Online Social Networking on Campus: Understanding What Matters in Student Culture

In the era of such online spaces as Facebook, Instant Messenger, Live Journal, Blogger, Web Shots, and campus blogs, college students are using these resources and other online sites as a social medium. Inevitably, this medium presents students with ethical decisions about social propriety, self disclosure and acceptable behaviour. Because online social networking sites have proven problematic for college students and for college administrators, this book aims to offer professional guidance to Higher Education administrators and policy makers. Online Social Networking on Campus: Understanding what matters in student culture is a professional guide for Higher Education faculty and Student Affairs administrators, which rigorously examines college students' use of online social networking sites and how they use these to develop relationships both on and off campus. Most importantly, Online Social Networking on Campus investigates how college students use online sites to explore and makes sense of their identities. Providing information taken from interviews, surveys and focus group data, the book presents an ethnographic view of social networking that will help Student Affairs administrators, Information Technology administrators, and faculty better understand and provide guidance to the "neomillennials" on their campuses.

Ana M. Martinez Aleman is Associate Professor of Education and Chair of the Department of Educational Administration and Higher Education at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College Katherine Lynk Wartman is a PhD candidate at Boston College, a resident director at Simmons College in Boston, MA, and has served as Parent and Family Relations and Special Projects Administrator at Colby-Sawyer College