I am not sure if you remember this, but for a short while, Facebook, everyone’s favorite social networking site, had a tool called Facebook Pulse. With it, you could find all sorts of interesting statistics about how people who used the site would construct their profiles and identify themselves. One interesting fact the Pulse function revealed was that, of all Facebook users at the time, the book most listed in the “Favorite Books” section of the profile form was the Bible. Of course, this was far from the most-listed favorite book at Columbia, but the Pulse data for this school did reveal that most students had at least filled out the “Religious Views” section of the form. So, although we are not a university community in which a majority of students are willing to admit that they read the Bible for pleasure, the way Facebook frames one’s presentation of identity forces us, even if briefly, to think about our relationship to religion.
It has been a consistent theme of this column that the university community here is not one that seems, on the surface, to be very religious. The Facebook data I was exposed to in some ways corroborates the idea that Columbia is a place where liberal, enlightened, secular intellectualism overwhelmingly reigns within the community’s main public value system. It would not surprise me to learn that many Columbia students do in fact read the Bible, but are too ashamed to admit it in light of this prevailing social code. And even those who do not fill in the blank straightforwardly or at all must make an active decision about how religion fits into their lives as they construct a Facebook profile.
The construction of a profile has become perhaps the second most important method of an individual’s presentation of him or herself to the public, after live personal interaction. Facebook, as we all know, enables its user to create a profile by filling out a form. Even though a user can theoretically post any information and choose to disregard the categories Facebook has outlined, the profile is constructed in a way that articulates a particular view about what is involved in identity classification. Aside from the photographs a user can post and the open “Favorite Quotations” and “About Me” boxes, the user must conform to a core set of characteristics that is meant to put everybody on the same level and make each person’s identity easily digestible to others. The profile implies that the best, most understandable way of presenting oneself to one’s public social network according to the rapid pace of internet-mediated information is by a test of multiple choice and fill-in-the-blanks. This would involve choosing one of several words that supplies the most accurate description of oneself: birth date, hometown, politics, sexual orientation, favorite things, and, of course, religion.
A huge percentage of Facebook users on this campus do choose to fill out the “Religious Views” section of the Facebook profile form. Some answer truthfully (i.e. “Catholicism”), and some others like to throw in some emotion (“Proudly Muslim,” “Big Jew,” “Agnostic and open to suggestions”). Those who do not honestly answer sometimes supply a witty one-liner (“All Dogs Go To Heaven”), obscure literary reference (“Met Him Pike Hoses”), or another object of worship (“Obama,” “Sunil Gulati”). Others choose not to fill in the form, a choice that still requires one to think, if only for a second, about how religion functions in one’s identity scheme.
Whether we like it or not, by including religion as one of the possible categories of identification, Facebook perpetuates religion’s importance as a quick, digestible identifying category. And Facebook is both a ubiquitous organizer of campus social life and itself an important piece of campus culture, even if many of us might think that its set of categories ignores the nuances of self-presentation. So, because of Facebook’s functional and structural importance, religion remains a central aspect of both public life and the way in which members of this university community think about themselves and the presentation of the self to others.
The “Facebook argument” for the latent centrality of religion within our community that I have presented here reminds us that the very gesture of brushing religion aside always involves some engagement with religion, however brief. Facebook and other Internet media might ask us to engage in and judge at the pace of knee-jerk reactivity. This would mean that here, people who admit to reading the Bible on their profiles are too often marginalized and pushed away from the mainstream. But as a community devoted to diversity and intellectual depth, we can surely do better.
Eric Hirsch is a Columbia College senior majoring in anthropology and English. He is an undergraduate fellow with the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. The God Beat runs alternate Mondays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com