Facebook state of mind

As a new semester and a new year begin, now is the time to forge resolutions and commit to new paths of self-improvement and moderation. It is the opportune moment to remove soda from your diet, quit your nail-biting, and restrain yourself from ordering Hamdel’s number seven breakfast wrap past midnight. For this student, and I encourage you to join me, it is also time to quit Facebook.

Along with its innovations, the Internet has brought tremendous woes to Columbia’s campus, allowing students to play poker and peruse Amazon from the comfort of the classroom, oftentimes while class is in session. However, Facebook is more than your average frivolous entertainment, and it poses a much greater threat than saturating our class time with statuses that read, “My room smells like kettle corn x_X,” or pictures of car crashes plastered with the caption, “You Got Owned.” Unlike online games or catalogs, Facebook seems to be affecting the ways in which Columbia students think and communicate, both in and outside of the classroom, and (need I say it?) not for the better.

Last semester, I witnessed a fellow student say “LOLZ” to our professor during a classroom discussion. In one of my English lit courses, someone referred to the qualms of the protagonist as “whitegirlproblems.” A few weeks before finals, one of my highly intelligent TAs described his reaction to the harrowing events of a Shakespearean tragedy with the phrase “frowny face.” Ultimately, hearing such an expression employed by a staff member in the lofty halls of Columbia University was more discomfiting than the gruesome events of the Shakespeare play itself.

These words and phrases appearing in our classrooms indicate not only the stultification of speech but of thought as well. The purpose of a college education, especially one devoted to the liberal arts, is not to teach students what to think but how to think. If the aphorism is true, then we come to Columbia not to stockpile factoids or formulas but instead to discipline and develop our critical minds—to adjust and improve our perceptions.

However, rather than expanding our mental and spoken vocabularies and broadening our avenues of thought, Facebook is inducing the undergraduate community (and beyond) to limit its thinking by confining its language to hashtags and idioms. This is not conjecture—it is an observable and increasingly prevalent phenomenon on campus, and as we adopt the language of Facebook as our means of communication, we unwittingly restrict our thought process to a lexis befitting of an infant. Then, as we relinquish the task of speaking conscientiously or striving for any weight of voice whatsoever, we rid ourselves of the ability to think with any complexity, nuance, or independence. The connection between language and thought cannot be stressed enough. This is the distinct reason that the government of Orwell’s dystopian superstate attempts to limit the vocabulary of its citizens with the insidious implementation of Newspeak. As Orwell knew so well, to confine a person’s vocabulary is to confine their mind. Well, it seems that we don’t need the government after all, and that we are happy enough to enforce a Newspeak of our own as long as we can keep using the superlative social network free of charge.

To opt out of Facebook is to attempt to escape its side effects. It is an attempt to keep one’s head free of the fatuous jargon that pervades the site and, increasingly, our university. When an ungainly man drops his books outside of Butler and someone says “awksauce,” or when a professor walks to the front of the hall to cancel the lecture and your friend expresses his pleasure monosyllabically (“like!”), there is a problem. The reality is that as a result of Facebook, our campus is increasingly full of clichés and internet parlance, not just in speech but in thought as well—and the problem is that Columbia is the place where we came to escape these bovine instincts and verbal lethargy, not to indulge them.

The author is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in English literature.