It's hard to imagine the college world before theFacebook.com brought a new meaning to procrastination.
"I don't know anyone who hates Facebook," junior Austen Eadie-Friedmann said.
Despite Eadie-Friedmann's comment, there are some strong-willed individuals at Tufts who have refused to join in the Facebook frenzy.
"Everyone claims it's addictive, and I don't want to waste any more of my time in front of the computer," said junior James Fraser, a Facebook foe. "It's creepy," he added.
"I guess I just think that it's kind of creepy and stalkerish," junior Alaina Thiel agreed. "It's messed-up ... I think it's better to talk to people in person."
Other students were initially drawn into the Facebook's web, but later extracted themselves. One such student is junior David Czulada, who initially "succumbed to peer pressure" and put himself on Facebook, but says he has stopped using the service because "I don't need Facebook to know who my friends are."
Some students' opinions of Facebook have followed the reverse trajectory. Junior Thuy Le had an initial aversion to the site, and she refused to join until last month.
"I didn't want to join because it was something everyone was doing - it was such a craze; there was such hype," Le said. "Facebook creates a fake social circle - people you don't really know and just met at a party."
Now that she's given in and joined, Le has found elements of her initial opinion to be valid. "People from my high school who I didn't really know and hadn't talked to while we were in high school listed me as a friend," she said. "I'm not going to add you as a friend just so I can get as many people on my profile as possible."
Junior Liz Oo's Facebook experience parallels Le's. "I was a latecomer - I was hesitant to join it because it seemed like such a fad, and I wasn't entirely comfortable with facilitating stalkers," she said.
Ming Chow (E '02), who teaches the ExCollege course "Security, Privacy, and Politics in the Computer Age," said that "one of the big problems with Facebook is
privacy."
"Once your mug and information is available on Facebook, people will pester you," Chow said. "Sure, for many, this isn't a terrible thing at first. In fact, many people enjoy being contacted by strangers, especially alumni and students currently at your school. It is that 'coolness' factor that kicks in at first. But like many things in life, it gets old, and old very quickly. Then people will start forgetting about the service."
And once they do, they can turn to online networking sites that are alternatives to - and sometimes even mockeries of - Facebook. Such sites have also sprung up all over the Internet, and these sites have drawn members beyond college-age.
"Of course, once one person starts something new, another person will imitate, but will make things look different [or create] different features," Chow said. "Same deal with all the alternatives to Facebook."
One of those alternatives is Catch27.com, a site that's the creation of E. Jean Carroll and producer Chantelle Farmer. Carroll has served as Elle magazine's "Ask E. Jean" columnist for 11 years, and Farmer is an Emmy-nominated "Saturday Night Live" writer.
To those with opinions like Thiel's - she dislikes Facebook in part because "people use it to look at pictures of and find out information about people that they don't even know, just as entertainment" - Carroll and Farmer's site is even more repellent than Facebook.
The site abandons all pretenses of Facebook-style community-building. (Its motto? "Catch27: Your social life is a game, are you ready to play?") The idea behind the site is that people are trading cards, and the point is to try to get the coolest pack. Invite friends, buy friends, trade people: it's like baseball cards, but a little more grotesque.
When members join Catch27, they categorize themselves into a card suit, the choices of which include "Jock," "Slut," "Brain," and "Rebel." Junior Edith Elliott, who is currently studying abroad in Spain, is a member of the website's public relations team. Several other current students have thrown themselves into the Catch27 fray, as have some alums.
International alternatives to Facebook are taking off as well. One such site is Orkut.com, which has over four million members, most of whom live in Brazil. On the site, editor Gavin Tachibana took a guess as to the reasons for the popularity of online networking sites.
"We live in a time where isolation and modern society are rapidly converging. In the past, we might have spent more time with family," he wrote. "But now we spend much of that time alone, leading to the accelerated use of activities meant to fill our 'dead time': cell phones, video games, television, the Internet, and for those so inclined, the Orkut site itself."
Some students haven't joined Facebook exactly because they don't have the "dead time" Tachibana mentioned. One such student is senior Jennifer DeNardo. "I have too much to do," she said. "I don't have time to give myself another means of procrastination!"
DeNardo, however, anticipates that she will join Facebook before long. "I'll probably join before I graduate, because once I leave Tufts, it'll be a good way of finding people and keeping in touch with people."
Tufts alumna Bonnie Rose Schulman (LA '04), though, has resisted the lure of Facebook even after graduating.
"When I was at Tufts, I just never got around to opening an account, maybe partially because I knew that it would drag me into spending even more time in front of the computer," Schulman said.
Now that she's out of college, Schulman finds Facebook to be more of a friendship hassle than a friendship helper.
"I guess I just feel like I have enough trouble staying in touch with the friends I have now," she said. "While I would be happy to meet my friends' friends in person, I'm pretty happy with my friend status as is."
