Facebook: The most vital of school supplies

While driving from Calgary to Vancouver last week, I listened to an interview with Matt Richtel on NPR’s Fresh Air. Richtel is a New York Times journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for his work on a series about  the risks of texting while driving. In other words, he is a man who knows a lot about technology and its negative effects on our lives. He told Terry Gross that his favoured analogy for the relationship between humans and technology is to compare it to how we interact with food:

Just as food nourishes us and we need it for life, so too in the 21st century, in the modern age, we need technology. You cannot survive without the communications tools. The productivity tools are essential. And yet, food has pros and cons to it. We know that some food is Twinkies and some is Brussels sprouts. And we know that if we overeat, it causes problems.

Similarly, after, say, 20 years of glorifying all technology as if all computers were good and all use of it was good, I think science is beginning to embrace the idea that some technology is Twinkies, and some technology is Brussels sprouts.

This makes sense to me, because for the last week I was without the Internet (thanks to the ineptitude of an unnamed Canadian telecom giant who, I believe, must hate me personally) and it felt like I was starving. I’ve had a lot of time this week to think, usually while lying on my floor staring at the ceiling looking for shapes in the stucco, about which parts of the Internet I missed because I was bored and lonely, and which parts I missed because they’ve become integral to my life. It was fairly clear from the get-go that missing two (2) episodes of Jersey Shore on mtv.ca didn’t really have a tangible impact on my life, save for possibly the brief reflective moment where I felt sad about my own taste in entertainment.

If you asked me in August, I probably would have lumped Facebook in amongst the “Twinkies” side of technological-innovations-that-hurt-more-than-help, but this week has convinced me that, for students, Facebook cannot be lived without.

When I started journalism school, Facebook wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t even a gleam in then-Harvard-freshman Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. So, in September 2002, when I showed up to the first day of Journalism 1000, that was also the first day I met all my classmates. There was no other way for it to be, so that’s what we all would expected would happen, and that’s what did.

Fast forward eight years, and Facebook has so managed to entwine itself in the fabric of our lives that it and it alone is the reason that I know about 30 people in my law school class despite only knowing one of them personally two weeks ago.

In the six years since Facebook stampeded on to the public scene, people (or my generation, at least) have so rapidly evolved to accept it as a dominant form of communication that, without a single instance of outside prompting, 120 people sought out and joined a Facebook group called UVic Law 2013. This group has no official basis or purpose. Yet, almost every single person in our first-year class independently thought “Hey, I bet there’s a Facebook group for our law class this year. I should find it and join.”

And, during the week since I arrived in Victoria, there have been four separate social events organized solely through this Facebook group. And I didn’t have the Internet. If it weren’t for one longtime, much beloved analog friend of mine who is also attending UVic Law this year and who does have an Internet connection letting me know about all the different social gatherings, I would have been completely left out.

Which would have been awful. Anyone who’s read basically any other entries on this blog knows that I’m petrified to start school, and that feeling has only intensified since arriving in the city I will attend said school in. And you know who else feels scared? Every one of the other future law students I met in person this week, all of whom are not just nice but awesome. Making all these new friends has made all the difference between a week of agonizing fear and loneliness and a week that’s been incredibly fun. I went from having a social network of one other journalism-defector to one that’s full of the people I’m going to be closest to for the next three years.

I know that in a world without Facebook we just would have met at orientation, and friendships still would have been started and we all would have been fine. But this way, we’ve been allowed to meet up outside all of the pressures and stress of the first day of school and figuring out schedules and having to find time to meet up amongst the 300 to 500 weekly pages of reading we’ve been told we’ll get. And if that’s not a form of vital sustenance made possibly by technology, I don’t know what is.