First, I searched for Facebook in the New York Times. It took me to an article from 2005 with a headline "Facebook.com Goes to High School" written by Ellen Rosen. At the time it was written, the site had only been in existence for one year. The article is critical of the social networking platform's tendency to lure teens on to the Internet. Initially founder Mark Zuckerberg wanted to ensure that adults did not have the ability to join, so college students (with their school-driven e-mail addresses) had to invite high school students in order for them to create an account. Back then, Facebok was much different. It was much more exclusive and was not as widely known or accepted in society.
Next I searched for Facebook in the Chicago Tribune and opted for search results to be displayed in chronological order, oldest first. Surprisingly, no results came up. There were two articles from 1990 that had the words "face" and "book" in them but had nothing to do with Facebook (obviously, as the site didn't exist yet). Finally I moved on to the Los Angeles Times and the same thing happened. I tried to search Facebook and different ways but every time the results were inconclusive or irrelevant.
When I searched for Facebook on ProQuest, I found something interesting. The earliest article, written by Susan DiMattia for the Library Journal in 2002, displayed this term in a different sense. It referred to "the Facebook" as a directory for a firm, complete with employee pictures and phone numbers. On Project Muse I found an article from 2006 that discusses the revolutionary ways through which students were beginning to sort through and process information. The article, written by Kate Wittenberg is entitled "Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?" and touches on topics we have talked about not only in LIS 201 but also in other FIG classes. Wittenberg touches on the concepts similar to those surrounding "Digital Natives," as she talks about Facebook as a complex environment for social networking, a new revelation altogether. Finally I tried my search in JStor and found an article from the magazine American Libraries written in March 2006. It discusses the developing nature of online information storage. Clearly, Facebook- a new social phenomenon- was beginning to function as a platform through which young people could find and share information about themselves and their friends.
Overall the databases did not have as much content about Facebook as I was expecting. Still, it was interesting to see public reactions to the social networking site in the years when it was first open to the public.
1 comment:
Like you, I obviously didn't think that Facebook would be mentioned before it was created, but it does seem surprising that there was not more content about it considering the cultural impact.
The Project Muse link seems most interesting to me because it seems to talk about the good in Facebook. It would have been cool to observe Facebook at its inception to see the impact it made on students and educators.
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