Blending the informal tempo of Facebook with the structured demands of academia reveals how digital immediacy disrupts reflective educational engagement, particularly when users treat social media as pedagogical spaces without recognising their communicative bias; Facebook, framed through Harold Innis’s distinction between time- and space-biased media, emerges as a platform whose speed and reach displace depth and context, encouraging oversharing, superficiality, and impulsive contact that undercuts professionalism and pedagogic structure, especially when students bypass institutional channels in favour of the most convenient outlet, often leaving assignment queries or confessions in public view, confusing personal visibility with academic intimacy, and accelerating information flow without regard for coherence or appropriateness; the cultural moment of 2010, when Facebook overtook Google in visitors and both Zuckerberg and Assange polarised the meaning of digital transparency, reflects broader libertarian fantasies of unregulated data circulation where speed replaces reflection, while interpersonal and scholarly norms erode in the name of connectivity, culminating in moments where educators face public dilemmas over whether to respond to academic queries posted on their social profiles or to fend off unsolicited professionalism-checks from anonymous reviewers seeking credibility via Facebook messages; this dissolution of boundaries between work and leisure, privacy and publicity, formality and spontaneity, is compounded by a widespread lack of information literacy, where platform selection, discursive tone and communicative purpose are not critically aligned, resulting in an epistemic dissonance where even high-level debates—such as a public challenge to a scholarly book endorsement—occur in trivial digital formats that strip nuance and intent; consequently, a reassertion of media consciousness is vital, as educators must champion a deeper awareness of medium-specific affordances and constraints to counteract the pervasive trivialisation of academic discourse through fast, fragmented, and informal platforms like Facebook. (Brabazon, 2015)
