When "Facebook" Becomes a Verb...

I'll admit it (with a tinge of shame)--I wholeheartedly embrace my membership in the Facebook generation. Despite having had essentially solely positive experiences with Facebook, I cannot help but feel silly and juvenile writing about it. Especially as a part of my first job that doesn't involve pizza or multitudes of young children. However, the social networking revolution, emblemized for me and my peers by the website Facebook, has sparked changes in the way we interact with one another that may eventually become as far-reaching as those caused by the advent of email.

The most notable change, for me, has been the widespread introduction of college class groups for the recent acceptees of various schools. I don't know of any of my friends who graduated high school in 2006 who was a member of such a group, but I think nearly every member of my graduating class of 2007 that had a Facebook account (probably 90%) was. In these groups, people are discussing myriad but unsurprising topics--music, movies, partying, the superiority of that particular school, and so on. I personally am a member of the Stanford 2011 group, and have been since mid-December. I have seen it grow from 60 people to just under 1,300 people, about 75% of the incoming class. Wow. I check it frequently (although less often then I did during the second semester of my senior year!), and now can't quite imagine going off to college in the fall without the preview it has given me. Though some of the discussions are more superficial and inane than I would prefer, the book and music suggestions, advice from several current students, and general camaraderie have provided me, and countless other recent high school graduates, with an invaluable, albeit vague, sense of the personalities of our classmates. And, of course, friends both real and Facebook-only.

    With such positive results, why did my opening sentence include the phrase "with a tinge of shame"? Why were face-to-face encounters with Facebook friends at the recent Admit Weekend filled more with a sense of awkwardness than one of familiarity; why was it embarrassing to recognize a regular post-er? Why could I not keep this entry from occasionally devolving into a tongue-in-cheek tone?

    I think that line from the first Spiderman movie may shed some light--"With great power comes great responsibility." In the case of Facebook, and other networking sites, this line doesn't apply to one superhuman individual, but to a super-human collective. The power to learn and meet people, the responsibility to present information appropriately and follow the guidelines for online etiquette. We sense that the rules for the two modes of interaction--physical versus virtual--exist in entirely different paradigms. Switching from one to the other introduced that inevitably awkward dynamic at Admit Weekend because we were unprepared for it. The shame associated with being Facebook-active comes in part from the fact that it seems to be almost exclusively a "young-person thing" (read: and therefore not serious), regardless of the huge mistake that "read:" clause entails, and in part from recognizing that we devote so much time to interacting and existing in a form of reality that is not the one we have grown up believing is the most important one. In a sense, I agree. However, that shame doesn't necessarily have to follow. The trick is to recognize that these two forms of interaction are not mutually-exclusive and instead embrace the synthesis we have unknowingly created in forums such as those college groups. When I head off to Stanford in the fall and recognize some person across the Quad whose musical tastes I liked or political perspectives I found interesting, I am going to go say “hi.”