Facebook.com: Preparing Future Leaders with Ignorance
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Introduction In February 2004 Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard University undergraduate student, started the website and the revolution Facebook.com. The exclusive social network based in academia has moved from being a Harvard online student directory to being one of the most important web sites on the internet reaching 2,100 colleges campuses and 7 million users.1 This site, ranked as the 7th most trafficked on the web, is a place where students in college get their own web page to create a profile that reflects their interests, friends, school information and photographs.2 Although this community is a good way for students to stay connected, it is also a breeding ground for views on gender and normativity. Facebook.com is a site that has its roots in the heterosexual binary and I plans on showing that. I will argue that there is an obvious acceptance of heterosexuality as a lifestyle in the Facebook.com community and that any queer lifestyle is ignored. I do not profess to know the actual motivation behind Zuckerberg’s invention, only what Facebook.com is intentionally or unintentionally doing to students and members of the community. I will provide an overview of the theory that will be used to form the argument against Facebook. com. I will then lay out a short history of sexuality in the United States starting with the midtwentieth century and the roots of corruption in views of sexuality that exist today. I will also show how heterosexuality became even more mainstreamed during this time. An overview of Facebook.com and its features will also be present in the paper. Finally, the theory will be applied to Facebook.com to help understand the problems with this social web community. Facebook.com, as will be shown, binds members into conforming to particular gendered norms that in turn shape the college student’s mind when thinking about particular gendered ideas. The community is based around dating and a few sexual innuendoes that all find their home in the heterosexual binary. The site offers a minimal amount of creativity for the members to work with and the options that are offered are ones focused on a very narrow view of sexuality and being. The online Facebook.com community is centered around the members, most commonly college students, who present their lives and personalities through the guise of the site. The connections that occur throughout each college in Facebook.com set standards for the students logging on each day in what they should put in their profiles and what they should share with the public. Generally, the things that are being shown through the profiles not only include interests, but also lifestyles. These lifestyles are of the college type—partying, friends and even schoolwork. Although each separate Facebook.com page includes different things, the norms that the campus accepts are seemingly still adhered to. For example, when the web-based community was opened to Otterbein College, the school I currently attend, in 2005 the response was overwhelming. Today, there are around 2,500 Otterbein College members of Facebook.com from a college that only has around 3,100 students.3 Although some of these members may be alumni of Otterbein, it is still clear that a majority of the students that are currently in school are part of the community. Although
aegis 2007
Colleen Deel
