This is an interesting factoid, but perhaps I miss the thesis about broader implications or signifiers. I mean, it is no secret that 'social networking' and 'Facebook' in particular have gotten a lot of attention -- when Mark Zuckerberg is on the cover of the magazines in the checkout aisle (and I mean the grocery store, not Fry's Electronics), should it be any surprise that 'a lot' of people use this website?

Now, with the notion that 'social networking = popular' clearly established, it begs the questions: which social networking site would people be most likely to use? If we take the Amerherst '12 cohort and compare to various sites...LinkedIn? No, they're only just setting foot on campus, let alone the career center. Friendster? Um, probably not (is anyone!?). MySpace? No, wait, these are "elite" students. By simple deduction, that leaves...Facebook, which has been king on campuses long before it flung it's doors open to all and sundry.

I speak from experience as someone who had email in 1991 (the year I started high school); watched my classmates arrive at university as the first "PC generation" in 1994 (everyone had a computer and a nearly equal number of people had no idea how to turn on their glorified 'word processors'...let alone download porn!); and went to work for one of those guys who used to be Boy Wonder on the covers of magazines: Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com.

So, interesting comment, but it will only take the next generation to remind yours that you weren't as special as you thought :) The good thing about this though is that you don't have to wait for grandkids to have someone to tell about the "good ol' days" starting out on the "information superhighway" ;)

Mr. Farivar is misreading the statistics.

1) Amherst makes no claim about the % of it's class of 2012 on facebook. None, whatsoever. It only says that the the class's facebook group has 432 members. How many of them are actually members of the Amherst class of 2012? I don't know. Amherst doesn't know. And Mr. Farivar certainly doesn't know.

Let me say this again: The only thing we know about this issue is that no more than 432 of them are members of this group. That is, at least six of them are not. But we don't know how many friends, parents, wannabes and poor typists are members of the group.

2) Amherst makes no claim about the % of students on campus with landline phones. It makes no claim about the number of students who live on campus. Rather, it says 1680+ students and of the ones that live on campus, only 5 of them have landline phones.

Mr. Farivar, however, says that it is 5 of 1600+. It seems that he believes that 95% of Amherst students live on campus, and figure I find laughable on its face.

Morover, Mr. Farivar repeated claims that multiple thing have "no point," quite a different claim than the responsible "whose point I cannot see." Desktop computers have bigger screens, can support more screeens, have larger hard drives and faster processors, especially when holding cost constant. Yes, most of this could be attached to a laptop when needed -- but I do not think that that occurred to Mr. Farivar. Landlines are very helpful in cases of power outages and/or emergencies, when the cell network can get overwhelmed, or even when your cell phone runs out of juice.

I remain appalled that Salon employs Mr. Farivar in this position. His work consistently remains below the standards even the worst regular Salon contributors. Others have pieces of varying quality -- as does virtually everyone in virtually every field -- but Mr. Farivar's work never even raises to level of adequacy. I hope that some day Salon can find a suitable replacement for Mr. Manjoo.

Wow, Amherst is on Salon! I am an Amherst student, Class of 2009, and I've been reading Salon for about four years now. Pretty spiffy.

Perhaps I can clarify some of the statistics. Yes, over 95% of Amherst students live on campus. In fact, in order to live off campus a student must get special permission and have a compelling reason to do so. Also, no first year student may live off campus. When the statistic says that only 5 students have landlines, that really means only five out of 1600.

The spam statistic surprises me because no student I know has ever mentioned getting an egregious amount of spam, or any spam at all, for that matter. I personally have received maybe four spam messages in my time here. Perhaps the statistic refers to all e-mails sent to Amherst accounts, regardless of whether they are filtered?

I am not on Facebook or any similar networking site, incidentally, and this hasn't affected my friendships or overall college experience in the least. I do know that many people have both Facebook and MySpace and that they use each for different purposes. When I got to Amherst in the fall of 2005, Facebook was a pretty big deal, but now I hardly ever hear anyone talking about it. Then again, I'm not exactly Mainstream Amherst, and neither are most of my friends.

Hope this helps!

I think you make good points about most of the writer's statistics, but why do you find it laughable that 95% of the students live on campus? When I went there, they really encouraged students to live on campus nnd pretty much did everything possible could to make it difficult for you to live in the town.

I think I knew of a few kids on campus who chose to live off of campus, but housing in that area at the time wasn't really that great and incredibly expensive. Those who lived off of campuse, unless they were from the area, usually ended up back in the dorms at some point.

Amherst College is incredibly rich, and they have, for the most part, really nice dorms. And a really nice dining hall. Sure, you might have to suffer through sharing a room your freshman year, but usually by sophmore or junior year you got a single. My dorm senior year had a full sized industrial kitchen (Milliken which I heard they tore down) and I had my own bathroom and shower. Why the heck would I live off of campus?

Maybe things have changed since I went there, though. Maybe Amherst (the town) has gotten more apartment buildings, etc, and all of the kids live off of campus. There's just some much competition in town because of UMASS AMHERST.