When Susannah Fox ’92 attended Wesleyan, she often spent her Wednesday nights at “Blues and Brews,” a weekly house party held by Eric Halperin ’92 and his friends. On one of these Wednesdays—Robert Cray playing in the background—Fox and Halperin met by the keg and hit it off. The trouble was, after that night, Eric disappeared.
“I would scour the library and would have to walk all around campus, looking, trying to find him,” Fox said. Lucky for them, they did find each other, and eventually married in 1998. But, she wonders if it would have been easier to get to know him if they were in college today.
“I would never have called and neither would he for a ‘date,” she said. “If I had just gotten his screen name or email, our impression is that it would have been so much easier to connect.”
That’s probably true. Today’s students can contact each other with cellphones, e-mail, text messaging, Instant Messenger and the most recent addition, Thefacebook.com (known to most as “Facebook”). These only became widely available in the last decade.
Facebook’s adoption among students has been astounding, with over 2.2 million users at 496 colleges and growing. There are 2,985 users at Wesleyan, including students, alumni, faculty, and staff. Anyone with a valid Wesleyan email address can create an account and profile on the site. Given that level of acceptance, it suggests that students are comfortable forfeiting their personal information for the social gains the site affords. But are they putting themselves at risk?
For the uninitiated, Facebook is a social networking website where students post profiles with photographs of themselves, and a wide range of information from cellphone numbers, addresses, Instant Messenger screen names, to sexual orientation, whether they’re in a relationship or not (and if so, with whom), to favorite movies, music, quotes, and a free response section. Some students will also post links to online photo albums and diaries that might contain pictures of underage drinking and the students’ innermost thoughts. The site also displays a list of a user’s friends and lets those friends leave public comments on your profile.
The site, then, is helping to change the ways students forge friendships and relationships, and is able to do so because of students’ willingness to post copious amounts of personal information for anyone in the school community to see. Now, students walk around campus knowing information about strangers, acquaintances, and crushes without ever having to interact with them.
And that information can be addictive.
“I once tried to go a day without signing onto Facebook and failed miserably,” said self-described Facebook addict Elissa Gross ’08. “I went until 8 o’clock at night.”
The site is fun, useful, and a great procrastination tool, but some see it as part of a shift in how we interact with one another.
“We’re coming from a tradition going back tens of thousands of years in which when people met, they didn’t know anything about each other, or just [knew] what a friend told them,” said Paul Levinson, Professor and Chair of Media Studies at Fordham University, and the author of “Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium.”
“What I think something like the Facebook does is that it gives everyone a little dossier, and it does profoundly change the rules of engagement when they do meet,” he said. “It obsolesces small talk.”
Most students I spoke with did not believe they were sacrificing safety by being on the site.
“I figure that with the internet, you can find any information you’re looking for,” said Ruby Ross ’08, whose Facebook profile lists Flamenco dance and chocolate soymilk as interests.
Nor is Allison Wilcox ’07 particularly worried about people using her information maliciously.
“It’s a small enough campus that if you want to stalk someone, you don’t need Facebook to do it,” she said.
Students’ laissez-faire attitude toward privacy on the site troubles Parry Aftab, an internet privacy and security lawyer and executive director of WiredSafety.org. She said students feel too secure on Facebook. When presenting themselves online, students are inclined to assume that only savory students will be checking their information and contacting them.
“There’s a disconnect between the construction of who’s reading your post and the reality,” she said. “The good people are not necessarily who are reading it.”
Aftab, who uses teen and collegiate volunteers to help stay abreast of net trends, says her organization often receives word of abuses from Facebook users.
“We get reports all the time of cyberstalking and harassment,” she said. “A lot of them become sexual very quickly.” Aftab also cites instances of identity theft and cyberstalking among Facebook users.
However, Chris Hughes, a spokesman for Thefacebook.com, said that the site rarely receives reports of stalking or other harassment.
“Most complaints about ‘stalking’ simply require a readjustment of a user’s privacy settings and a warning message sent to the user accused of inappropriate behavior,” he said. “We think our users are pretty savvy about what information they give out to their peers.”
No one I spoke with knew of any illicit behavior through Facebook at Wesleyan.
Fox, who is now associate director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit organization that studies how the internet affects areas of our lives, says that most people don’t understand the implications of their actions on the internet.
“They love the convenience [of the internet],” she said. “For the most part, nothing bad has happened to them so they continue to do these high-trust activities.”
Her colleague, Steve Jones, a senior research fellow at Pew Internet, and a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that many of his students didn’t consider the consequences of their online profiles until after they put them online.
“Facebook seems safer because it’s restricted to your own campus,” he said.
Jones warns, however, that there could always be unexpected consequences.
“Let’s say you put something in your profile about how you’re a real party animal, and 20 years later, you’re running for political office and someone discovers it,” he said. “On the other hand, I don’t think everything everyone puts up there is true.”
True or not, there are other emerging consequences for posting a risqué Facebook profile.
University of Wisconsin-Madison freshman Jill Klosterman discovered that campus employers were perusing the profiles of potential employees, comparing their online self-portrayals to their resumes.
“I was told by a [Wisconsin Union] employee that ensuring that my Facebook profile was employer-safe was ‘strongly advised,” she said.
Jones likens employers using Facebook to basing hiring decisions on hearsay. It seems clear, though, the days of students seeing the site as purely their domain may be numbered.
At Yale, for instance, professors have begun creating their own profiles, often at the insistence of students who are enamored with a particular professor.
The reaction to professors joining Facebook there seem to be mostly warm, according to Yale Daily News writer and freshman Josh Duboff, who wrote an article about the phenomenon.
“Most people seem to think that there’s nothing on their Facebook profiles that is so private that they are worried about faculty members seeing it,” Duboff said. “The professors seem to have an amusing attitude toward the whole thing.”
About 30 Yale professors have joined. At Wesleyan, a quick search didn’t turn up any active faculty, but that could quickly change. At the University of Iowa, even the school’s president is on the site now. Facebook may shift to become an online reflection of the physical school community.
Levinson, who plans to join the site at Fordham soon, is unsure how this evolving community will take shape.
“It could bring faculty and students together, but it could also undermine some of the advantages and camaraderie students now have with it,” he said.
He points to sexual preferences as one such trait students might not want professors to view. Facebook does offer privacy preferences that allow students to tailor who sees aspects of their profiles, however.
“I think most of our users are intelligent enough to know that any information they’re posting to a site for their college will, in fact, be seen by other members of their collegiate community,” Hughes said.
Aftab, who actually likes Facebook, said students should just be prudent about what they post.
“You shouldn’t use it as a diary,” she said. Aftab warns that students should also avoid being sexually provocative, or taking strong political or other opinions “that are going to evoke a strong reaction from other people. Otherwise you’re putting a target on your back,” she said.
Risky or not, Facebook’s popularity is a direct result of students’ willingness to forgo privacy to belong to a community. Perhaps the most profound result of the rise of Facebook is that it demonstrates a great many of us do not fear incursions on our privacy, but rather want to be found. Many, overtly or not, hope people are searching for their profiles and finding them interesting. Otherwise, why belong to the site at all?
Or, as Alan Yaspan ’08 responded when asked if he’d ever been stalked online, “I could use an ego boost.”
“I think pretty much everyone that posts all this information wants people to contact them,” said Dan Stillman ’04. “They just don’t want to seem too eager about it.
Stillman is the co-creator of WesMatch, a competitor to Thefacebook.com that allows users to find students who are compatible with them by filling out a questionnaire and then checking a list of whose answers most closely resemble their own.
The etiquette of these technologies is still developing. Facebook, WesMatch, and the internet as a whole, have legitimized researching our acquaintances, classmates, and crushes.
”Thanks largely to Google and the Web in general, there’s an expectation today that, if you want to find out information about a person, you’ll be able to just load up a web browser and type in a name,“ Stillman said. This expectation is recent, however. When he was a freshman, people were surprised if he knew about their backgrounds before they spoke. ”Today, I think many people are surprised if someone hasn’t looked them up,“ he said.
Meeting someone they had researched on the web, some students find themselves asking questions they already know the answer to. It’s not quite socially acceptable to admit you’ve been researching the person. There is a disconnect between the acceptability of online snooping and the permissibility of using that information.
Like many students I spoke with, Ross said this has happened to her when meeting friends of friends she had looked up.
”I had to pretend my ignorance,“ she said.
Matt Gregory ’07 found himself unexpectedly unnerved when he walked into a friend’s room and found her looking at his profile.
”She was doing it to get contact info, but it still made me feel uncomfortable,“ he said. ”I felt that was something she could have gotten in a more personal manner.“
Indeed, finding friends has become akin to shopping online. You can see customer reviews (what someone’s friends have added to a profile), and even add or cancel a relationship with the push of a button. In the information age, we expect to do the same kind of research on a potential girlfriend or boyfriend as we would a new toaster.
Levinson thinks the site is helping students find each other more efficiently.
”The fact is, on the one hand humans have a lot of basic similarities, but when you get beyond that, there is a myriad of very disparate interests,“ he said. ”By making this information available, it encourages people to meet people who are interested in the same things you are.“
Gross said the site makes her and others gutsier.
”I think college students like Facebook because, like alcohol, it really lowers your inhibitions and timidity in terms of posting or messaging things you would never say in real life,“ she said.
Gross said that, among her friends, it’s impressive to get with someone who chose not to be on the site.
”It’s like a challenge now, trying to find someone who’s so mysterious and elusive that they would avoid this newfound cult,“ she said.
Anonymity is not just hard to attain on campus now, it is rarely desired, either. Those students who choose to avoid Facebook, won’t sign on Instant Messenger, and don’t have a cellphone, are seen as modern day Luddites, quietly disrupting the new social order. Many students expect others to be reachable and researchable anytime of day from anywhere. And, with that, come new risks and rewards.
Privacy, already scarce on a campus as small as this one, is almost extinct, but that’s just how students like it.
As Yaspan puts it, ”Nowadays, it seems like you have to have some presence in cyberspace to be anybody at all.“
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