At the end of my first two weeks as a freshman in college, I had exactly 38 friends. At least half of those were hot girls, because that’s how I rolled. I saw them almost every night, staying up into the late hours and reacting to their jokes with energetic laughter and flirtatious nudges. I had never been more popular in my life, and I gave myself little fist pumps, like, four times a day. Really, the only issue at this point was that I hadn’t actually met any of my friends yet.
Facebook was perfect for a guy like me because I could meet my new classmates without actually talking to them. I wasn’t shy or anything; I just had tendencies of nervousness and timidity in the company of others. “But that’s the exact definition of 'shy,'" you might argue. To which I say, stop talking like such a nerd. I would also say that I wasn’t being shy. I was being smart. My plan was to wait out the beginning of school and keep my reputation alive while everyone else got slaughtered by their own social awkwardness. It was like social Hunger Games, and I knew that if I were patient, I would eventually climb down from my tree, let out a colossal sigh for the wickedness of humanity and start making out with chicks. Or something like that.
The thing is, that strategy only half worked. There was a lot of sighing and not so much making out, or any social interaction for that matter. While I stood on the sidelines, many of my fellow freshmen began forming meaningful bonds spawned from mutual feelings of “I have no idea what the hell’s going on and neither do you.” They joined clubs and shared interests, career aspirations and beers. They began to really know each other. Because of my exclusive devotion to Facebook, all I really knew about my friends was that Dan Jacobs thought Anchorman was “pretty tight yo” and that Jen Wesker liked dogs, Dave Matthews Band and wearing string bikinis during “SPrinG BReaK 2003.” I also knew that Christina Babson told you to please stop after four pokes.
I further rationalized my muted social efforts by concentrating my stress on my academic performance. This was pretty easy, not because of any personal intellectual vigor but because of an achievement-oriented anxiety that gets firmly implanted in every teenager during the “college process” in high school. I had spent the previous few years being told by frowny adults that, when it comes to getting into college, it would be wise to inflate my GPA and make sweet love to my SAT prep books.
Now that I was in college, the stakes of my classroom performance felt even higher. The carrot at the end of the academic stick was no longer college admissions; it was now a much more vague (and therefore significantly more terrifying) incentive. Looming after college was the infinite void of adulthood, and there was the unnerving sense that my college GPA would dictate my future career, wealth and whether or not I had ugly children. It was like the college process all over again, except this time I was applying for life.
Read more: http://www.askmen.com/entertainment/austin/social-networking-for-college-students.html#ixzz25EEMWH1a
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