I found out about this when my girlfriend’s Facebook newsfeed exploded. Ilya attended her high school, and neither anyone who knew him in his pre-college days nor I thought that this was anything more than a local affair. He was just a hometown kid whose life took a tragic turn, and Facebook users, as they’re wont to do, were spreading the word and posting their own thoughts on the situation. One read, “he was a person, not a headline.” But that doesn’t make his story any less applicable to anyone our age. We can still learn from Ilya.

I was confused that his death was being treated as anything more than a barely-noticeable blip on the social networking scene. I, as well as many others, had never heard of Diaspora* before his death, and its story is, so far, singularly unremarkable. In 2010, four NYU students were upset by Facebook’s privacy policies and set out to make a social networking site with a system that better enables users to control who sees what. It raised its startup capital using the site Kickstarter—a site that solicits donations for creative projects—and is currently in a very early stage of development. The project is apparently experiencing financial difficulties, as last month the Diaspora* Foundation (which develops Diaspora* software, but not the independently-controlled community) started a new fundraising campaign.

I don’t pay particularly close attention to the social networking scene; Wikipedia has a list of more than 150 “notable, well-known sites,” most of which I haven’t heard of (including Diaspora*). But I like to think I’m not completely out of the loop, and Diaspora* never registered on my radar. The story here seems to be that the largely unknown founder of a largely unknown and potentially failing Facebook competitor died.

But that’s hardly news at all, and certainly doesn’t merit the national attention it has garnered. In fact, Zhitomirskiy’s death is a human-interest story, presented in the guise of news, but one that is no less valuable for that. By all accounts, Zhitomirskiy threw himself into Diaspora*. “There’s something deeper than making money off stuff,” Zhitomirskiy said. “Being a part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.” Diaspora* was that “stuff for the universe,” and according to Finn Brunton, a teacher at NYU involved with the project, Zhitomirskiy spent nights “sleeping under the desks because it is something that is really exciting and challenging.”

An official statement has yet to be released as to cause of death, but police are confident that Zhitomirskiy committed suicide. The picture painted by the media is of a tireless young man, toiling, he believed, to benefit humanity. The implicit message is that the stress finally got to him; the long nights never leaving the makeshift office and the financial difficulties weighed too heavily upon him, and he took his own life.

It is a message applicable to all of us here at Washington University. The academic demands are at times staggering, and the pressure to excel, from others and ourselves, can be overwhelming. It is important to remember that the courses of our lives will not be determined by this or that test, and that long hours of feverish study, day in and day out, are detrimental to our mental health. We are young, and we must not forget the value of taking a break, relaxing, and if only for a little while, allowing our cares to slip away.

Courtesy of Google

Google’s social networking site, Google+, is still trying to gather a following on campus following its summer launch.

Many University students have elected not to start Google Plus accounts, or simply do not use them.

Still, since its launch this summer, Google’s new social networking site has accrued over 40 million users.

“We are amazed at how fast Google Plus is growing, but Google Plus is still a

project,” Iska Hain, a Google spokesperson, wrote in an email to Student Life. “This is just the beginning, there is a lot more to come.”

Many students who do use Google Plus complain that there are not enough other users.

“No one that we know [uses Google Plus],” junior Stacy Berg said. She noted that the social networking site would be more desirable if more people that she knew were Google Plus users.

According to Hain, Google Plus is introducing marketing initiatives to build brand recognition on college campuses.

However, some students said that Google Plus doesn’t live up to the hype.

“I thought it was going to be more popular, and I thought people were actually going to use it. Maybe I just don’t know the right people,” senior Rebecca Salisbury said. Salisbury joined Google Plus over the summer to connect with friends.

While many students were deterred by the lack of Google Plus users, some were impressed with the functionality of Google Plus.

“My friends and I stumbled across [Google Plus], … and we decided we wanted to try it out. I like the interface better [than Facebook’s], but there just aren’t enough people on it, so I stick to Facebook,” freshman Neel Erickson said. “Few people know about it and a lot of people still think it’s an exclusive thing.”

According to Google, user practicality is a priority.

“Google Plus aims to make sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world,” Hain wrote. “In the case of college students, Google Plus is particularly good for sharing specific information with specific groups of people.”

Some students said that Google Plus doesn’t offer anything new to the social networking scene.

“I feel like it’s a copy of Facebook,” sophomore Kevin Sun said.

Google hopes to change this conception by informing potential users of the unique features Google Plus has to offer, which center around its connection to other, more popular Google applications.

“Google Plus is more than just a social network; it will have an impact on how people interact across all of Google,” Hain wrote.

Many students, though, haven’t felt the need to join Google Plus.

“I heard that Google Plus is really confusing to use, [and] not a lot of my friends have Google Plus,” freshman Eunice Koo said. “Unless Facebook makes drastic changes… I can’t imagine anything that would really get me to move to Google Plus.”

Audrey Westcott

You, being an enterprising student, realize the danger of being tagged in photos that depict you drinking or partying, so you decide to untag yourself to make sure that future employers don’t find your photo.

The problem is, that photo isn’t gone, nor is it inaccessible. It isn’t deleted or removed—it is there, waiting for someone with access to it to come and find it.

I’ll assume for the moment that all of us have Facebook profiles, or participate in some other social networking activity. I write columns for Student Life, so my opinions are out there on the Internet, ready for anyone who Googles my name.

No matter how hard we try, once something is put on the Internet, it is essentially there forever. Almost every site we use (Google in particular) indexes just about every search, and it is possible to find out just what people have looked for throughout their entire lives.

Have you ever tried deleting your Facebook profile before? You can simply get rid of it sure, but it isn’t gone, especially because it’s possible to log back in a few months later and pick up as though you had never stopped. Facebook doesn’t have to get rid of anything, because once something is up, it is in the public domain, and they have the servers to keep everything running.

The suggested course of action for legitimately erasing a Facebook profile is to actually individually delete every single post, photograph, message, like, etc. (a process which, for someone who has been on Facebook since high school, can take hours), at which point you can close your account without worry.

We all know the risks involved in this system. We are advised to make sure photos don’t go up that people who might employ us later can see, or to make sure we don’t do anything stupid or embarrassing, especially if it could become a problem later on.

The thing is, nobody actually lives their lives like that. Nobody can legitimately go out with their friends on the weekend, trying to have a good time, and actually avoid every single camera, in the misguided hope that embarrassing Facebook photos won’t come up.

As we start to live more and more of our lives online, it cannot reasonably be expected for people to explain every single action that they take. Everyone should be afforded a degree of privacy, and if that privacy isn’t available, then everyone else should try to ignore the things that don’t really matter.

It shouldn’t be up to students to make sure that they look like perfect snowflakes to everyone else in the world so it doesn’t ruin their futures. Everyone has a life beyond their application for a job, and you can’t expect them not to live it.

It is instead up to employers to come to the realization that the person they are hiring might not be the most perfect applicant that there ever was and accept someone who might have a drunken post or a few embarrassing photos.

It isn’t as though college students thirty years ago didn’t do the same things we do today. They drank, they smoked and they hooked up. They lived the so-called “college existence” too, some of them to a degree beyond ours. For them, there was never any way the rest of the world could find out, so it wasn’t as important.

It shouldn’t be our job to worry about how we are living our lives outside the workplace, so long as we come into our work with professionalism and dedication. Employers should start ignoring things on Twitter and Facebook because they should know a three-year-old photograph that I can’t get rid of doesn’t determine what type of person I am.

(Erin Mitchell | Student Life)

Social networking has no doubt changed the way college students interact. Information is shared more frequently, relationships are easier to sustain and knowledge is spread at unprecedented speeds. From sharing photos to dating, social networking sites have transformed cultural norms that were once taken for granted. Casual conversations with friends take place through instant message chats, and gifts and birthday cards are sent virtually to be displayed to a world of hundreds of “friends.”

Such modes of connection also take the guesswork out of communication. My sister was recently admitted to her top-choice university and was faced with the new task of finding a roommate. And so, she turned to Facebook.

After what couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes surveying different possibilities throughout her new school’s “Recently Admitted” Facebook group, my sister had selected her choice for a freshman year roommate. Scanning through the girl’s photos, she became a tour guide, dictating the details of her not-yet-friend’s life.

“She’s close to her family,” she told me with absolute certainty. “And she has a great group of friends.” The photos had changed from a family vacation to a group of smiling, embracing girls. “Look, her boyfriend is cute,” was her response to the boy linking arms with her might-be roommate. In the next photo he was dancing, “…and he seems like a fun guy, right?”

While my sister found her instantaneous judgment somewhat laughable and very possibly inaccurate, she couldn’t help herself. And who was I to blame her? I too stalked my would-be roommate and would-be best friends, all of whom turned out to be far from the people I had seen on their Facebook pages. The information, the photos and the wall posts are all there, acting as open invitations into sculpted, Facebook lives. How can we resist them?

And, if we can’t resist them now, will we ever? Facebook, or some updated version, will undoubtedly change the way we function as adults and real people outside of college. I imagine our relationship with social networking sites, as a generation who grew up connected to the Internet, will be very different from that of the older adults who currently use Facebook. Just as our college years were transformed by the use of such sites, our 30s, 40s and 50s (I’m too afraid to go any farther) may also reflect the more recent trends. Just as many of us set privacy setting to block our parents, family members and potential work prospects from viewing our photos, we may be doing the same to block out our own children. It is no longer easy to simply hide parts of our youth inside stacked boxes in a dusty attic where no one will look for them. The Internet is accessible and its contents traceable. With the capacity to “back stalk” to our college years, our past, which one day will seem like a lifetime away, will in fact be available literally with the click of a mouse.

Alissa is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. She can be reached via e-mail at arrotbla@artsci.wustl.edu.

So what’s the difference between these two similar words? It seems that “unfriend” implies merely undoing the Facebook action of friending someone, while “defriend” suggests removing a person from your life as a friend altogether. So perhaps, despite the popularity of “defriend,” “unfriend” may indeed be the more appropriate choice.

But with so many social lives centering around Facebook these days, especially among college students, simply unclicking a friendship really can be like defriending that person. By deleting someone as a friend, you are essentially saying, “Even though I have more than 500 Facebook ‘friends,’ I no longer care to have you as one of them.”

It seems unusual that people feel the need to unfriend anyone in the first place. Most college students do, in fact, have more than 500 Facebook friends, most of whom they probably rarely see or even speak to. So what’s the harm in having just one more—one more person with annoying status updates and vain photos? I mean, you’re already dealing with hundreds of others just like that.

Nearly a year ago, Burger King ran an experimental campaign (the “Whopper Sacrifice”) through Facebook, which offered users a free hamburger for deleting 10 expendable friends they had accumulated over time. After the campaign ended 234,000 friendships and even informed all the unfriended individuals that they had been dropped for a hamburger—or a 10th of a hamburger—they canceled it. But the question remains: With all the annoying and unnecessary friends we have on Facebook, what triggers Washington University students to unfriend?

Unless you’re a compulsive pruner who feels the need to periodically delete all friends you no longer have contact with, unfriending seems a little harsh.

Senior Michael Clerkin admits to unfriending someone only once. This someone was involved in perpetuating drama caused by a breakup with an ex—unfriending in this case certainly seems justifiable.

There may also be some people who you simply don’t have the patience for. For example, Compulsive Updaters, or people who updates their status every three to five minutes, may fall in this category. Sometimes you wish there were space on your screen to read about others’ status updates, thus making unfriending necessary.

Then there are also the Attention Seekers. These people may not update every five minutes, but their updates go beyond what they just ate for lunch or where they are cramming for finals—Attention Seekers’ updates tend to be approximately one paragraph in length and are about the most traumatic or emotionally upsetting parts of their lives. Why they think Facebook is an appropriate medium to broadcast this material, no one will ever know.

The Vain Facebookers can be just as nauseating as Attention Seekers and may also merit unfriending. These individuals tend to have more than 1,000 photos of themselves on Facebook, all of which were posted and tagged by them. And these aren’t just any photos—they’re often photos of them standing in front of a mirror holding up a camera. Or photos of them with any obscure celebrity. Or photos of them wearing minimal clothing and flexing too many muscles.

Despite the many kinds of Facebookers who are actually worthy of being unfriended—or even defriended—most people just can’t be bothered. Freshman Mihai Rasinariu and sophomore Carissa Ferguson agree that when they find people annoying, they simply block their notifications rather than going through the hassle of unfriending them. As one student put it: Why burn bridges? Because when you unfriend, you may be unintentionally defriending as well.

As we move into the professional world, accompanied by worries about interviews and making good impressions, we sometimes forget the social Internet footprint that we leave. We’ve all read articles about how some people mess up on online social sites like Facebook and MySpace, and later we tell ourselves that we are not stupid enough to do such things. But upon closer inspection, most of us have some incriminating photos or videos which can definitely come back to haunt in the future. How can we prevent this in a society where we feel a need to put ourselves out there with programs like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube?

More importantly, we should take a closer look at the direction our generation’s society is going in. In this day and age, information that we put on the Internet can be a double-edged sword: We are easier to contact, but that means our info is also easy to find. But you say, “I only use social networking sites for staying in contact with people.” How many of your Facebook friends do you actually stay in communication with? (And no, an occasional “Happy B-day” post or a “Like” does not count).

We seem to be getting closer to one another technologically, but we are getting farther from each other regarding social correspondences. E-mails to friends are rare and written letters are almost never seen nowadays, yet we see a constant need to add more people on our social networks so that we can “remember” them.

Still, there are worse things out there than Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Remember the good old days when you had to have an AIM account or another instant messaging account to meet random people in chat room? Now, sites like Omegle enable us to start a conversation immediately without any input of information. My curiosity got the better of me when I checked out the site, and I began a conversation with a stranger. The ease with which we can meet strangers online today is extremely disturbing, but paired with the fact that we put our info out in cyberspace, they increase the danger of information falling into the wrong hands.

In the end, we still have enough of decency and sanity to realize that social networking programs are tools for safe enjoyment. However, Wash. U. students tend to forget that we live in a bubble that does not exist in the real world. So remember, as you leave the bubble to seek outside jobs, click the “remove tag” button on that photo that you barely remember taking of you kissing a Ronald McDonald statue.

Aditya is a junior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at asarvesh@artsci.wustl.edu.

Understandably, this trend has crept onto the Washington University campus. As Student Life reporter Eliza Adelson covered in “The Interwebs” last week, Wash. U. continues to take great advantage of this resource. Not to be outdone by the administration, however, some student groups have also created their own accounts and are Twittering away.

Student Union created one of the most prominent and visible Twitter accounts on campus.

“We tend to Tweet a lot,” sophomore Morgan DeBaun, SU vice president of public relations, said with a laugh. “We Tweet…an average of three times a day. It’s not just governmental, administrative or procedural items either. When Student Union got to tour the new dining facility, they sent constant update[s] with pictures.”

Twitter also promotes awareness about the goings-on of SU, encouraging transparency and allowing students to convey their opinions directly to SU, according to DeBaun.

In general, Tweeting among student groups on campus seems to be a relatively new phenomenon.

“We got one at the end of last semester, and we used it a lot over the summer,” said junior Kenny Hofmeister, one of KWUR’s two music directors. “It’s great for getting the word out. We’ll post something on our blog and link it on the Twitter.”

Twitter is in its infancy and still has several opponents on campus. Central among them is senior Gregory Allen, editor in chief of the Washington University Political Review (WUPR).

“We don’t think that very many people would read it,” Allen said. “The main age demographic that uses Twitter is quite a bit after graduating college, so it doesn’t seem like there would be a whole lot of value to us from doing it…[It] seems like it would be a lot of time expended for not a lot of gain.”

A New York Times article published on Aug. 25 of this year stated that only 11 percent of Tweeters are between the ages of 12 and 17. Considering the inverse relationship between age and technology, this appears to be a relatively low number.

In place of Twitter, WUPR’s Internet medium of choice is Facebook. Its Facebook page displayed 374 fans.

“Facebook was something that we saw as absolutely mandatory,” Allen said.

On the other hand, groups such as Student Life, SU and Eleven thrive on Twitter’s ability to disseminate information more frequently.

So what are some recommendations for aspiring Twittering groups?

“It’s useful for promoting events…it’s a promotional tool,” DeBaun said. “It’s also useful for just updating students [about what is going on with the group].”

Hofmeister said: “If you’ve got something you want to share with other people, then I guess it makes sense. It’s a good way to get information out there.”

Juicy Campus, a Web site that has recently become extremely popular at Washington University, facilitates the same kind of Internet bullying on college campuses nationwide, and it’s time we collectively stand up to this immature and harmful activity by making an effort to boycott it.

Though Juicycampus.com has some tame elements, including discussions about entertaining professors, good or bad class experiences and whether the University’s admissions office is telling the truth about its selectiveness, many threads on the Web site take on unavoidably hurtful topics. These range from discussing which freshmen are the sluttiest to which seniors are the hottest, or listing a person’s name and allowing the cyber-community to anonymously trash or praise that person. The topics and content on the site can certainly be quite painful for the individuals and groups publicly dissected on the thread, depending on how they react to their public humiliation. 

There is something about the anonymity of the Internet that allows otherwise respectable and reasonable human beings to verbalize their most hurtful and damaging opinions without concern for how deeply others may be affected. We are mature enough to take responsibility for our own words and actions. It is a shame that even Wash. U. students, who as a whole are such friendly and compassionate individuals, have fallen prey to the petty temptation of verbally destroying their fellow students on this Web site.

The University community should be a place where all students feel welcome and valued. Juicy Campus has the possibility to deeply alter the community and comradeship that we currently enjoy, and we should all be working to stop this from happening. By visiting this Web site, we only increase the potency of its pettiness. If we collectively refrain from using it, then posting there won’t be an effective way to express one’s jealousy, disgust or hatred. If you really need a way to let out angst or indulge in petty gossip, do something useful instead. We have plenty of engaging ways to spend our time that can beneficial to ourselves and our community, so there is no reason to sit at our computers and act like whiny preteens instead.

Digsby combines all of your instant messaging programs, e-mails and social Web sites into one window. Right now, I have mine running AIM, Facebook chat, my Gmail and my Facebook. It’s very handy. I’ve Facebook chatted more times since I got this program than I ever have before. I don’t have to open Firefox to check my e-mail or Facebook anymore.

At first, Digsby seemed like a winner, much like the last one I downloaded, Mojo. It was not long before I found the dark side of Digsby. And what a dark side it is.

Whenever any one of my friends does anything on Facebook, I am notified. New wall post? Bubble in the bottom left corner of my screen. New profile picture? Bubble in the bottom left corner of my screen. New status? New album? Did I get a message or a friend request? Bubble in the bottom left corner of my screen.

I can’t look away from these bubbles. I find myself reading everything that everyone is doing simply by virtue of the fact that my mini-feed (and more) is now on my desktop. And sometimes I click it.

That’s the worst. It takes me straight to whatever it was that I clicked on. I don’t even go through my homepage anymore. I don’t need to. I tried to write an essay last night. It took four hours longer than it should have because of Digsby making Facebook incredibly convenient. This article is almost a day late for more than a few reasons, one of which is Digsby.

Maybe, though, the problem lies with me. Maybe I am a Facebook addict. It’s certainly possible. I mean, even before Digsby I regularly checked my Facebook three or four times each day. If that is the case, though, Digsby is like giving a brown paper bag to a homeless alcoholic. It’s giving a used syringe to a heroin addict. It’s giving an elected position to Rod Blagojevich.

Is there a plus side to this? Well, Digsby seems to be incredibly convenient. It probably isn’t, but it seems to be, and that is just as good. And hopefully I’ll learn some self-control because of this. I think they say that exposure is the surest way to deal with temptation, and if they don’t say that, I sure hope it’s true anyway. It is only through dealing with my problem that I will be able to solve it.

Or I’ll just check my Facebook so much it bores me, and I won’t want to do it anymore. This is the most likely scenario. I can live with that.