Week 6 - Goffman Online

Hope everyone's week off was amazing! Before I begin about the boring stuff.. heres a YouTube clip of some ridiculously cool and relevant slam poetry for your enjoyment!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAx845QaOck

 

This week we took what we’ve learned from Goffman and applied it to contemporary online interactions. I’ve attached an interesting article by Forte and Hewitt outlining a study done on the relationships between faculty members and students and how that is affected by Facebook.

Facebook could be considered a paralleled backstage to the student’s academic frontstage. Like in Ross’ reading this week, CabbieCall was seen as an important venue for The KB/KG to critique and criticise their training frontstage. No doubt we all poke fun and criticise classes, professors and exams… would that change if it became possible that someone of University authority was reading? This was the case in the reading which is why CabbieCall was made by learners for learners without any evaluators or instructors involved. The article notes that, “Because social networking communities are built to support presentation of self, identity management is likely to be a significant issue for participants in communities whose membership crosses perceived social boundaries and organizational power relationships” (pg. 1). In this case, adding professors as ‘friends’ on Facebook crosses both perceived social boundaries and organizational power relationships. With that being said, the study measured student’s rated perceptions of their professor from two groups: those who had seen his/her Facebook profile and those who hadn’t. Based on the findings, the rating was 4.7 for both groups of students. I was really surprised by this. Personally, I don’t think it is a good idea for teachers to be adding students as friends on Facebook or vice versa. It breaches the purely professional relationship that faculty and students have with one another and allows them intimate access to each others social lives. Can teachers and students really be ‘friends’?

Reference:
Forte, A, Hewitt, A 2006, 'Crossing boundaries: Identity management and student/faculty relationships on the Facebook', 04/10/2012,
http://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?
q=cache:r95RrMgJZNYJ:scholar.google.com/+facebook+goffman&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5