There is safety in numbers. I think we all believe that. When we’re in a group, we adopt herd mentality; things we wouldn’t do before become personally acceptable if the crowd so dictates. One person wouldn’t think of storming a football field; when the stadium empties on to the field, the dynamic of what is acceptable in the eyes of group members changes. Not only does the unacceptable become acceptable, but the unacceptable can become the dominant mode. Of course, not all crowd-incited actions involve the changing of one’s personal ethics – a crowd can gather to lift a car off an accident victim, where one person might not. When we are challenged by the ethics of crowd actions, it is generally the curious, outlier actions they take that stick in our mind.
This brings me to a rash of news stories I’ve seen in the past few weeks, where university administrators have entered the “walled garden” of the Facebook, and delivered sanctions to students who have posted pictures of alcohol consumption. A big hat tip is due to my colleagues in the UNC Social Software Working Group, who came up with the idea of monitoring the news for interesting stories regarding the intersection of campus authorities and students regarding Facebook content. I’ve been doing just this for some time, and you can follow my work at del.icio.us/fstutzman/uncsswg – 158 stories and counting. The pathbreaking event involved student at North Carolina State University, and was quickly followed by an event at Northern Kentucky University. What sparked this post, however, was a event I discovered this morning, where the University of Missouri’s newspaper ran the story of BM* front and center.
M, the vice-president elect of the Missouri Students Association was singled out for a picture she shared on her Facebook profile; that picture was then reposted to print, and to the web. In the picture, the alleged Ms. M is drinking a beer while duct taped in a chair. It’s a funny picture. It’s a really funny picture. And it probably would horrify anyone who is happily in denial about campus life.
That brings us back to my reflections on our actions in crowds. The Facebook is a living, organic crowd in which students actively, and exhaustively, participate. The Facebook is a crowd mediated through the virtual sense, but in no sense of the word is the Facebook ‘virtual’ to students. It is a practical augmentation of their existing networks, and their participation effectively carries the weight of real-world actions in their crowd. Just as one might might act differently in a country club compared to a dive bar, the Facebook allows a comfortable “space” for a semi-public, semi-virtual existence.
I assume Ms. M, the NC State students, and the Northern Kentucy University students were all acting under the same assumptions when they posted their pictures; it is the same assumption hundreds of thousands of other college students share when they post similar pictures. While they knew these pictures were public, they were not identended to be public; as they were crowd participants, their actions were justifiable as crowd behavior. This is not to say that when posting drinking pictures, the students even cognize they are doing something “wrong” – the “me too” nature of participation on SNC’s, particularly the Facebook, almost forces this sort of behavior. At the same time, scandalous picture posting may be a risk students are willing to take to gain recognition and reputation inside the SNC – which in the Facebook almost flows transparently from the virtual to the real.
If you think back five, ten, fifteen (and so on) years, before digital photography was everywhere, before SNC’s, and you remember the (print, egad) pictures students would post in their dorms, what were they? Were they the sanitized, censored pictures of healthy student activities we seem to think ever *exsisted*? No, they were zany party pictures, almost all involving a ton of students hugging in front of the camera, some clutching cups. They were embarrasing shots of the roommate passed out. They were pictures of drinking at the pre-game tailgait. In essence, they were pictures of the things students thought were fun and interesting, but they also spoke to the identity of the student at the same time. Fast-forwarding from the past to now, we can clearly see that nothing has changed. The print pictures are still up on the dorm room walls, but the original digital copies are posted to the Facebook.
The case of Ms. M is so interesting to me because it is one of the first times I’ve seen a student’s private SNC identity so harshly leave the “walled garden” of the Facebook. As if one student had repeated a private conversation to a reporter, we the public are thrust into Ms. M’s life, and her life is undoubtedly changed as a result. I don’t take issue with the fact this happened – rules are rules, regardless – but it does make me wonder about where we go from here. There is something very special about a community like Facebook, but the potential reprecussions of one’s “crowd” existence becoming a public existence are worrisome.
At any rate, there’s no reason to think that this particular phenomenon will stop – but sooner or later, it will fall out of the news, and just become another facet of living lives augmented by SNC’s. Students are extremely resourceful, and they will find ways to deal with this and other challenges. With a hat tip to TC, though, 16 members of UNC’s police have Facebook profiles – and if you need any more proof that the virtual is the real, there it is.
Update – As it turns out, there’s a back story to this particular event.
Update Two – The day this story was released, someone on Missou’s campus stole over 1,500 copies of The Maneater, the campus paper that published Ms. M’s picture. A criminal investigation is ongoing.
Update Three – Names have been removed from this post. See the original story for names.
