So this new Facebook thing is freaking me out. For the eight of you who haven't been on Facebook in the past few days, the Powers that Face have decided, in their inscrutably Olympian wisdom, to install a new feature called "News Feed," which serves as a digest of everything that your friends have done in recent hours. This Feed is the first thing you encounter when you log on to the Web site, and it is unprintably terrifying.
Why, you ask? After all, as my roommate pointed out, it isn't revealing any information that you couldn't obtain before through diligent Facebook-stalking. Well, yes, that's true. The difference is that there were relatively few Facebook stalkers with sufficient commitment to their occupation (nay, their art) to accumulate a comprehensive knowledge of every party invitation, every picture, every profile-edit on the whole network -- yet all this information is now available for easy perusal at a moment's notice.
The notices about the parties are particularly alarming. This guy, call him Bob, is holding a party this weekend, to which I was not invited. But the Feed told me, "35 of your friends are going to this party! Want an invitation? Click here to request one from Bob!" That's just awkward.
Not to mention the relationship stories. Let me explain by illustration: I was sitting in my room, shrieking in disbelief at the massive "Big Brother" connotations of this whole initiative, when one of my fraternity brothers walked into the room. He asked what was going on. As my roommate began to answer, I glanced at my Feed, looked back at him and said, "When did you become not-single?" He was terrified.
The whole thing is just a dreadful challenge to our lives. Nothing at all can be secret, now. Every time I write on someone's wall, the universe will know. The next step is the combination of the status bar with the News Feed. You'll log on and see, "Connor is running a slight temperature and has diarrhea. Click here to send him a get-well card, or here to send him a cruel practical joke!"
Social skills will become entirely unnecessary. Flirtation, dating, breaking up, making friends -- it will all be reduced to a series of clicks. Hell, they could probably run the Spring Elections and Greek Rush through this thing, too. Pledging would just require that you do embarrassing things that would show up on other people's Feeds, like: "Preston is now in an open relationship with a goat. Chauncey poked his mom at 3:42 a.m."
I am, as you might have been able to intuit, not particularly pleased by this innovation. In some way, though, it seems to communicate something particularly satisfying about our world here at the University, albeit in a profoundly unsettling way.
Our community is ... well, thick is the only word that comes immediately to mind, but I think it does the job nicely. There's nothing sketchy about the world in which we reside. Okay, that's not true, there're all kinds of things about our world that are sketchy, especially Virginia Ave.
In the watercolor that is the communal University, however, there is nothing sketched in, nothing hinted at, nothing suggested -- everything is clear and deliberate and unutterably vibrant.
And that's good. It's great, actually. It's the best. It's what makes life here so teeth-grittingly exhilarating, the speed and the viciousness of the ride and the skill it takes to stay mounted.
Not that that excuses this ridiculous Facebook Feed. There is something about it, though, that isn't completely repulsive, even though it suggests the coming annihilation of privacy and the subsuming of America beneath the banners of Facebook and Google. Somehow, that menacing list also reminds me of the quick fresh dazzle we get to live by virtue of our citizenship in the University, and there's nothing wrong with that. In any case, my friends, I'd be careful about fooling around with the new party affiliation option under the new regime. Comrade Zuckerberg is watching you, and he's been itching for an excuse to launch his latest idea: Don't poke, purge.
Connor's column runs bi-weekly on Thursdays. He can be reached at sullivan@cavalierdaily.com.
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