Brown 2011: A virtual community
Brown posted its regular decision results for the freshman class of 2011 online today at 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Thousands of high school seniors are justifiably excited for A Day on College Hill (ADOCH), when they'll have a chance to see what Brown is really like (or something like that).
In the meantime, the Class of 2011 can settle for community of a different sort: one of the newest and perhaps fastest-growing Facebook group associated with the University. As of 11:09 p.m., there are 432 members of the group. It seems to have been formed by Early Decision-admitted students, and it has been used as a place to share stories, congratulations, and even to plan meet-ups (15 people in New York at one point) for future classmates.
Somewhat off-topic but relevant to our understanding of our own community and how the media environment is shaping it-- these are kids who will show up with a very different kind of network from most of us had on our first day however many years ago.
Comments
you know... this makes me feel somewhat old. I was talking with a good friend of mine the other day and we both realized that the class of 2007 will have been the first class to have had Facebook all four years of college. Toward the beginning of our second semester freshman year, I still remember having a friend at Harvard e-mail me telling me that I just had to join Facebook--remember those days? back when Facebook was an elitist networking website for the Ivy League? There were no such things as groups, photo albums, wall posts, or the then-infamous facebook "Poke" and the now-infamous "news-feed"... It's amazing how in barely four years Facebook more or less became a verb ("S/he facebooked me") and part of our greater cultural lexicon. I'll be curious to know how much longer it lasts and what its future potential is/can be... (take, for example, the group "For Every 1,000 that join this group, I will donate $1 for Darfur"... with numbers over 440k)
Posted by: Christina | March 30, 2007 01:40 AM
ps. I take that back -- the Facebook poke is still fairly sketchy.
Posted by: Christina | March 30, 2007 01:41 AM