Remember when Facebook used to count the number of posts on your wall? Don't pretend I know you remember. And I'm guessing you were weirdly obsessed with that number and how your number compared to your friends' numbers. Thank God they got rid of that feature we're all much saner without it.
The Facebook wall-post-counting thing is disturbingly similar to a phenomenon we all experience at Dartmouth. It's not just Facebook that quantifies our relationships and interactions with each other we do. Instead of measuring the quality of our friendships on this campus through internal determinations of fondness, compatibility and trust, we count the number of waves we get on the way to Collis.
Although many Dartmouth students joke about facetime, it's sort of similar to how we joke about stalking people on Facebook. We laugh about it with our friends, but we secretly depend on it. Browsing through people's tagged photos has become a legitimate way of getting to know them, just like casual waves prove a level of friendship. Facebook and facetime both provide us with a method of making as many acquaintances as possible. If we put ourselves or at least a superficial, pixilated version of ourselves out there for mass viewing, we'll be guaranteed to be recognized.
Our conversations in Novack lines and in between classes turn into the real-world equivalent of wall posts and photo comments short, smiley segments of class, food or party-related banter, cut short by parting paths and schedules. You want to be able to look around and catch the familiar eyes of as many people as possible, while laughing at the joke shouted at you across a pong table. Social multitasking ... sort of like Facebook chatting and "liking" photos and comments.
Our reliance on facetime as a substitute for real conversation and interaction encourages us to categorize the people we know in oversimplified terms, like the limiting "Interests" and "About Me" boxes on a Facebook profile. This is incredibly apparent at a school like Dartmouth: If we can't organize people into convenient boxes through their sports teams and friend groups, we have a Greek system to organize and define us. When we have insufficient information to craft our understandings of each other, we figure people out based on superficialities rather than real substance, the latter of which has fallen by the wayside as the result of our shallow pursuit of acknowledgement by others.
I think it's positive that this school discourages anonymity, but there is a certain pressure to "know" everyone and where you and they fit into the social network. I think we would all form closer ties if we stopped modelling our real life interactions after social media outlets leave the "liking" and the poking to cyberspace.
