The Foreign Service Journal, June 2009

Causes) ; Third Culture Kids Every- where ; and so on. Figuring out what being “friends” on Facebook actually means can be confusing. For some people, the site has become a place where they list everyone they know. It has become like a high school popularity contest. I am not “friends” with all my friends on Facebook. One grown FS child told me he was being sent so many friend re- quests that he wanted to kill his whole account and start over. My advice was that he “unfriend” people as a method of cleaning up his account. He said he would feel bad about doing that, even though the “unfriended” do not receive notification that they have been dropped. I reassured him that he could simply “ignore” friend re- quests. Later, when I asked the FS kid if he had killed his account yet, he said just as he was about to, his high school sweetheart contacted him — and that made all the hours online worthwhile. LinkedIn For those who consider social net- working to be frivolous, there is LinkedIn, a professional networking site that asks members to provide pro- fessional information and resumés in curriculum vitae style, including pho- tos and references. LinkedIn sends continual updates about your connec- tions and thus expands your network. Launched in 2003 as a “contact” platform, LinkedIn is playing catch- up as a social networking site. It is adding new applications, in addition to the resume building ones, includ- ing such features as “100,000s of in- teresting discussions on LinkedIn.” The site is working to control the credibility of the discussions by add- ing managers, who are other users, in an attempt to retain its “professional” status. 56 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 9 “I want to know what happened to people, what kind of people they became, where they ended up.” S CHOOLS S UPPLEMENT