College professors around the world struggle with Facebook for their students attention (It’s OK, we know). Most of them take care of this by forbidding laptops from the classroom. But doing that removes an essential tool for “note taking” or learning further about the topic (some students I know actually do this).

The Web is a useful supplement for classroom learning, opening students up to the world of ideas and concepts the may be unfamiliar with or, more to the point, uncomfortable with. However, there is the sneaking suspicion on the part of faculty that our students aren’t “taking notes” on their laptops, they are checking Facebook.

How could they not. Facebook is the biggest social networking application in the world. The site is still in its toddler phase, but has achieved an impressive global reach, with 750 million users world wide. But this ubiquitousness happenened in a matter of months. A mere three yeras ago, MySpace had a larger user base than Facebook. To Internet scholars, that seems like a million years ago. Because of Facebook’s rapid rise, we know little about the impact the application has on our experience of the social world?

I’m writing a book for Ashgate Press where I make the case that Facebook produces a preference for “the personal” in ways that make users disdainful of, although not averse to, “the impersonal”. I argue that the emphasis on disclosure and connection on Facebook colors by the nature of our engagement with public (political) life.

To return to the classroom example, the power of disclosure and connection to a network of intimates is difficult for a professor to compete with. I am a stranger to most of my students. They don’t know me. They have no way of knowing whether what I’m saying in the classroom will be useful, or uncomfortable by making them think about things they have little control over.

By contrast, on Facebook, they can build deeper connections with people they have already vetted, people to which they are socially proximate. They can share intimate, subjective, feelings and observations about the world around them. They can talk about people they like, what professors are wearing, or how much fun they had the night before. Each update from a friend is a small burst of oxytocin that is next to impossible for someone talking about macro-economics to compete with.

But what if I am saying something my students need to know? What if I’m talking about impersonal systems and strucutres that do not have Facebook accounts or provide status updates. What if a discussion about addressing the Greek debt crisis isn’t based on how you feel about Greece, but requires the development of reasoning about how one builds institutions in an increasingly complex world. What if global warming is actually a “thing out there” and isn’t subject to how you or your friends “feel” about it. A tsunami caused by radical shifts in temperature that is about to crash over you isn’t interested in whether you “like” it or not.

This is what I suspect Facebook does to us….it engages us with the appealing world of disclosure and connection when many of our large scale problems have little to do with those two things.