By Menachem Wecker
With national news stories referring to a “push … to defriend Facebook” and to Facebook’s “demise” amid a user “exodus” and “privacy minefield,” some of the anti-Facebook rhetoric has found its way to GW.
One of the university’s most new media savvy professors, Henry Farrell, associate professor of political science and international affairs, recently deleted his Facebook account just shy of its third birthday, citing Facebook’s lax privacy settings which expose users’ updates to increasingly larger networks of users.
“I had been getting increasingly annoyed at having to reset my privacy controls,” he says. “It became more and more obvious that Facebook was gaming its customers to try to make them reveal as much information to as many people as possible.”
Dr. Farrell, who says he has not regretted deleting his account for a moment, is an expert user of and researcher on social media. He and two GW colleagues co-authored a paper on blog readers’ political affiliations, and he maintains an academic blog wiki page. He co-writes two blogs: The Monkey Cage and Crooked Timber, which the Guardian called the 33rd most powerful blog in the world.
According to Dr. Farrell, Facebook can prove particularly tricky for professors who want to maintain a professional relationship with their students. He says it is “weird” for professors to befriend students on Facebook. “Friends don’t usually grade each other,” he says. “I don’t especially want to know about my students’ private lives – it would be a distraction from teaching them – and I imagine that they don’t want to know about mine.”
Professors don’t want to be seen as imposing their political views on their students. “I try to create a clear divide between the arguments I make in class and the arguments in which I engage in public debate,” he says.
When Kim Acquaviva, assistant professor of nursing education, joined Facebook in summer 2008, she also decided not to “friend” current students. Though she would like to incorporate Facebook and Twitter into a future research project, for now, she keeps her social media handles separate from her research and teaching.
Dr. Acquaviva, who signed up for Facebook hoping it would help her maintain contact with family and friends while juggling teaching and research, calls the current privacy settings on Facebook “ridiculously complex.”
“The privacy settings force privacy-savvy Facebook users to spend an inordinate amount of time making sure their privacy is adequately protected,” she says, “and put privacy-naive Facebook users at the mercy of the Facebook administrators.”
Though she knows of a handful of people who have quit Facebook, Dr. Acquaviva plans to continue using Facebook and says the majority of her friends, colleagues and family members “seem resigned to the fact that a flawed Facebook is better than no Facebook at all.”
Laura Feigin, B.A. ’10, and Eshawn Rawlley, B.A. ’10, are also resigned to using Facebook despite concerns.
According to Ms. Feigin, a master’s candidate in English, Facebook, once a “rite of passage” for high school students accepted to university, and initially, only students at certain universities could sign up. Facebook later allowed people with email addresses from any university to join and has since opened its doors to anyone with any email address. “The integrity of the website has ultimately been compromised,” she says.
Some of Ms. Feigin’s friends have said they intend to boycott Facebook, delete their accounts or petition Facebook to protect their privacy. But most do not seem willing to sever all ties.
“I think a major reason why people haven’t decided to bite the proverbial bullet and delete their accounts for good is that we’ve become so accustomed to being able to rely on Facebook for the majority of our remote communication,” she says. “Moreover, deleting an account won’t even take our information out of Facebook’s servers, which makes a protest seem moot.”
Ms. Feigin, who says she has “one foot out the door,” is not sure if she will quit. “For many months, I’ve found myself signing in less frequently,” she says. “I still use it, but I’m not sure that the quality of my life would change without it.”
Mr. Rawlley agrees that Facebook has lost his generation, now recent graduates. Despite many changes it billed as “improvements,” Facebook’s platform has remained fairly static, he says.
“For many of my peers, Facebook has become merely a depository for all the pictures we don’t want or need on our computer’s hard drive,” he says. “I could get nearly the same utility out of a Flickr account.”
Mr. Rawlley says it has turned into “another chore in the information age” and a series of annoying applications, ‘pokes’ and useless fan pages.
Mr. Rawlley says he has no idea who started the “quit Facebook” movement or how it started, but he sympathizes with its goal. “The Facebook generation has decided it is no longer enamored with a social networking site it no longer recognizes,” he says, a site that tries to turn the entire internet into something users can vote on by clicking “like” or “dislike.”
But he fully expects Facebook to stay in business. “I don’t think this effort will succeed in making anything close to a dent in Facebook’s sign-up numbers,” says Mr. Rawlley. “It’s just too big to get rid of. Score one for old habits.”
Ryan Dellolio, web developer at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, says Facebook’s “blatant disregard for privacy is troubling.” According to Mr. Dellolio, Facebook is still “going strong” at GW, though, and very few of his friends and colleagues are deleting their accounts or letting them go dormant.
Grant Schneider, assistant to Elliott School of International Affairs associate dean Douglas Shaw, joined Facebook in 2004, because his brother told him “everyone at college had it.”
“I won’t quit, because I feel like I’ve got a decent handle on the privacy settings,” he says. “I don’t think I know anyone who is quitting.”