Face(book) the consequences

I was sitting at a desk in Fayerweather on the first day of classes my freshman year, still reeling from the excitement and freedoms of college, when my philosophy professor approached the lectern and informed us that God was dead. He was quoting Nietzsche, I suppose, but suddenly freedom had a new valence. I was free to do whatever I wanted, of course—whether that meant staying up all night or eating pizza for breakfast. But I was also free from any outside influence, my parents being a thousand miles away and God being, apparently, dead.

College has no predetermined moral compass: no holy book to follow (other than housing guidelines) no parental insistence of “my house, my rules.” We belong to too many communities—on residence hall floors, in classrooms, in Lerner meeting spaces, on Campo dance floors—each of them disparate, each with their own jurisdiction. No RA, professor, or even police officer can fill the void in authority.

We’re on our own to define our collective ethics and principles, to determine what is and isn’t acceptable to say and do to our roommates, our classmates, our significant others—a difficult task, to say the least, in a student body composed of thousands from radically different backgrounds. Still, we seem to have intuitively found a way to negotiate our values without resorting to ecumenical councils or grand assemblies. The site of that negotiation is Facebook (pun intended).

In 1785, philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a prison called the “Panopticon,” a concept revisited in the 20th century by Foucault in the popular University Writing text, “Discipline and Punish.” In the Panopticon, prisoners face a central observation tower. Unable to tell when they are being monitored and when they are not, prisoners are compelled to obey. The prison relies on the power of surveillance rather than physical lock and key as a means of control.

Facebook may not be a prison, but you consent to a similar power structure every time you log on and scroll through your news feed. The creators of those announcements have no idea whose feed they will show up on, who will notice their latest status update and who won’t. Photographs that, pre-Internet, would have simply settled in a scrapbook somewhere, are now on full display for friends and friends of friends, the subjects all properly tagged and associated. What would previously have been private phone calls become public wall posts, capable of being tracked by third parties through wall-to-walls.

The media has often maligned our generation for this exhibitionist impulse, calling it self-indulgent and attention-seeking. Perhaps, probably. But when we update our statuses, post on others’ walls, or tag ourselves in photographs, we make decisions that are no less important simply because they take place online.

We avoid updates that would offend those on our friends list, which often means avoiding certain expletives or slurs. We know that because our updates are subject to the comments of others, we have to be able to defend our opinions. We realize our wall posts are visible to all, and so choose our words carefully. We are responsible for what we write, and so we self-regulate. What we write and what we don’t write, how we represent ourselves and how we don’t represent ourselves, become our community’s standards.

Responsibility is crucial to Facebook’s ability to stimulate and enforce these social and moral standards. In stark contrast is Bwog, where anonymous posters disparage fellow students, viciously criticize their fashion choices, and engage in endless debates over which side of Broadway is smarter or better-looking—in short, comments they almost certainly wouldn’t dare publicly announce on College Walk or post on their Facebook profiles, comments they wouldn’t want associated with their real names.

Our generation is called many things, and many of them are unflattering, but I would hesitate to call people who so closely connect their words and actions to their identities “irresponsible.” My hope is that we continue to expand the boundaries of that responsibility and translate our online words and actions into real ones—that Facebook groups and status updates raising awareness for causes turn into student activism and community service, that respect for one another on Facebook walls carries over to residence halls.

Aarti Iyer is a Columbia College junior majoring in creative writing. She is the editor-in-chief of The Fed. Culture Vulture runs alternate Fridays.