The ‘social’ network

Mark Zuckerberg was a nobody before his meteoric rise to stardom. The Harvard culture that he was surrounded by actively rejected him — the girls disliked him, and the prestigious final clubs ignored him. But this changed when he founded Facebook, an act that literally made him the fulcrum of social life. Soon enough, he was indispensable, even to those who had once thrown him under the bus. He outpaced the Harvard elitists and surrounded himself with the hot girls whom he had once ogled from afar. But this coup had nothing to do with Zuckerberg as a person. After founding Facebook, he was no more likeable — he was just much more useful. He had become a valuable networking resource. He had become a commodity.

One can’t help but make the comparison with the social culture here at Princeton. It is no secret that we attend an elitist and excessively competitive institution. Many students have discussed the utilitarian nature of Princeton interaction and how it seems to drain this place of genuine and valuable discourse. Most of us agree that a little change would be welcome.

Think about the last time you ran into a member of a prestigious campus group or exclusive eating club. Were you not nicer, warmer and faker to him or her than you would have been to someone who had no such affiliations? How often do you spend precious Princetonian minutes reaching out to someone new, truly without ulterior motives?

You might not believe me. You may pride yourself on your inclusiveness and open-mindedness. You may be convinced that you genuinely like every single person with whom you associate, regardless of their social affiliations or networking value. This may be true for some people; but at Princeton, my bet is that there are other factors at work.

If you’re fake, and you don’t know it, you’re experiencing something that social psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” — subconsciously adapting and harboring beliefs that make you feel more at ease with your position in the world. In truth, the degree to which we value our acquaintances is much better predicted by their place in the social pecking order than by any aspect of their personalities or interests. Of course, no one wants to feel like a user. So instead, the guilty individual shuns such grimy thoughts from his cognitive repertoire and pretends that he has no ulterior motive when constructing his social relationships.

One might argue that that’s just the way the world works. If we can’t handle exclusivity here, then we can’t handle it in “the real world.”

Right, but wrong. It is true that exclusivity exists everywhere; that’s how the supply and demand of social resources works. Yet in “the real world,” the short supply of resources is more frequently a reflection of actual resources, as with jobs and internships. At Princeton, however, the selectivity is artificially manufactured to appeal to a large portion of the student body that not only relishes exclusivity, but also takes special joy in letting others know that they have been excluded.

There are certain social circles that, although abstract in their form, are soundly inaccessible to those who do not meet some arbitrary standard. Other circles, like bicker eating clubs, have formalized the rejection process. Yet in both cases, the desired attributes are so intangible and synthetically manufactured that they don’t actually have any real value at all — they are imaginary traits that have been created for their own sake. The argument of “the real world” is simply an illusion maintained by those who have the most to gain from the system.

Not to say that this mindset doesn’t exist elsewhere; it’s just that generations of Princetonians have cultivated it, encouraged it and made it into an art form. It is so entrenched and salient in Princeton tradition that it would be no more obvious if the school offered a course titled “How to maintain a sense of moral rectitude while sucking up to your idols and rejecting your friends.”

In response to rejection, Mark Zuckerberg created his own miraculous “social network” in which he was king. But not all of us are that lucky; most people are unable to whip up multibillion-dollar enterprises from their dorm rooms. It shouldn’t take a miracle for human beings to start acting humane.

David Mendelsohn is a psychology major from Rockville Centre, N.Y. He can be reached at dmendels@princeton.edu.