The Facebook Project



You are listening to Nicholas Stucko (State University of New York-Orange), Shannon Malloy (College of Mount Saint Vincent), Mike Helt (State University of New York-Orange) and Olivia Brooks (State University of New York-Orange).

The one thing I want my students to learn in my Introductory Sociology course, It's Not Rocket Science, is how to understand the life of someone different from themselves in a way that is as just as complex and nuanced and contradictory as how they how they know (or don't know!) their own lives, their own selves.

That's it.  That's the goal.  Just the seemingly simple social cliche of trying to understand what it is like to walk in another person's shoes.  And the way I teach them how to learn this is to have them create a faux Facebook profile and page based on the details of a life they determine to be the complete social opposite of themselves and then to interact with, as well as rigorously observe one another, as these personas for ten weeks, finally revealing their true identities to one another on-line and in person, on the final day of class.

You can hear more voices from my Fall 2011 classes right here and can follow the Spring 2012 run of the project as it unfolds live! and in real time starting Wednesday, February 29, 2012 here and here. Students at the first link are from the State University of New York-Orange, the latter, The College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx. I will be following up on their work and writing about the similarities and differences of creating rural versus urban cyber communities at The Sociological Imagination this May 2012.