social network cutlure

Sticking with this theme over the last few days... sort of like when you get that stupid pina colada song stuck in your head.

One of our assignments for the social networks mini-seminar is to "consider the culture of social network spaces." I thought I'd start with trying to get a better sense of who is actually using these spaces, aside from the scholars, academics, and crazy people on reality TV shows talking about their MySpace pages.

There are 34 senior engineering students taking WRT 407 this year. On Thursday I asked, by a raising of hands, the following questions (responses included):

Who has a Facebook profile? 9 students
How many check Facebook daily? 2 students
How many check Facebook at least once a month? 4 students (including the two who check daily)
Who has a MySpace page? 3 students
How many check MySpace daily? 1 student
How many check MySpace at least once a month? 2 students (including the one who checks daily)
Who uses other social network spaces? 2 students
Who uses social networking spaces, such as Linkedin? 3 students

I'm not sure what the survey results imply. When I shared with the class that the totals seemed low compared to what I excepted, one of the most promising students in the class said, "We're engineers, what did you expect?"

Now on the surface, that reply was (and is) kind of funny. It's a lot like lawyer jokes: you always laugh at them, but then pause to consider the reality of it. Engineers (and I'm speaking about the computer and electrical engineers I'm most familiar with) are not so much different from other students as they are more serious. I am, of course, making broad generalizations here. But for the most part, the engineers I've worked with over the past five years are focused, serious, and God-awful busy. Maybe it's the same with other pre-professional disciplines.

So my point: Based on my far-from empirical survey of senior engineering students, I can conclude that not all college students are on the grid plugged into social network spaces. And really, that's all I conclude without getting myself into some one-dimensional break-down of personality traits. Maybe there's a dissertation topic in here somewhere?