Wednesday, September 7, 2016 // The Statement
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Wednesday, September 7, 2016 // The Statement
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accounts for certain sites that ask for a Face-
book login, rather than providing the opportu-
nity to make your own or use a Google login.
But these difficulties are not enough to force
him to join the website with 1.7 billion users.

The distaste for online relationships, Ellison

said, is one of three reasons cited for people
who do not have Facebook accounts. Ellison’s
work focuses on the benefits of the social net-
work, but she pointed to other research being
done to specifically note why some people
choose not to have Facebook accounts.

“We’re at the point now where on a college

campus if you’re not on Facebook, it’s probably
because you have some reason,” Ellison said.
“It’s not just that you haven’t heard about it.”

The other two reasons cited by those with-

out accounts include fearing productivity con-
cerns and privacy issues — as Ellison puts it:
“what one particular company is doing with
my data once it’s out there.”

LSA senior Katrina Rayment’s reasons have

shifted from adolescence to young adulthood.
At first, she struggled socially in middle and
high school, meaning “I did not want to adver-
tise how few friends I had.” Now Rayment has
plenty of pictures she could be tagged in. It’s
just that she sees Facebook as a waste of time.

“Other people have told me how much time

they spend on this one thing and that just
seems, like, really unappealing,” Rayment
said. “I already spend so much time wasted
browsing the Internet; I don’t need to add, like,
another distraction.”

The average person spends 50 minutes

every day on Facebook, according to The New
York Times. That’s more time than the aver-
age American spends on educational activities,
grooming themselves, house care and real-life
face-to-face communication, according to the
widely cited Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time
Use Survey. Of all leisure activities, only televi-
sion takes up more of our time.

For college students in particular, this can

manifest into a larger problem of procrastina-
tion. It’s a real issue — writing this article alone,
I frequently find myself opening up a new tab
of the site almost unconsciously. Facebook’s
distracting qualities are so prevalent that
researchers Adrian Meier, Leonard Reinecke
and Christine Meltzer at the Johannes Guten-
berg University in Germany came up with
aname for it: Facebocrastination.

Public Policy senior Graham Steffens said

Facebook began to “go out of style” when he
was a senior in high school. He hasn’t looked
back since deleting his in 2013.

“I definitely have more time,” Steffens said.

“The amount of time spent scrolling through
your newsfeed is incredible. You don’t realize
how much time it takes until you delete it.”

If students like Jermyn and Steffens are

fine without it, what keeps others logged on?
Ninety percent of those aged 18 to 29 use social

media, according to Pew. On college campus-
es, the primary way to hear about parties and
other campus events happening is through
Facebook invites. In my own experience, Face-
book Events and Facebook Groups seem essen-
tial for campus life.

Unsurprisingly, that’s the major drawback

for Steffens and those who are Facebook-free.

“I wouldn’t get invited to events where

other people would,” Steffens said. “It just took
extra effort to kind of go out of my way to make
sure I heard about those, or make plans with
people if you actually want to hang out instead
of just having like a third party to initiate that.”

Jermyn says to get invited to events he

either has to go out of his way to get the infor-
mation or depend on his friends for an invite.

“Even just social things, like if people would

be having parties or something they would
create a Facebook event, say: ‘I’ll invite you on
Facebook,’ and I would say: ‘Well, I don’t have
a Facebook,’ ” he said. “I probably missed out
on some social interactions because I didn’t
have a Facebook and I kind of just rely on other
people to text me if there was something going
on.”

However, not seeing events or social inter-

actions via Facebook isn’t all negative.

Steffens said he realized after leaving Face-

book the effect staring at photos of parties he
wasn’t invited to or vacations he didn’t go on
has on users.

“I have an overall positive experience with-

out it,” Steffens said. “The lack of FOMO —
that’s a big thing. People can get really stressed
out constantly looking at other people’s lives
and compare their own lives to it. Removing
that aspect, I think makes a happier person.”

Facebook’s inherent voyeurism, and the jeal-

ousy that can result from it, is often lamented.
However, Ellison, the social scientist, noted
that as a perk.

“Facebook is a window to staying connected

with friends in kind of a lightweight manner so
that they’re able to see what others are doing
and feel that there’s a connection even when

they’re not co-located,” Ellison said.

As interesting as that can be, Ellison notes

in the short term the feature can also aid in
building connections in real life. While non-
users like Christoph may not know what their
friends have been up to recently, Ellison says
users have conversation starters when they see
them in person.

“One of the ways that we talk about that in

our work is by making an argument that Face-
book serves as a social lubricant, and the idea
there is essentially the information that you
see on Facebook can then be used to kind of
make conversation happen more fluidly when
you do communicate through some other
channel,” she said.

Maybe a user sees a friend post about get-

ting a puppy or visiting a new restaurant; the
next time the user sees their Facebook friend
in person these are starting topics of conversa-
tion. This aspect makes Christoph understand
the appeal of Facebook; he said he never knows
what people are up to unless he sees them day
to day or makes an effort to reach out to them.

“My relationships are more stuck in the

timeframe that I’ve seen the person,” Chris-
toph said. “A lot of the people that I haven’t seen
in a long time I have no idea what they’ve done
in the last year or so, which is unfortunate. The
thing with Facebook is that with Snapchat you
can see what’s going on if you’re checking it,
but with Facebook you can see what’s going on
today and look back three weeks ago and check
out everything up until when they created it in
middle school.”

Yet Steffens’ feelings of FOMO associated

with the barrage of information still aren’t
unfounded. Psychology Prof. Ethan Kross
published a study in 2013 linking avid Face-
book users to higher rates of depression. His
researchers found the more people utilized the
social network throughout the day, the more
their mood declined.

“We find that the more users use Facebook

passively — i.e., browsing the site without add-
ing content — the worse they subsequently
feel,” Kross said. “We also have some data indi-
cating that one potential explanation for this
relationship has to do with jealousy — brows-
ing the site passively is associated with higher
feelings of jealousy, which in turn predict peo-
ple feeling worse over time. Some researchers
have speculated that this is because people
curate the way they appear online.”

Keeping in mind the curation factor Kross

referred to, the constant sharing can also be
too much. Christoph said hearing about this
stress from his Facebook-using friends was a
reason he never joined.

“I feel a little less cluttered,” Christoph said.

“I hear people complaining that Facebook is
boring and they don’t know why they use it.
I know people that get worried about putting
their vacation photos on Facebook and making

sure to share all their study abroad photos and
stuff, so it’s kind of like people feel obligated
to update it and keep their presence online
fresh and update everyone. For me I don’t
really worry about posting photos or Facebook
drama that’s happening. It’s one less thing to
check. I don’t have to look for Facebook mes-
sages.”

Here the benefits of Facebook become one of

its disadvantages — this rings true for college
students passively Facebocrastinating to avoid
studying.

A study done by Sven Laumer, an assis-

tant professor at Otto-Friedrich University in
Germany, validated my annoyance with Face-
book’s constant, banal notifications: Many
users see Facebook as a place of demands
rather than a space for interesting content to
be shared. Users complained of feeling social
overload when on the site because of its social
demands and obligations, such as wishing
“friends” a happy birthday, promote or share
content produced by other “friends,” contrib-
ute to their fundraisers or react to their sta-
tuses.

Jermyn currently doesn’t suffer from this

stress, nor does he foresee ever having to.

“I find that without having a Facebook, I’m

able to keep in touch with the people I really
want to keep in touch with,” Jermyn said.
“The other people who maybe I wasn’t as good
of friends with or whatever in high school, if
I really want to get in touch with them, I can
get in touch with them, but I don’t think that I
really need a Facebook to make sure that I can
do that.”

Sure, Jermyn will be the only classmate at

his high school reunion shocked at how his
classmates have aged. He may miss seeing
where his acquaintances went over Spring
Break, or hearing about so-and-so’s new job,
but he’s content. The Facebook-less are fine
without it; despite being disconnected online,
they’d still pass on an online interaction to one
face-to-face.

W

hen Will Jermyn was in seventh
grade, he did what many 2007 mid-
dle schoolers did — he set up a Face-

book account.

But unlike most other 7th-graders, the Face-

book Jermyn created was for his mom, not
himself. Jermyn, a Public Policy junior, used
his email to make it. He didn’t know many oth-
ers on the site at the time and thought it would
be too much effort to create a new email.

Jermyn has cycled through several new

email accounts in the nine years since then,
but he still hasn’t found a reason to create a
Facebook. As the popularity of the social net-
work grew and more of his classmates used the
site to organize events after school or created
groups for clubs, he considered making one
but found he was always fine without it. He
said he has realized at times that his life would
be easier with an account, but the extra work
that came with not having one — like having to
go out of his way to make sure he knew about
events happening — didn’t outweigh his feeling
that it wasn’t essential.

“I just never really decided to get one,” he

said. “There were definitely a lot of instances
where I was like, I should have one with differ-
ent clubs and stuff and different teams. Using
Facebook was kind of like a big way that every-
one communicated.”

Jermyn is outgoing, but prefers to stay in. He

has a good group of core friends, whom he says
he relies on to hear about things going on on
campus — whether they be events or the daily
doings of one’s friends. The ubiquity of Face-
book as a tool for communication is something
Information Prof. Nichole Ellison studies at the
University of Michigan. She said its popularity
and utility have made it a “common language,”
but also come with the drawbacks of the hav-
ing a life online: how much time it takes.

“Facebook is kind of one-stop shopping,”

Ellison said. “For many people, that’s where
all their friends are. So you have the cell phone
numbers of some of your friends, but not all,
or you’re on Snapchat with some of them, but
not all, but Facebook is kind of like a common
language. Facebook does of course have these
coordination features, like planning events,
that kind of lower the barrier to that kind of
work.”

I had the opposite experience of Jermyn:

In seventh grade, my mom set up my account.
Today, the way I utilize Facebook has shifted —
as I’m sure it has for most users as the site has
moved to expand. It’s gone from a place where
my double-digit amount of classmates post-
ed gawky photos and messaged after school
before I had a phone, to what is now essentially
a database of everyone I know. The ability to
“unfollow” users makes it more personable, but
the experience is less genuine. Though there’s
nothing which particularly attracts me to the
site, it’s hard to imagine life without it. I am

not a fan of memes or 30-second cooking tuto-
rials, nor do I enjoy flipping through tagged
photos of people from my middle school. Day
to day, Facebook for me is often banal. Log on,
see the same active users, hear about an event,
check my notifications, close browser. It’s not
an activity I want to do, need to do, or look
forward to doing, it’s something I just do. It’s
normal.

Even the activity of keeping up with 1,200

Facebook “friends” can be exhausting, with
the exhausting yet ultimately appealing voy-
eurism that is Facebook stalking. There is also
the issue of fretting about one’s own appear-
ance — the fundamentally fruitless concerns
over how many “likes” a new profile picture or
status receives. These are social anxieties that,
regardless of Facebook, we all experience, but
are amplified on the site.

Jermyn has never had to deal with that.

His friends are actually his friends, and he’s
not pretending to have a four-digit amount of
them.

“One aversion to Facebook that I’ve had is it

is very easy to connect with people and the idea
of having thousands and thousands of friends
or something — I don’t know if I ever really
liked that kind of idea,” Jermyn said. “For me,
I’m more about having a few close friends that
you text with and that you hang out with on
a regular basis instead of having this large,
expansive network that’s maybe people that
you aren’t as willing to hang out with frequent-
ly, maybe you see them like once every now and
then, but not on a regular basis.”

He added that if a club or a job required him

to make one, he would, but for personal use,
probably not. He’s content with the friends
he has in real life, and doesn’t understand the
appeal of having lots of “friends” online.

Yet Facebook seems critical; for many, it’s

hard to imagine a world without it. Whenev-
er a new social media app is created, it seems
Facebook ends up buying it — take how Face-
book Live emulated Periscope, or how mov-
ing Messenger to a separate app put it at odds
with other popular messaging applications like
Whatsapp. The site bought out picture-sharing
app Instagram in 2012 and recently launched
“Instagram stories,” mimicking the opera-
tives of Snapchat. According to a Pew survey
conducted in September 2014, Facebook is the
most used social media site.

That ubiquity has made lives like LSA junior

Hiro Christoph’s difficult, even in minor ways.
I was surprised he didn’t have a Facebook —
he’s an RA, known for being personable and
kind. Christoph seems like the kind of person
who would get hundreds of likes on his profile
picture. Influenced by his parents, who were
always adamantly against him having a Face-
book, he never logged on.

He noted that he has faced some difficulties

not having one, such as being unable to make

dis
con
nec
ted

By Emma

Kinery,

Daily News

Editor

It’s not an activity
I want to do, need
to do, or look
forward to doing,
it’s something
I just do. It’s
normal.