Editors’ Note
By Jen Argote And Amita Kulkarni, The Dartmouth Senior Staff
Published on Friday, September 25, 2009
Surfing Safari
N ow that we are officially a week into our senior year at Dartmouth, it seems like only yesterday Jen and I were eagerly friending random members of the Class of 2010 on Facebook with the notion, that, “Hey, we are going to be fellow ’10s, so of course we must be friends by default.”
In our three years here, Facebook and online social networking sites have transformed the way we communicate, and have influenced the people we choose to know. Aside fromrandomly friending classmates as an incoming student, my time on Facebook consisted solely of stalking my friends’ photos or searching for long-lost elementary school classmates. How things have changed: last week, I was sharing my disgust of Kanye West’s outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards with my Facebook community through a status update via my Blackberry, “wtf kanye, wtf.” Three of my friends “liked it,” and two others commented in agreement. Jen has even taken things one step further with her Twitter account. She tweets once in a while, but tries to refrain from letting people know when she’s showering, what she is eating or who she is raging with on a Friday night, instead preferring to tweet about far more important topics, like going to the dentist and crappy iPhone service.
This week, our staff writers tweet — oh wait, I mean talk — about the subject of social networking sites that include Facebook and Twitter, and how they have come to influence our daily lives. We hope you enjoy it. Either way, we’ll check your Twitter and Facebook to see what you really thought.