The Vassar Huff blogger

Former VSA VP Morgan Warners, and fellow Vassar grad, is now a blogger for The Huffington Post. (Who is jealous other than me?) He wrote his first post on Monday on the dangers of being at once hyperconnected and socially and physically disconnected.

His post also reminded me of something I had forgotten to post: my senior reflection and article for The Miscellany News' graduation issue.

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The Days Before Facebook

Fall Semester 2005 – those were simpler times. The brief, fleeting golden days before blogging, poking, posting and Facebook stalking became standards of the virtual lives of Vassar College students.

The Class of 2008 marks the last graduating class to have matriculated at a Facebook-free Vassar. Even for those who lived it, the time without Facebook, like the times when the Library had just four printers, seems a distant past.

How did we ever make friends before Facebook? Sustain classmate crushes? Plan parties? Learning about our freshmen year roommates required us to be pen pals with them. Before coming to campus, we chatted over Instant Messenger, made phone calls, e-mailed or used the forum set up by the College. Compare this to the incoming freshman class, the Class of 2012, who started a Facebook group proclaiming their status in December 2007.

Because the Vassar pre-Facebook era (P.F.?) was so short-lived, I’ll try to resist using the phrase “back in our day,” tempting as it may be. But the more ingrained in our daily lives the social networking site becomes, the more difficult it is to imagine how we once made do without it.

During freshman week 2004, the Class of 2008 resorted to an actual physical book of photos of our classmate’s faces. If you wanted to know who your friend’s boyfriend’s roommate was, you could look up their name and see their high school senior photo and that is about it. Topics such as favorite music and movies were reserved for second dates, not basic given knowledge or standards of evaluation.

Even after many of us signed on to the virtual Facebook, information was pretty sparse. Our first profiles consisted of little more than a representative photo and contact information. No photos, no events, no status, no gifts, and definately no jetman.

In fact, what first attracted me about Facebook, versus then-favorite social networking site MySpace was how calm it was. There weren’t any advertisements, no messages from anonymous sketchy people hitting on you. It was a closed environment—reserved for liberal arts students. It was almost utopic; we felt safe.

Which explains, perhaps, why successive changes to Facebook have caused near-revolts from students at Vassar and nationwide. After about a year, the Web site opened to high school students, giving rise to the formation of groups such as “It was dumb to open facebook to high school students” and “Facebook ain’t no fun no more cuz High School Students can get on!” In September 2006 the site opened to all internet users and added the controversial news feed. Nearly half a million student users have joined or formed groups protesting the feed.

We signed on because we want to share information, but just how much information we should share and with whom has always been a point of contention. How many of us students have been “friended” by a parent or other adult and felt a level of discomfort? It’s almost as though that person had shown up at a TH party and asked to do a tequila shot. Seniors might want to reconsider their possessiveness, however, since we too are now entering the pool of adult Facebook users.

Facebook dependency is akin to the many other technological addictions these years have brought. It seems odd to imagine locating friends in the library or mall, for example, without texting them. We find the concept of procrastination without YouTube confusing. Many of us have rarely opened an encyclopedia, but we rely on Wikipedia as an infallible source of information. Gone are the days of the whiny livejournal—but blogs have established themselves as news sources.

There are positive and negative effects, of course, to the amplification of our virtual lives. Many argue that it distances us to what has up until now been considered true human interaction. Because we are constantly interconnected, we are rarely ever alone with ourselves. However, our best friends are never farther away than a text, e-mail or instant message, something that will be a comfort as we disperse.

We are the multi-tasking generation, aptly streamlining and prioritizing our tasks, but focusing on a single thing can be a challenge. If we cannot see our best friend once a day, that’s probably okay. If we cannot check our e-mail once a day, it may cause an emotional breakdown.

Each incoming group of Vassar students will see their own changes and have their “remember-when” moments. Facebook did not make our college experiences good or bad, just different from those that came before. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go change my status to “graduated.”