Big Brother is watching you. And these days, he has plenty of company: the boy from your freshman seminar, your potential future employer, the strange kid living down the hall in your dorm and the rest of the College community.
Armed with the wonders of the World Wide Web, this generation enjoys an unprecedented level of interconnectivity that ties together everyone from close friends to complete strangers. Thanks to the meteoric rise of online social networking sites, such as Facebook, which boasts over 6.4 million collegiate users at over 2,000 campuses, behavior that until recently would have been synonymous with "creepy" is simply mainstream for this generation. YouTube broadcasts students' wild antics to any wandering eyes while Google searches expose their previous indiscretions and past lives to the rest of the world.
Sure, there are countless upsides to the ubiquitous digital interconnections: ease in keeping in touch with loved ones, effortless sharing of pictures and memories and an endless source of procrastination. At the same time, what was once safely confined inside homes and hard drives has become public fodder. Generation Facebook has developed a warped sense of personal privacy. Just because something can be made public does not mean that it necessarily should be.
The "Facebook effect" makes the already close-knit community at Dartmouth seem even smaller. More than half of American college students log onto the social networking site at least once a day, according to a recent Pew Internet survey. By just casually browsing Facebook, students stumble upon the profiles of both friends and strangers, keep tabs on their personal lives, and in the process, begin to recognize more faces while crossing the Green. With computer mouse in one hand and digital camera in the other, College kids live their lives in the public spotlight. It is a generation of Paris Hiltons. In a world like this, who needs the Patriot Act?
Personal views toward religion, politics and sexual orientation, once taboo to discuss in public, have been systematically put out into the open through Facebook. Without hesitation, students share with their intended online audience reels of digital photos chronicling everything from inebriated weekend shenanigans to joyous family celebrations. However, complete strangers simultaneously find these same pictures while bored in their 10A. Whatever happens on Webster Avenue stays on Facebook.
No longer just fleeting moments in Food Court, public displays of affection are captured on the Internet as significant others post lovey-dovey snapshots of each other and trade sweet nothings on their Facebook walls. Remember: Real men do not use emoticons. On the flip side, hearts are broken in plain view as Facebook coldly proclaims that your lab partner last year is "no longer listed as in a relationship."
Often, students fail to realize that once tidbits of information or risque photos are uploaded into the ether, they are forever out of their hands. And even the visages of privacy-conscious Facebookers, decked out with privacy controls and de-tagged pictures, are still visible to the rest of the world through the posted photos of middlemen. At the end of the day, the tidal wave sweeping private lives into public view only can be slowed, not stopped. There can be no reasonable expectation of privacy on the Web.
Why should this all matter? Beyond the weirdness of making wedding photos of utter strangers a few clicks away, social networking sites show off superficial digital personas, not the full reality of the individuals behind the profile. Especially at a small school, this Facebook mentality promotes the out-of-context prejudgment of others and premature burning of bridges. Among friends, these shallow digital connections pose the danger of becoming weak substitutes for genuine relationships. Who needs tete-a-tete life updates from their friends when you have them conveniently consolidated on the Facebook News Feed? The quality, not quantity, of interaction matters.
Yet even more tangible consequences of Facebook lie on Wall Street. With seniors and juniors participating in corporate recruiting, 23 percent of companies use social networking sites to screen potential hires, as reported in a March 2007 poll from the Ponemon Institute, a privacy think tank. The openness of the online community backfires as the line between the social and professional worlds has blurred. The fewer items posted in cyberspace, the more control this generation will have over their real lives.
Daniel Belkin joined the group "Face the Facebook Fallout."
