Share the Love
Two people’s eyes meet, but they don’t have the courage to take it further. At German universities and libraries, Facebook pages have recently been set up to help these two people strike up a conversation after all. By Manuel P. Nappo, Director of the CAS Social Media Management program at HWZ and Chief Networking Officer at Centralway. www.about.me/mpn
"Spotted communities" have spilled over from Glasgow to Germany and are also finding their way into Switzerland. FB fan pages, which are intended to facilitate contact if someone has been seen in the lecture hall, the canteen or on campus but not approached. Students in Germany in particular are very active in spotted communities. The pioneer is the community of the Munich City Library, which already has 15,000 members on Facebook after just one month. A message can be sent to the administrators of the Facebook page, which is then posted anonymously on the page. In the best case scenario, there are entries such as "Computer science student with orange hair and a pink vest, who are you? Would like to get to know you. " can be read.
Who is behind the operators of the site is just as anonymous as the messages. Only the founders of Bibflirt.de reveal themselves on some spotted communities. They also revealed in an interview how time-consuming it is to monitor the messages. This statement is surprising in that many of the messages posted do not appear to have been selected manually.
Only a few messages have a genuine interest in seeing someone again. Many are pure entertainment, clumsily or even raunchily worded. Sometimes you come across a creative poem, but a look across all spotted communities shows a picture of cheap chat-up lines. For many, writing or commenting on messages seems to be entertaining. In Switzerland, the University of St. Gallen is the pioneer with around 2000 members. The picture of the news in this country also looks similar to that of our neighbors.
It seems that spotted communities are an entertaining way to pass the time. People are on Facebook anyway, and if they need a short breather in the library, they take a look at the site. Only a few people seem to take it seriously. So it is questionable how many people really meet up again thanks to Facebook pages.
The whole thing would probably be different if the messages were not anonymized. Surely fewer would post then, for the simple reason that they fear ridicule and malice from their fellow students. But I would like to plead for more courage here. Inviting someone for a coffee at university or finding out who the person is through fellow students can't be that difficult, especially in today's networked world. It takes a lot more effort elsewhere. In a crowded streetcar, you hardly ever ask the person sitting next to you if they would like to have a coffee together. Zurich's public transport company has been helping here for some time now with its "Gesehen@ VBZ" portal. The messages seem much more serious than those in the spotted communities on Facebook.
I think: share the love & a coffee.
