Member-only story
Forgetting Facebook — Part I
I had no idea what Facebook could possibly become when I first joined during my junior year at the University of Oregon in 2004. I was an aspiring journalist but understood the roll that technology would play in my eventual career. I wanted to stay on top of everything that was new and evolving in communications. My first account expired when I lost access to my University of Oregon email shortly after graduation.
I was a social media evangelist early on, proselytizing for each new platform that appeared but none as strongly as Facebook. I established my second account on February 24th, 2007. In Facebook, I recognized a powerful way to share information and experiences across great distances, something that characterized my life up to that point. Up until I enrolled in college, my partner and I had traveled to eleven countries working in humanitarian aid and training, and we had numerous colleagues and friends to keep in touch with.
My partner wanted nothing to do with Facebook initially, preferring to either lose touch with old friends or subsist on yearly phone calls, or, better yet, visiting in person.
When I graduated from the University of Oregon and started several internships at local newspapers, I was often asked to establish the very first social media presence for those papers, if they did not already have one. Twitter was very easy…
