I think it's fair to say that everyone at least vaguely enjoys a good debate. We come to college and, all of a sudden, we're exposed to 5,000 new people with 5,000 new opinions that we've never encountered before. A whole new arena for conversation. Some of the most interesting meals I've had here at Tufts are the ones that took place around lively debates with my friends about gendered language or nuclear war. I recently found myself engaged in similar discussion about the morals of doing laundry, but this time I wasn't sitting in Dewick or at a table in the Mayer Campus Center. Instead, I was sitting at my desk in my room, watching a Facebook comment thread grow.
It was 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, around the time when most people are thinking of throwing in the towel on homework, or maybe just wishing they could. I had long since given up on doing anything productive and was wasting time watching episodes of "Stargate SG-1" (1997-2007) while occasionally checking Facebook in the hopes that something exciting would appear on my news feed. I'd be willing to guess that this is a fairly familiar scene for most college students.
At some point I saw that a friend of mine had posited a scenario in his status: What do you do if you're about to do laundry and you notice that someone has paid for a dryer but neglected to press "Start"? Do you push "Start" for that person, or do you take advantage of free dryer usage?
By the time I saw this status, about seven minutes had gone by since it had been posted, and there were already eight comments and three people sounding off on the subject. I joined the fun and soon found myself eagerly refreshing the page over and over again. Usually when I'm doing this on Facebook, it's because I have nothing better to do with my time. This time, however, I was actually interested in seeing where the conversation went. Eighty-four comments and an hour later, the discussion had touched on theft, values and self-interest, as well as international relations, karma and political theory.
I find this whole interaction — call it an online exchange of ideas — fascinating, not only because of the subject matter but also because it happened at all. Too often, I blame Facebook — and the Internet in general — for being a tool in my procrastination, for allowing me to distract myself from readings or research papers by promising me interesting or, more often, less-than-interesting updates on my friends' lives. I don't think I'm alone in this. The Internet is often bemoaned as a waste of time. But it occurred to me about 75 comments into the thread that Facebook doesn't have to just be a place where people post photos of their crazy weekend parties or update everyone on the fact that they woke up this morning with a cold. Maybe it's time we stop thinking of it in that light; after all, this can't be the first time that 10 college students have had an actually intelligent conversation on Facebook. It shouldn't be revolutionary. It probably isn't.
I'm not advocating a change in the use of Facebook. Not entirely, anyway. I'm simply saying that maybe, just maybe, it's a more valuable tool than we give it credit for. Ninety-five comments on one person's status on a random Sunday night got me thinking about morality outside of the hypothetical laundry scenario. It got me using my brain and actively debating a subject that I probably wouldn't have had the courage to pipe up on had it been raised in a class. In fact, it got me thinking about things that I probably wouldn't have thought about at all. Through Facebook, I was able to sit at my computer in my pajamas and debate morality with others, including some people I've never met, who were sitting at their computers in dorm rooms all over the country. And what's more, this conversation wasn't full of the kind of long-winded replies that one encounters on discussion boards. It was a live debate — with no time to make our answers glossy or perfect — made up of 95 different blips of dialogue, almost as if the 10 of us had been sitting at a table and sharing our ideas.
The conclusions we came to don't really matter, though if you're interested, there were several different ideas and some of those spawned new topics of discussion. Eventually the thread calmed down as people logged off and returned to their homework. The last comment was simply ":p" — a far cry from earlier posts on whether or not our choices influence others. But I don't think a single one of us left without having at least entertained one new idea.
There are plenty of us who have heard our parents and other adults bemoan the amount of time we, as a generation, spend glued to our computer screens browsing social networking sites. We depend on the Internet for social interaction and that probably won't change any time soon. I'm not saying that it should. But maybe, if we're going to spend so much time online, we should use it for some thinking once in a while. Maybe we'll find that we're a little more intelligent than we give ourselves credit for. And, maybe, we'll actually learn something new.
