Editorial: Don’t experiment with Facebook

Imagine if Pitt blocked Facebook for a week. It wouldn’t be Doomsday, but …

Let’s… Imagine if Pitt blocked Facebook for a week. It wouldn’t be Doomsday, but …

Let’s outline a plausible scenario. Well, for starters, the nature of the on-campus workweek would change tremendously. On campus at least, no more would most students find solace from grueling hours of class inside the security net of scouring their friends’ profiles. Without off-campus Internet to run back home to, first-year students would take the biggest hit, and the majority of students without cell phone data plans would follow.

For good or for worse, we’re ionically bonded to social networking. If ripped away from it for even days — let alone a solid week — overall focus during class time would likely dissipate into nothingness. Clouds of social ignorance — the lack of knowledge of goings-ons between friends, which we’re now so used to — would swallow students’ minds and pull them down to a dark place out from which no professor could dig them.

Diminished focus from the student body means less productivity for the University, at least for that Facebook-less week in particular. And since semesters are so compact, the productivity loss of a single week could effect significant consequences on final exam performance and general application of course knowledge later in life. At Pitt and at any institution of higher education, blocking Facebook could turn into a big deal — potentially.

But administrators at another Pennsylvania school don’t seem to think so. The truth is that for other college students in our state, the scenario is reality. And it shouldn’t be.

On Monday the administration at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology — a 9-year-old institution — blocked not only Facebook, but Twitter, MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger for a total of one week, according to an InsideHigherEd.com article.

Quoting the school’s provost, the article contends that the idea for the Facebook-less week was born out of a desire to teach students the impact social media has in their lives, not out of “a curmudgeonly antipathy toward Facebook.” In the eyes of the administrators, by taking away Facebook, they’re conducting an “experiment.” And it’s not like they’re testing the network.

Now we at The Pitt News are all in favor of the scientific method — it’s produced a wealth of knowledge across all fields that we can trust is accurate. But as respecters of good science, we also respect that when experiments involve human or animal subjects, a rule must be followed called the “Three R’s:” reduce, refine, replace. The rule’s essence is to only to use live subjects when absolutely necessary.

To Harrisburg University and all administrations inspired by its social media educational campaign: The Facebook experiment fails the Three R’s.

We could launch into lengthy discourse about how a modern university ought to grant its law-abiding students certain Internet rights, or contend that inter-generational misunderstanding actually birthed the policy, but this editorial has to fit on half a page. Flipping the lives of students upside down , and potentially seeding resentment for the university, clearly invalidates the value of this scientific “exercise.”

Look, social media sites clearly do have a major impact on young people’s lives. No kidding. It’s just that forcing students into this kind of self-reflection experiment is not the way to teach them that fact.