The Social Network

I've been fairly annoyed over the last 2 weeks by people posting about The Social Network on the facebook because they think it's clever. It's not that clever. Now blogging about The Social Network, that takes some originality. As you may have guessed, I am currently watching The Social Network. I haven't been paying as close of attention as I probably should have been.

My initial reaction is that I feel a little old because I went to college in a pre-facebook world. (That and because Mark Zuckerberg is 2 years younger than me) From there I started thinking about how different college would have been if we'd had the facebook. Because facebook really did change everything. But it's not just facebook. Facebook was just one of the steps that brought us from a time of white board phone messages to Google Lattitude. You can't hide from people anymore. "Be back later" is no longer acceptable. If you want to talk to somebody, you expect to be able to reach them immediately regardless of where they are.

I was in Lafayette yesterday for my dad's birthday and my brother and his buddy were looking for a place to live next school year. I suggested they check the school paper because when I was in school that was the best place to find the houses that were rented by private landlords, as opposed to apartments that you might be able to find online to which Kyle's friend hilariously replied, "Did they even have the internet when you were in college?" this was his attempt at humor and it actually was a little funny because sometimes when I'm hanging out with my brother I get confused and think I'm 21, when in fact I'm almost almost 30, but after I thought about it the answer was barely. We did have the internet, but we were fresh off the You've Got Mail days of AOL with the brand new T1 lines in the dorms. So yeah, finding a place to live was different. When I went to Ball State, the school paper was still the best place to look to find a place to live. I should have realized that's not the case anymore (especially considering I have lived in and worked at apartment complexes for the last 9 years), but I'd never really thought about it like that before. So apparently that's not the way the kids are doing it these days. It's all on the internet. This shocking revelation led me to think about what else was different. Obviously (well I hope it's obvious), this is not the first time I've realized that things in today's facebook generation are different than they were when I was in college, but I started making a more deliberate mental list.

Going back to the dorms, every room still had a landline phone because people just didn't have cell phones. Freshmen at Ball State today wouldn't even be offended if I yelled 214* at them out the window of my car that I could park at my off-campus apartment while they were stuck walking to the football field in their attempt to get home for the weekend. A lot of things were a lot different than they are now. There was no facebook, no cell phones** which means no texting, I didn't get a DVD player until Christmas sophomore year and remember buying vhs tapes for our 13 in. TV/VCR combo in the dorm. There was also free 20 minute parking outside our dorms and a lot of buildings on campus. That was awesome and a thing of the past now.

And it all happened really fast. I started college in 2000. If you were in college in 1996, you were still leafing through the library writing research papers, but by 2004 every freshman is carrying a laptop to class. And the way it was in 1996 is how it had been for 50 years. I know this is not ground-breaking information, here, but when you really think about it, it's pretty crazy.

So I should probably re-watch the movie because I was way more into writing this and reliving the glory days in my head than in watching it, but my favorite part was when Mark Zuckerberg was being questioned about Facebook and he stopped them and said "It was called The Facebook back then". That's my joke! Except that it's not a joke because it really was The Facebook back then. Here's to the facebook changing the world.

*214 was the prefix of dorm phone numbers. My number was 214-0321. I don't believe that number is still working.

**My grandparents gave Lindsay and I a cell phone for Christmas my senior year of high school that we shared and used extremely sparingly. It was actually for emergencies. When I went to college, Lindsay kept that phone and I didn't have one of my own until sometime sophomore year.