Lauren M. Squires wrote:
... I don't hear people saying "I was sittting around facebooking yesterday" or "I myspaced for a few minutes this morning." (I hear this activity described as "...so then I was on Myspace/Facebook for a while, and then...")
I'm not sure why this distinction should be...
Lauren makes an interesting observation. I *do* occasionally hear students say things like, "I didn't feel like working on my paper, so I spent a couple hours facebooking." But it is far more usual to hear the usage she describes, "I facebooked him." Also on this campus, possibly because it is a small school in a small town and thus relatively isolated, MySpace is seldom mentioned. In fact, when I asked my internet class about it, that very unscientific sample reported that use of MySpace was considered somewhat deviant: "That's where the perverts are all hanging out." Some said they had used MySpace in high school, but graduated to facebook when they came to college. -- Mark D. Johns, Ph.D. Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Communication Studies Luther College, Decorah, Iowa USA http://academic.luther.edu/~johnsmar/ ----------------------------------------------- "Get the facts first. You can distort them later." ---Mark Twain