Staring down Facebook

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By Zoe Sandvig SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Last semester, Will Ross, 21, did the unthinkable. He deactivated his Facebook account. His friends began asking what happened to him.

"It was as if I'd disappeared or something," he said.

But Mr. Ross, a senior at Grove City College, in Grove City, Pa., would rather send hand-written letters or escape to a cabin in the woods than keep up with his friends' profile pictures. He joins a growing fragment of college students and professors across the country who are challenging technology trends.

At Grove City, a Christian college with a student body of about 2,500, it's not unusual to see students texting each other en route to class, taking class notes on their school-issued laptops or sending Facebook messages instead of walking across the dorm to talk to each other.

According to Maggie Jackson, author of "Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age," almost one-third of 14- to 21-year-olds juggle five to eight different kinds of media while doing homework.

In a 2007 study conducted by the University of Minnesota, 41.8 percent of college students admitted that the overuse of technology negatively affected their academic performance.

Facebook, a social-networking site that connects more than 150 million people worldwide, was created in 2004 by Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, 24. It has risen to the top as the leading academic distraction.

"You can waste a lot of time struggling to maintain Facebook posts ... instead of engaging in your schoolwork or true conversation," Mr. Ross said. He and a few friends, mostly juniors and seniors, concocted a plan for a campuswide "Facebook fast" for the month of December, leading up to exam week.

"One way to realize how unconsciously dependent you are is to do experiments," Mr. Ross explained. He wanted it to be "something that everybody could do that would get everyone talking."

They began by targeting about 200 freshmen males - a group Mr. Ross considers most technologically-dependent - through small-group discussions about using the media wisely.