Though always admissive of an inside view of my social life (clear from my minimalist privacy settings), I was beginning to feel a bit scrutinized when my family started trying to calculate the percentage of pictures in which I was holding a red solo cup. Formerly a place for my friends, older siblings and me to celebrate the memories of some of the best times of our high school and college years, Facebook has become a reservoir for town gossip topics and judgment sessions. It is a forum for adolescents to post excessive statuses regarding their play-by-play class schedules, and for elders attempting to catch up with their web-addicted offspring. In other words, MySpace five years ago.
This migration from one social networking site to another is similar to a childhood game of hide-and-seek. We, the young adults, go hunting for a venue to post pictures, stay updated and creep on each others’ profiles (just admit it), and within a couple of years, we are stalked down by our 15-year-old brothers and our 50-year-old aunts. Though originally a site exclusively for our college-age group, Facebook is now striving to be the latest sellout to mass appreciation, thereby giving the rest of the world a whiff of our dirty laundry. Public profiles and certain people’s lack of foresight when establishing viewing rights isn’t helping us much either. Luckily, being the innovative, hip and oh-so-original youth we are, I’m sure we will soon find our new hiding place.
CollegeOnly, a new social networking site recently started by Josh Weinstein ’09, is currently attempting to appeal to that progressively starving appetite for partial anonymity. Assimilating two former services created by Weinstein, GoodCrush and RandomDorm, the website is seeking to fill the niche that allows college students to expose themselves as, well, college students.
The appeal of private networking raises the question of why we must remain exclusive in showcasing our college experience. Perhaps it is because we’re simply into privacy. Maybe we like to feel catered to as the social center of the universe. Quite possibly, we fear that Grandma will have a heart attack if she sees how much “apple juice” we’re drinking on the weekends.
Most feasible to me, however, is the idea that we are in a four-year no-man’s land, during which consequences are at a minimum — as long as we don’t get caught. Parents can’t punish us for breaking curfew at the liberating age of 21, and it isn’t quite time for employers to notice the dark circles under our eyes or hear our cries for an aspirin when we roll into work in the morning. In effect, the only pieces of evidence of our extracurricular activities are these posts that advertise and evoke nostalgic memories of Lawnparties, formals and the shameful Monday night trips to the U-Store for raw cookie dough. Oh, wait, is that last one just me?
The point is that whether one leads a hard party lifestyle or simply enjoys the occasional substance-free dance party, it is, in my opinion, the modern liberty of each student to be assured that our standards become our very own, rather than the inheritance of our past or the molding of our future. Formed in a bubble away from both the home behind and the real world ahead, our ethics have the freedom to experiment and be known only to the select few with whom we are evolving. One could go so far as to say our network privacy is just another part of the maturation process. I support this period of shelter for the sake of the days and nights that make my four years here special. It’s too bad I didn’t think of that excuse before my mother started commenting on all my statuses.
Nevertheless, having been, at least for a time, secluded from the rest of cyberspace, I feel all the more rich in experiences for it. As I cross more things off my college bucket list, I find the utility in sites like Facebook and CollegeOnly as they spring up and cultivate a culture that is oriented to our youth — at least until they reach their respective timely expirations at the hands of an expanding and probing public.
Joey Barnett is an anthropology major from Tulare, Calif. He can be reached at jbarnett@princeton.edu.
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