Some seniors are finishing their Bowdoin educations by creating original honors projects that help us see the world in new and interesting ways. This is the first installment in a continuing series that highlights these projects.
While many college students regularly pore over Facebook just for fun, Karina van Schaardenburg '07 is doing her senior honors project on it.
Van Schaardenburg, an anthropology major, first became interested in the different uses of the internet and how it changes communities when she was in high school. During that time, she completed an independent study on censorship and its relationship to the internet.
Now, as a senior in college, Van Schaardenburg is pursuing her interest in internet communities through an honors project, which will examine how Facebook shapes the community at Bowdoin. She is particularly interested in how Facebook influences the way people view their communities and social networks.
Van Schaardenburg will also investigate whether Facebook constitutes a public or a private space, since people have daily real-life interactions with the people they have met on Facebook.
Finally, van Schaardenburg will look into how accurately users' profiles portray the actual communities that they are part of. She will also investigate the effects of these descriptions, because she said that different people have "different conceptions of what [Facebook] is, what it should be used for."
She will investigate her topic by conducting interviews with Bowdoin students from different class years, sexes, and other groups. She expects that the uses of Facebook will differ among groups of students, depending upon their view of how Facebook should be used.
As a Facebook user herself, Van Schaardenburg recognizes that she must be, in a sense, a subject in her study, because her own experiences with the social networking site may influence her results.
Van Schaardenburg said she chose this particular topic because it is "culturally pervasive." It is relevant because Facebook, a relatively new web site, has grown exponentially to the point that most college students use it. She finds it a more interesting web site to study than other internet social networks like MySpace or Craig's List, because unlike those networks, Facebook is not anonymous and its setup encourages the dissemination of personal information. Because of these characteristics, it is more relevant to investigate from an anthropological perspective.
Van Schaardenburg pointed out that the lack of anonymity and the fact that people can see very personal details about people they know are precisely the reasons why Facebook is so popular. However, there is sometimes tension between wanting to know about everyone else's lives while not wanting to divulge one's own personal information.
The fact that there are no previous studies about Facebook invigorates Van Schaardenburg. Unlike many honors projects, which involve choosing a premise and applying it to old information, her project allows her to gather completely new information and synthesize it.
"I hope that it makes people think about the communities they live in and how they construct them," Van Schaardenburg said.