I have been Facebook free for a year now. While I liked having access to my friends' pictures and knowing what was going on in their lives, I noticed that I had a habit of assuming I knew things about my peers because of something I'd seen their Facebook profiles. When I had a Facebook, I had far too much access to information about that guy in my drawing class, or that girl who spilled a drink on me at a party that one time. I could go to Facebook and find out who they took to senior prom, what friends we had in common, what their greek affiliation was and what their political beliefs were.
Obviously, this got me thinking about how I might be perceived from my own online presence. What assumptions were people making about me because they saw it on my Facebook? Did that guy I met at the bar last week know that I went to Israel two summers ago because he clicked through my photo albums? Did he know who I had dated in the past or that I was leaving town this weekend?
This came to my attention when I returned from study abroad in Italy during my junior year. Throughout the semester, I put pictures on Facebook as a way to update my family. But when I returned to campus, I realized that I had little to relay to my friends. I would begin a story, "This one time in Amsterdam..." and I would be interrupted by, "Oh yeah, I saw that on Facebook."
This sort of information - study abroad pictures, conversations between Facebook users, religious preferences - is freely available to friends via Facebook. When I deleted my profile, I had over 1,000 friends, many of them DePauw students. This campus is small, and information spreads easily through word of mouth. It's difficult to keep anything private here. But add Facebook into the mix, where rumors can be supplemented with pictures and wall posts, and it becomes virtually impossible to keep anything quiet.
I'm not against social media in general, however. I have a Twitter and an Instagram. But these types of social media are more contained. They allow one photo or thought out into cyberspace at a time. I don't think that anyone goes to someone else's Instagram account and assumes they know everything there is to know about them by what filter they chose. As for Twitter, I use it as a news source, rather than a way to access information about my peers.
And on top of all this, Facebook, more so than other kinds of social media, is a time suck. When I deleted mine, I calculated it out - I guessed that I spent a half an hour on Facebook a day. That's three and a half hours a week and 182 hours a year, which comes out to be just over a week a year. That was a massive chunk of my time to dedicate to peering through the virtual window into other people's lives. I'd rather take that time to focus on my own.
- Chapman is a senior from Lake Bluff, Ill. majoring in English writing.