Administrators, Academics Weigh Facebook's Impact on College Life

Mark E. Zuckerberg envisioned Facebook as a tool for students to create an online network of friends. This past summer, nearly a decade after it was founded, Stephen A. Turban ’17  used the social medium to connect with other classmates who were fond of the Mediterranean dip hummus.

Turban, then an incoming student, wrote a post on the Facebook page for the Class of 2017 about bringing hummus to his freshman seminar.

“It ended up being like, ‘Hope you’re taking this class. If you do, I’ll be the one bringing the hummus,’” he said.

Turban’s comment caught the attention of one of his fellow classmates, who shared his love of hummus and soon became his virtual friend.

“Literally for the next, like, two months until school started, we just talked about hummus on Facebook,” Turban adds. “We had like one message a day or two days. It was awesome.”

Turban, along with 97 percent of the freshman class, has a Facebook account. Since the creation of the social network, Turban’s story is not entirely atypical among Facebook users who have found friends, fellowship, and community at Harvard, even before they step foot through the gates of Harvard Yard.

While Facebook has undoubtedly made students at Harvard feel more connected, academics and individuals who have worked with students over the past decade are not sure whether it has truly brought the Harvard community closer together.

THE AGE BEFORE LIKES

Before Facebook emerged on Harvard’s campus, students socialized in ways both similar and different to that of current undergraduates, say Harvard administrators who have witnessed how the social network has shaped students’ life over the past decade.

Adams House Co-Master John G. “Sean” Palfrey ’67 recounts how, even 15 years ago, students used different means to reach out to each other.

“Every room had a phone that was working, and, in fact, in the beginning phones weren’t allowed in the dining hall,” Palfrey said. “You weren’t allowed to talk in the dining hall on your phone because it would disturb other people.”

Those rules—and the popularity of those signature red phones—disappeared as students began taking advantage of rapidly advancing mobile technology and email capabilities, Palfrey said.

“People at first didn’t really know what to think about email, but really pretty quickly it became a relatively serious communication device,” he said.

Initially, many students utilized Facebook as just another substitute for talking on the phone, Palfrey said. However, he adds, as Facebook grew to accommodate different forms of media such as photos and videos, students began to use Facebook to share their personal lives in the public sphere, an alternative to the business-like atmosphere of email.

Yet Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman ’67 said that when he was an undergraduate at the College—during the “dark ages,” as he referred to them—the core of the social scene was largely familiar to present-day campus life.

“There was a lot of hanging out,” he said. “People were pretty studious, but they would look forward in their free time once out of the library or once away from studying just to shoot the breeze. Oftentimes it was in your own suite.”

Similarly, Resident Dean of Ivy Yard Michael C. Ranen, who was a tutor in Winthrop House when Facebook was created, said that students in the pre-Facebook era simply used older social media services, such as MySpace and Friendster before that.

Even after Facebook was created, Ranen said, the nascent network was far from the expansive and dynamic medium that it is today.

“I would said that early use of Facebook was almost like a collection of friends,” Ranen said. “There wasn’t as much sharing going on,” he said.

ADDING MORE FRIENDS

Since that preliminary phase, Facebook has rapidly evolved, transforming the way that users can present, disseminate, and locate information about themselves, their acquaintances, and even the individuals they may never even.

This increased connectivity has shaped and continues to shape the lives of Harvard students from the moment they step foot on the Yard to well after graduation, and many Harvard affiliates say that the social network has helped foster connections and sustain relationships across the Harvard community.

For instance, last spring Facebook helped prospective students get to know each other before they arrived on campus. When a city-wide lockdown in April triggered the cancellation of Visitas, the College’s campus preview weekend, the Class of 2017 Facebook group “played a vital role” in connecting admitted College students with current students, Harvard Admissions Office spokesperson Amy A. Lavoie wrote in an email to The Crimson.

According to Lavoie, the hope is that the page, which was created by Harvard but is entirely student-driven, can allow students can get to know each other and ask questions.

Ranen, who presides over several freshman dormitories, said that he thinks the current freshman class grew closer due to the conversations and connections that took place in the Facebook group.

“They really did build their own community,” he said.

Facebook has also helped former students connect many years after their graduation. Dingman said that Facebook has helped his classmates reconnect.

“I’ve seen it with my classmates from college who have discovered one another many years after graduation,” he said. “It’s been through social media, and there’s been sort of an excitement about, ‘Well, let’s renew ties.’ Probably wouldn’t have happened if you had to dig up a first-class mailing address.”

Mikolaj J. Piskorski, an associate professor at the Business School who studies the effects of social media on everyday life, agrees, adding that photos and status updates help individuals stay in touch.

“Facebook gives people a platform to reconnect with other people,” he said. “People are apt at using the information that they have gathered on Facebook to start conversations.”

Research also has shown that platforms like Facebook have allowed for people to meet who might not have met otherwise, Piskorski said.

“We know that 20 percent of the new marriages in this country originate online,” Piskorski said. “About 50 percent come from dating sites, such as Match.com, and the other 50 percent come from sites like Facebook. Facebook has made a huge impact on how we meet people, both friends and romantic relationships.”

BREADTH OVER DEPTH?

At the same time, both academics and observers of student life at Harvard worry about the impact of Facebook on the depth and nature of student connections on campus. Many argue that students use Facebook for reasons other than expanding interpersonal relationships, leading to isolation, distraction, and inauthenticity on a platform that seems to encourage quantity over quality of relationships.

According to Piskorski, looking at photos and profiles of other people constitutes about 80 percent of the average individual’s Facebook activity.

And while Facebook has made it easier to not only access but also disseminate personal information, many feel that much of the information shared lacks depth, leading to more superficial relationships.

“I think what Facebook did was it enabled you to tell your friends and not-so-close friends more trivial things,” Palfrey said.

Ranen said that he has noticed that students often do not use Facebook as a means to connect with their immediate circle of friends.

Students can also use Facebook to present a disingenuous portrait of their lives to students who already feel inadequate, Dingman said.

“There’s another aspect of Facebook that I hear from freshmen that I think is very concerning, and that is that you’re more aware of the activities of a broader group of people regularly,” he said. “[Students] don’t usually post that ‘I’m having a miserable day and I got a B- in my Ec10 midterm and I have no plans for tonight.’ They’re more inclined to post something that they’re right out in the mix having a jolly time, and that means the person viewing is left feeling like, ‘Am I the only one without a robust plan?’”

Furthermore, administrators like Dingman worry about the consequences of Facebook and technology use more generally. What’s meant to create new connections oftentimes leads to isolation and alienation, said Dingman, describing a situation in which he witnessed every person in a room on their cell phones avoiding communication with one another.

Palfrey said that he feels that Facebook can fuel student procrastination, mentioning that current workshops on campus offer strategies for combating the incessant distraction of Facebook and other social media alternatives.

“I think pretty rapidly Facebook became a competitor to work as opposed to a tool for work,” he said.

Despite these caveats, all of the Harvard affiliates interviewed for this story agreed that Facebook’s impact, while perhaps mixed in its benefits, has been a powerful one.

“It’s a phase. It’s a significant phase,” said Palfrey, adding that “I certainly don’t think it’s the destruction of society or education or Harvard or whatever.”

“I think there’s no rolling it back,” Dingman said. “It is here to stay.”

—Staff writer John P. Finnegan can be reached at finnegan@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @finneganspake.

—Staff writer Jill E. Steinman can be reached at jill.steinman@thecrimson.com.