[Air-l] A verb for using social networking sites
Mark D. Johns
mjohns at luther.edu
Sat Jun 16 14:54:36 PDT 2007
Lauren M. Squires wrote:
> ... I don't hear people saying "I was sittting around
> facebooking yesterday" or "I myspaced for a few minutes this morning."
> (I hear this activity described as "...so then I was on
> Myspace/Facebook for a while, and then...")
>
> I'm not sure why this distinction should be...
Lauren makes an interesting observation. I *do* occasionally hear
students say things like, "I didn't feel like working on my paper, so I
spent a couple hours facebooking." But it is far more usual to hear the
usage she describes, "I facebooked him."
Also on this campus, possibly because it is a small school in a small
town and thus relatively isolated, MySpace is seldom mentioned. In fact,
when I asked my internet class about it, that very unscientific sample
reported that use of MySpace was considered somewhat deviant: "That's
where the perverts are all hanging out." Some said they had used MySpace
in high school, but graduated to facebook when they came to college.
--
Mark D. Johns, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Head of the
Department of Communication Studies
Luther College, Decorah, Iowa USA
http://academic.luther.edu/~johnsmar/
-----------------------------------------------
"Get the facts first. You can distort them later."
---Mark Twain
More information about the Air-L
mailing list