Lost in cyberspace

I started a new experiment in my teaching career this week by setting up a Facebook group for my English students and it's been a steep learning curve.

My first task was to create a new Facebook identity in simple English which would be open to my students to look around.  Facebook doesn't like you doing this, they want you all in one place so they know who and where you are.  As a result, they don't make it simple or give you any help.  Anyway, having created my new identity, I then started to get quite a few "friend requests" from people I'm already friends with on my existing account.  It was at this point it struck how much Facebook behaves like a virus, albeit a largely consensual one.

Going through the process of creating my group it also hit me how insidious the Facebook model really is.  They want to keep us in their world and they make it subtly difficult to break out into the rest of the world wide web.  For all the talk of people like Mark Zuckerburg, they're just a highly commercial outfit with an aggressive and monopolistic edge.  Because they are trying to corral us all into their pen, one day Facebook will fall and its fall will be mighty and swift, for the simple reason that they will never be able to find enough inducements for us to stay.

Moralising about the internet aside I have now set up my group, leading to more interesting issues, the most pressing being, how do I know someone is my student when I get a friend request from someone whose name is in chinese script and whose image is a teddy bear?  I am slowly starting to recognise them, in many cases by looking at their photo albums, which in turn is giving me some interesting insights into the lifestyle of chinese teenagers in Sarawak and how whacky and culturally diverse it is, from my perspective at least.  What a strange world we live in and how much the better it is for all these people madly finding out about each other.