[Air-l] A verb for using social networking sites

[Mark D. Johns]

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/
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"Get the facts first. You can distort them later."
     ---Mark Twain