How the world is doing

Oct. 14, 2010

Dear Julie,

At the beginning of the movie "The Social Network," a male Harvard student is having a beer with a young woman in a bar. Their conversation is more of a duel. Parry, thrust, parry, thrust. At some point she decides to break up with him, in part because being around him is so exhausting. "Dating you is like dating a StairMaster," she observes.

The year is 2003. After leaving the bar, the Harvard student returns to his dorm room, has another beer and starts downloading photos of Harvard women to be rated for their hotness, a prank that eventually led to the 550-million-member phenomenon called Facebook.

And Facebook may just be getting started. Businessweek says Facebook enables advertisers to target an audience, and Facebook users innocently enable Facebook to do so by providing information about themselves online to their friends. If your status is single on your Facebook page, Facebook can provide ads aimed at singles. If your status becomes engaged, suddenly ads for local jewelers could begin appearing on your page.

Google does much the same by analyzing our searches, but Facebook offers advertisers virulence. During the FIFA World Cup last summer, Businessweek reports, Nike placed a video on Facebook that was played and commented on more than nine million times. And watching a commercial on TV is one thing. Watching a commercial endorsed by a friend is an advertiser's dream.

Facebook is a world within the world and a world that for more and more people is big enough.

Last week my feature writing class took a surprise current events quiz. I had wondered how much attention they were paying to the larger world. Previously they'd been assigned to go out onto the campus or out into the community to find a story. Most came back with stories about organizations they belong to or people they already knew.

The world beyond our circle of friends is the world where trapped Chilean miners emerge from the Earth to be tearfully greeted by all of us and to remind us how much, despite wars, we do love each other and do love life. I want my students to be able to tell stories about people who are different from them and yet not different at all. Finding these stories only requires paying attention to how the world is doing. Its status.

The scores were so consistently low I threw out the quiz. The questions ranged from straight news to entertainment and sports and a few softballs like, Who is the governor of Missouri? Not many knew his name.

If you want to be a journalist, I told them, you must be aware of what's going on in the world. The statement met with blankness. To their credit, three students spoke up but to say they don't care who the governor of Missouri is. It doesn't affect their lives, they said. They just want to be able to get a job.

They were defending not knowing and not caring.

That shocked me. What employer in any field wants to hire a college graduate who doesn't know or care who the governor of their state is?

The average Facebook user spends six hours a month keeping up with his or her "friends" online. It sounds like being friends with a StairMaster.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.