communicating

Last January Jimmy introduced me over msn to facebook. It quickly became an excellent and easy way for me to contact my friends at home. I could poke them letting them know I was thinking about them while they were all busy with finals. When I came back home I was able to use it for communication with friends from Helsinki, especially recently as more of the Helsinki crew have joined it. I could also quickly make friends in Durham and not feel like I didn't know anyone as everyone started adding me. Then in the last few weeks it's started to take off with all the people I went to high school with, most of whom I haven't seen since I was 16. So all in all I've used it in a variety of ways to communicate with different areas of my life.
This year has been the first year that our freshers have had it since the beginning of their university career and we've seen groups set up like 'campaign to get x and y together- how fed up are you that they're not yet a couple' and little missions like that to thoroughly humiliate each other, which makes us look on and think 'thank God we didn't have it in our first year!'. Then this last week a student in Durham has died and his profile has been flooded with messages from friends. It was a completely surreal experience reading some of his wall and seeing a new way in which the same thing can be understood. I've been looking at the internet a lot recently for an area in my dissertation and how it can influence and portray specific groups. Communications a weird thing anyway, especially in writing. There can be no limits to interpretation but it just fascinated me how many depths could be found to something that actually has no depth at all.