COMICS

by Andy Kay

like spam and inane posts.

Furthermore, the included file-sharing feature poses issues of legality for some individuals wishing to share content, problems that will doubtlessly lead to squabbles over a consumer’s right to privacy and what constitutes intellectual property. What starts as an innocent collaborative project or presentation on a Groups page may easily lead to litigation over who owns said project.

Those issues aside, it’s inevitably going to be unused. Trial runs at Oberlin College found that students weren’t actively interested in doing anything academically related on Facebook.

It goes back to what every critic says about Facebook, and social media/ networking in general: It’s an escape. You don’t want to take your homework on vacation with you, so why would you engage in a literary critique of Frank Kafka on the same medium you post passive-aggressive rants?

All Facebook has succeeded in is reinventing the wheel; they’ve developed what could have been considered innovative a decade ago and hyped it up as some scholastic tool of the future. In reality, the only logical discerning use for Groups will be setting up real-life study sessions or class note exchanges, which would be useful if we already didn’t use Blackboard and the our VCU email accounts for the same purposes.

Attempts to revive innovations like Facebook for their original purposes have often ended badly (see Myspace and LiveJournal). Once a system or innovation has been co-opted by the masses, it’s difficult to reverse that trend without ultimately killing the product.

At the end of the day, Facebook is annoying and unattractive enough without this effort to reenergize it and make it relevant to academia. The growing stigma associated with using Facebook is enough to turn people off from using it as a social network, let alone a serious resource or academic network.

There’s something to be said for oldfashioned, person-to-person meetings. We can return to the traditional use of Facebook and social networking sites, or we can return to the traditional use of communication and set up real-life meetings. CT

ADAM STERN Executive Editor SHANE WADE Opinion Editor

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In last Thursday's issue of the CT, Reuban Rodriguez was incorrectly referred to as the associate vice president of student affairs and enrollment. His actual title is the associate vice president for student affairs and dean of students.