{"id":419,"date":"2010-11-29T23:21:28","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T07:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/?p=419"},"modified":"2010-12-01T17:05:41","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T01:05:41","slug":"ambiguous-signals-the-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/419_ambiguous-signals-the-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"Ambiguous signals: &#8220;the Facebook&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When Facebook was sweeping Stanford in Spring 2004, it wasn&#8217;t yet just Facebook &#8212; it was [thefacebook.com]. Many of my friends who were undergrads at Stanford around that time (and shortly after) will still refer to it as &#8220;The Facebook&#8221; or &#8220;the facebook dot com&#8221;. This usage can be a jokey signal to members of the in-group that one was an early user. This also may signal attendance at one of the universities Facebook was available at early on (e.g., Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia).<sup><a href=\"#footnote_0_419\" id=\"identifier_0_419\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-identifier-link\" title=\"Though it is worth noting that by the time of the domain-name change, many more schools had access to Facebook. But I would guess the likelihood of adoption and attachment to the name is lower. Update: see this more detailed timeline of Facebook university launches.\">1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>Of course, this signal can fail for various reasons. The audience may not understand &#8212; may see &#8220;the Facebook&#8221; as a grammatical error. Or widespread attention to Facebook&#8217;s history (say, via a fictionalized movie) may put many people in possession of the ability to use this signal, even though they weren&#8217;t early users and are not alumni at the appropriate universities. <\/p>\n<p>Worse still, for some audiences, this usage might seem to put the speaker in a late-adopting category, rather than an early-adopting one! For example, in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.livestream.com\/facebookguests\/video?clipId=pla_0da9c42f-9499-4c60-8069-e306dd089fc3&#038;utm_source=lslibrary&#038;utm_medium=ui-thumb\">President G. W. Bush&#8217;s visit to Facebook today<\/a>, he said he is now on &#8220;the Facebook&#8221;. So to many ears, &#8220;the Facebook&#8221; does exactly the opposite of the effects described above.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, at least one friend has had just this experience: she used &#8220;the Facebook&#8221; and got a &#8220;are you a luddite?&#8221; kind of response. To avoid ambiguity (but also subtlety), &#8220;the facebook dot com&#8221; is still available.<\/p>\n<ol class=\"footnotes\"><li id=\"footnote_0_419\" class=\"footnote\">Though it is worth noting that by the time of the domain-name change, many more schools had access to Facebook. But I would guess the likelihood of adoption and attachment to the name is lower. Update: see this <a href=\"http:\/\/on.fb.me\/fgZWS9\">more detailed timeline of Facebook university launches<\/a>. [<a href=\"#identifier_0_419\" class=\"footnote-link footnote-back-link\">\u21a9<\/a>]<\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Facebook was sweeping Stanford in Spring 2004, it wasn&#8217;t yet just Facebook &#8212; it was [thefacebook.com]. Many of my friends who were undergrads at Stanford around that time (and shortly after) will still refer to it as &#8220;The Facebook&#8221; or &#8220;the facebook dot com&#8221;. This usage can be a jokey signal to members of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,6,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-context","category-facebook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions\/428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaneckles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}