join Facebook’s earliest members.  As a member of the Millennial Generation (defined by the Pew Research Center as Americans born after 1980), I am a member of the first class of college students not to ever go to college without Facebook. In fact, I had Facebook before I even graduated high school, and I “met” my dorm-mates months before my first week of school.

That means I never made a college friend that I didn’t connect with online. I never dated someone without looking at their online profile. I also never had a boss or a professor who couldn’t look me up and see what I was about. When I graduated last year, mid-recession, I was warned to “take those personal details offline.” Take them offline? I never thought it was a private space. They were never there.

I’ve observed, in my life, my work in publishing and my research in sociology, that with each passing year, the social worlds of young people are increasingly entrenched in social media. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t use the word entrenched at all. The rest of my generation, particularly those who had Facebook as high school freshmen (or even earlier), learned who they were while using Facebook. Not because of Facebook.   Our lives are lived in and through social media, as they are lived in and through face-to-face interactions.

Imagine how the milestones of adolescence are changes (or exactly the same) when lived out in a world wrapped up in Web 2.0. Your high school chemistry club calls meetings on its Facebook page. Your first boyfriend asks you to go steady via a Facebook relationship request. Your most embarrassing high school moment? The unflattering photo posted of you after your first big spring break trip.

Facebook didn’t create these moments, and the social fabric isn’t tearing at the seams. Regular life happens online all the time for these teenagers. They aren’t referring to their school cliques as networks, but still as friend groups. David Brooks may have used different terms for his analysis, but that doesn’t mean that language is carrying over into everyday life.

I say these things to both comfort and caution: the language of relationships isn’t going anywhere. It’s just growing in complexity and variance. As a sociologist, this poses myriad questions to the expected changes in the way this generation will become adults. The change to collective memory alone: These “networks” are instant archives.

Facebook and other social networks aren’t just changing the way older generations think about social relationships.  They also, more fundamentally, are providing a medium through which a younger generation is growing up, revealing the way we now live.