New Facebook “Groups” feature: boom or bust?

Shane Wade

Opinion Editor

This month, Facebook released a new feature that reminds us of the original use of the social-media site – not point less games, not gaudy photo albums, not ostentatious statuses that journal of the lives of uneventful people.

Facebook’s new “Groups for Schools” feature seeks to connect college students for both scholarly and extracurricular pursuits in a more organized and concrete way than the current group/fan page setup allows.

But I predict “Groups for Schools” will ultimately end up as an unused, haggardly option that amounts to the Google Plus of new Facebook features.

The ability to network is one of the most alluring options about Facebook. While simultaneously playing Farmville, you can read the latest reviews on businesses, catch up on what new events or meetings your student organization will be holding and find out about a variety of events in your area.

While the new feature expands this option for collegiate organizations, it doesn’t fix or address the problems that currently plague social networking sites, like spam and inane posts.

Furthermore, the included file-shar ing feature poses issues of legality for some individuals wishing to share content, problems that will doubtlessly lead to squabbles over a consumer’s right to privacy and what constitutes intellectual property. What starts as an innocent collaborative project or presentation on a Groups page may easily lead to litigation over who owns said project.

Those issues aside, it’s inevitably going to be unused. Trial runs at Oberlin College found that students weren’t actively interested in doing anything academically related on Facebook.

It goes back to what every critic says about Facebook, and social media/networking in general: It’s an escape. You don’t want to take your homework on vacation with you, so why would you engage in a literary critique of Frank Kafka on the same medium you post passive-aggressive rants?

All Facebook has succeeded in is reinventing the wheel; they’ve developed what could have been considered innovative a decade ago and hyped it up as some scholastic tool of the future. In reality, the only logical discerning use for Groups will be setting up real-life study sessions or class note exchanges, which would be useful if we already didn’t use Blackboard and the our VCU email accounts for the same purposes.

Attempts to revive innovations like Facebook for their original purposes have often ended badly (see Myspace and LiveJournal). Once a system or innovation has been co-opted by the masses, it’s difficult to reverse that trend without ultimately killing the product.

At the end of the day, Facebook is annoying and unattractive enough without this effort to reenergize it and make it relevant to academia. The growing stigma associated with using Facebook is enough to turn people off from using it as a social network, let alone a serious resource or academic network.

There’s something to be said for oldfashioned, person-to-person meetings. We can return to the traditional use of Facebook and social networking sites, or we can return to the traditional use of communication and set up real-life meetings.