that time Facebook was about staying in touch with
the people you went to high school with, he says. That
changed when the service opened to anyone over 13.
“There are probably some people I’m not keeping
in touch with because I’m not on Facebook,” he
acknowledges. But for him, the personal blog he has
kept for six years is his way of letting family, friends and
thousands of others know what he’s up to. Because he
posts his resume on his blog, he doesn’t use LinkedIn,
either. But he’ll check Flickr daily to see the latest photos from the 20 or 30 friends who regularly post pictures they take with their iPhones.
Lillis, who joined Facebook several years ago, says
that establishing a group of friends there is a different
experience for alumni her age than for those who
started college after the service was established. Current
students can add people as Facebook friends soon after
they meet them in their dorms or in class.
“Whereas people in my generation, where Facebook came out a little after we graduated, we have to
go find those people,” she says. “Some are married,
some have changed their names. It’s harder to find
those people.” Of Lillis’ 225-plus Facebook friends,
about half are fellow Carolina graduates.
In July, the GAA launched a Facebook page and a
LinkedIn group, both of which can be found via
alumni.unc.edu/SocialNetworking. As of December,
the GAA Facebook page had nearly 2,300 “fans” and
averaged 12 new fans per day; the LinkedIn group had
about 400 members, gaining about one new member
per day. And the GAA’s nearly 3-year-old TarNation
had about 2,450 active social networks.
When Lillis was an undergraduate, Friendster was
where everybody was, she says. “I didn’t feel a need for
it. I was in college, I was seeing all these people. I
thought, why would I want to see you and then talk to
you online when you’re right next door?” She did
eventually get a MySpace page, but disliked the spam
she received and found the individual personalization of
MySpace pages — especially when people added loud
music — annoying.
Now that she has been on Facebook several years,
she says she sees the point of communicating that way
with people she sees in real life, and she checks it at
some point every working day. Since the service
opened up beyond those with college e-mail addresses,
her friend list has grown.
“At first it was a small little universe,” she says.
“Now people I haven’t seen in 20 years are on here,
people from middle school, high school, business contacts, people I met at conferences, people that work at
the J-school.” She enjoys looking at the photos they
post, though she doesn’t post many herself.
“Maybe that’s not very fair, but I tend not to think
anybody would be interested in my photos, and I don’t
want to spam anybody,” she says. “They come up so big
in the news feed.”
Lillis doesn’t use Twitter, but she
does have a page on the LinkedIn networking site. “Facebook is mainly
social,” she says. “LinkedIn I see as
more professional.”
Like Lillis, Benji Cauthren ’03 tried
MySpace as an undergraduate and
moved to Facebook after he graduated. He works in alumni relations
with the journalism school and helped
start a site that follows the LinkedIn
model for the school ( www.alumni
connections.com/olc/pub/UNOJ/).
He also uses Facebook to stay in touch
with college friends and to get information about opportunities and events
out to students and alumni.
The majority of his more than 300
Facebook friends are people he went
to school with or met in the last few
years, he says. He logs into the site
daily for 15 or 20 minutes and checks
whether friends have posted photos or
updates about what they’re doing.
“I used to be addicted to Scrabble games [on
Facebook],” he says, “but they took that away.” He’ll
update his page occasionally and often shares musical
interests or an article he finds interesting, but he says
he seldom posts photos or updates the status line that
indicates what he’s up to. Like Lillis, he considers
himself more a viewer than a poster.
He will use the site to keep
contact with someone he hasn’t
spoken with in a while.“But there
aren’t a lot of people I have a
friendship with strictly through
Facebook. It’s more a gateway to
some more interaction.”
Facebook has become more
than a way for friends to stay in
touch, he says. “It has evolved into
a thing business and companies
can use. Obviously in the election
it had a lot of power that political
parties could harness as a mobilizing tool. It’s being used in ways
that were probably not originally
intended, and it’s doing a lot of
good.”
Making personal information
available through social-networking sites is not without potential
drawbacks, and Stutzman says the
older people now joining these
sites are learning to protect their
privacy as college students have
already learned to do. His research
COURTES Y BENJI CAUTHREN ’03
Benji Cauthren ’03
uses Facebook and a
site modeled on
LinkedIn to help with
alumni relations at
the School of
Journalism and Mass
Communication.
Avid or Annoyed?
Do you hanker for every new com-
munications gadget? Were you first
among your friends to start twittering?
Or do you think electronic gizmos
intrude on your life and your connec-
tions to other people? The Pew Inter-
net Project has an online quiz to find
where you fit in the continuum of
information and communications tech-
nology users. A short series of questions
determines whether you are an Omni-
vore, a Connector, a Lackluster Veteran,
a Productivity Enhancer, Mobile Cen-
tric, Connected but Hassled, an Inexpe-
rienced Experimenter, a Light but Sat-
isfied user or Off the Network.
www.pewinternet.org/quiz/quiz.asp
One caveat: The quiz was developed
before social networking sites really
took off beyond the college population
and doesn’t factor use of those sites into
the calculations.
