U. looks into Facebook networking opportunities

Facebook announced new features Wednesday that will allow public organizations or businesses, such as universities, to create public profiles they can use to share content and announcements with subscribers via a public feed. These would function like the feeds listing updates from friends’ pages that currently appear on users’ homepages.

While Princeton does not yet manage an official page like Stanford, which tested the new feature in a partnership with Facebook, the University is considering the networking site as part of an expansion to social media, University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 said.

“Facebook is one of the things we’re evaluating. It is one of the many options,” Cliatt said, adding that the Office of Communications is currently in the process of researching several avenues of new media.

Though the University has not decided if it will launch the page, Edward Tenner ’65, a visiting scholar at the University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), said he sees a number of potential benefits of doing so.

“Facebook is a more attractive way to receive a stream of information,” Tenner said, adding, “You don’t have to visit each individual site to stay informed.”

This kind of communication may be a useful means of contact between the University and students.

“People are always on Facebook, and it’s so much more efficient,” Aparajita Das ’12 said. “People are more likely to see it than, say, the USG website, which is also great, but people just tend to check Facebook more.”

Joseph Hall, a postdoctoral research associate in CITP, said in an e-mail that he thinks the new feature “will definitely open up a ‘whole new angle’ ... of communication for higher education institutions to communicate with those interested in them.”

But Tenner noted that pages like Stanford’s haven’t “yet become the place for high-level exchanges of ideas.”

Hall voiced a similar sentiment, saying that the public profiles “will only be truly novel if these universities and such reframe their use of these technologies” so that they can be more responsive to the needs and concerns of members of the University community.

“What they might do, in addition, is to hire a ‘Princeton Facebook team’ that is responsible for leveraging the information from the Princeton network,” Hall said, adding that “this could be done well or very creepily (like surveillance) … [T]he University would have to fight the tendency to use this kind of access in non-constructive ways.”

Tenner noted that creating such a team would mean paying somebody for the expansion of public relations activity, since the University would still send out standard press releases and maintain a website.

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For students like Dinora Llamas ’12, however, Princeton’s homepage already fulfills the purposes a Facebook page would serve.

“I feel that if you’re already not interested in what the University is doing, this will not change that. If people are interested, they will read The Daily [Princetonian] or go on the website,” Llamas said, adding that the Facebook page might even detract from the University’s respectability in the eyes of those who don’t see Facebook as a serious website, “which can be a problem when it comes to prospective students.”

Still, Das noted that a public University profile could provide prospective students with a wider range of perspectives on the school in addition to the information they can find on various Princeton-focused Facebook groups.

“There’s also the possibility of [a Princeton Facebook profile] serving as a way for present students to encourage others to apply or, if they’re unhappy, to protest policies or current conditions,” Tenner noted.

Though the University may eventually decide against officially joining the Facebook community, the campus is already overwhelmingly plugged in to the popular site.

“Facebook is taking over academia … although I’m not sure that older members of the academy fully understand why or if it’s fun or ‘useful,’ ” Hall said.