Facebook at a national level

Many of us use Facebook to catch up with old friends, connect with lost friends, and share recent updates on our lives. This was what Facebook was initially used for. It was a way college students could connect with their friends that went away to other schools and even that evolved into bringing in the high school and grade school aged students and eventually our own parents! This social network phenomenon has become much more than a way to let ones social network know what is going on in ones life. Facebook has become a way for people to advertise their companies, create awareness of organizations, fundraising events, a way to stay up to date on current events from news postings and anything else someone can think of.

This is where an article I found on CNN.com comes in. The San Diego State University natural disaster experts used participants from 15 countries to research how people and social media would work in communicating crisis by sending out a test message about an earthquake. The ultimate goal was to see what kind of response and how fast the response would be using social media such as Facebook and even Twitter.

I thought this was appropriate seeing that we are using social media throughout the duration of this class. It is interesting to think that something that started out as a social network for college students has turned into a way for teachers and participants to track progress on a group project and has now started to evolve in a way to help to get quick response in the case of a natural disaster or other national crisis.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/24/emergency.drill.online/index.html?iref=allsearch

-Meredith Daniels-