Research Topic

I'm pretty glad I needed to take Writing 150 this year, if only because I was forced to sit down and learn how to use the library. As much as I would never have admitted it, this is a valuable skill. I would never have made it all the way through my collegiate years without having to write a research paper, for which I would have had to sit down and either ask a librarian for help, taught myself how to research on the library database, or given up in frustration and resorted to searching through Google in hopes that that would help get my paper written.

Therefore, my class day spent in the bowels of the library learning all the secrets of the HBLL search database has been educational and actually somewhat productive. I qualify that with  a somewhat because there is so much information to go through, it's been hard to choose a topic for my research paper.

I think what I've settled on is Facebook and the effect it has on social skills. It's a pretty interesting topic for me because in my Communications class we've been studying media and how it affects people, and the results have been more scary than surprising. Following this train of thought, I wanted to look at something in media that just about everyone I know uses and could have real effects on. The solution? Facebook. I know only one college student who doesn't use the book of faces, and for those who do use it there's a pretty constant connection with it. Everyone opens their computer, gets on the internet, and checks Facebook, even if just for a minute. So this is the topic I want to look at and research for my paper.