Sunday, January 29, 2006

Trends among college students

Facebook, a social networking website for college and separately for high school students, is the 51st most visited site based on a weekly average (Alexa says it's currently the 38th most popular English-language site). Although less relevant to the meat of this post, it also gets about 1.5 billion pageviews a dayit gets .15% of all web traffic, or about twice that of nytimes.com.


They've been doing something interesting, along with captivating the attention of millions of college students and garnering funding from CIA-linked sources, which is to track trends among student preferences for movies, music, books, affiliations, etc. Now take a look at this:


The left side is the Top 10 for my east coast public school and the right side is for the all students on facebook. If you're confused, look at #2 and #10. I'm not shocked, but am slightly disappointed that the "most students are conservative" meme is probably true or at least that most politically active partisan youths are. It also makes me want to say that I'm non-partisan, but progressive (in other words, not Republican). Of course, it could be the CIA trying to convince people that conservativism is mainstream. You know, sometimes I think it's easier for me to rationally agree with Republicans, but there's always an unexplainable reason in my mind as to why Democrats have to be on the right side of the aisle.

SOURCE: Facebook | Pulse

3 comments:

Will said...

Of course, they're only spying on the non-Americans in college.

Ed said...

hmm

from a more serious perspective, i would venture a guess that since conservatives usually feel alienated in college, they tend to express themselves more vocally in general

Will said...

Ed, you have a point there. The Centurion has no liberal competition (except for the MLM, which they keep sprinkling around campus.