Social Media and Higher Education: On the Influx of Facebook in Swedish Academia

Abstract

Facebook has for the past decade come to dominate social media and in a Swedish context it can be understood to constitute an arena for student socialization, in the form of a “digital university” organized by a US company. In this chapter, the authors explore dimensions of the Swedish contemporary neoliberal university by drawing on empirical examples of higher education students' use of Facebook. The specific “campus culture” that serves as the model for Facebook is however not a universal one, but clearly situated in American university campus culture. Albeit this, 75% of the general population in contemporary Sweden have since the global launch of the site become Facebook users, and among Swedish students the number is strikingly even higher with 98% Facebook users (according to the last annual survey on Internet use in Sweden). This high number indicates that being on Facebook has come to constitute close to a necessity for contemporary Swedish students. This is particularly interesting given that Swedish higher education is state-funded, without student tuitions, and the fact that Facebook is highly commercial. Somewhat metaphorically put, the relatively sudden expansion of Facebook use among students can possibly be understood in terms of a commercial “colonization process” of Swedish universities – and without much of a critical debate. Rather, the growing number of educational research on Facebook and higher education (both Swedish and international) has tended to direct extensive focus on potential benefits of Facebook as an arena for students to develop digital literacy or as free and neutral ground where students learn to become students, outside of traditional university structures. Such studies can be understood as in line with somewhat utopian understandings of technological development as a “blessing” for education systems, which in turn is contrary to the perception of technology as mainly a “burden” for education – a standpoint recurrently put forward, not least in the public debate on education (for instance by emphasizing how digital technology distract students from focusing on learning). In this chapter we aim to deconstruct such dichotomous views in order to gain insight on the role of Facebook, with all its paradoxes, within the student realm of the contemporary Swedish university. More specifically, the aim of this chapter is to analyse and discuss how ideals of the neoliberal university come into play in higher education students' use of Facebook as an informal arena. Or put differently: how can we understand the neoliberal university through the lens of students' Facebook use, and which complex understandings of the contemporary university does students' Facebook use enable us to discern?