IVP - Strangely Dim

Facebook Fever

Likewise Books has Facebook fever. Ever since Facebook--the social networking utility that has linked college students online for years--opened itself to noncollege students, growing numbers of InterVarsity Press employees and Likewise authors have opened accounts and are keeping tabs on one another there.

One of Facebook's standard features is an online poll, updated daily and limited to one thousand responders. I must say some of the polling questions are among the lamest I've encountered online: my favorite so far is "Do you have good taste in music?" But some of them offer interesting insights into what goes on in the Facebooking mind.

Today's poll is "Is the glass half-empty or half-full?" Fully 76 percent of the respondents are, apparently, optimists. (Don't ask me why, because I'm decidedly among the minority. As my beloved daddy regularly reminds me, "An optimist can never be pleasantly surprised.")

There's no negligible difference in outlook between men and women; women may be slightly more optimistic than men, or they may be slightly more inclined to respond to online polls--who can say? The least optimistic age group--only 74 percent of them--are ages 18 to 24, probably because they're just now back in school, trudging into 8 a.m. astronomy class after a summer of sleeping till noon.

The other polling question that caught my eye earlier this summer was the simple, even simplistic, "Are you religious?" The consensus was "No" by a similar margin: 70 percent over 30 percent. I can't decide if I'm surprised by these results or not. I'm also not sure how to interpret them, especially taken together: if three-fourths of the Facebook community are irreligious and generally upbeat, what do you suppose they want to talk about? What do you suppose they want to read about?