Emma went off to high school this year, and I won’t pretend I haven’t been keeping tabs on her–just a little bit. These things are just so easy to follow these days—the new sophomore boyfriend, the long list of assigned schoolbooks she’s already come to loathe, the stunning array of swear words she’s taken to throwing around.  All this information is at my fingertips, and all thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and the team at Facebook.

It’s convenient, yes, but beginning to prove a bit startling. My own arrival on the Facebook scene was midway through high school; since I was already part of an established circle of friends, I used it only to maintain friendships with those I already knew quite well. The charade of mass meeting-and-greeting online wasn’t a fact of life until I arrived at Brown last fall; thus, it became, in my mind, a “college thing.”

So you can imagine the bewildered sort of astonishment with which I’ve witnessed Emma’s high school existence taking shape online before my very eyes these past few weeks. Just as my class did while college freshmen only last year, fourteen-year-old Emma and her classmates are making and maintaining new friendships with the click of a mouse and growing increasingly attached to the parallel reality of Facebook-land.

It has me reeling just ever so slightly and tormented by questions of how far this can go. Can I expect to one day find myself, age thirty-something, feeding my five-year-old a nice after-school school snack and helping him friend his kindergarten classmates on Facebook? I shudder at the thought.

My own freshman year in high school was the last Facebook-free school year in memory. I made my friends in class and on the cross-country team that year, rode the train to and from school with them, went out to movies and football games with them on the weekends. Phone numbers and screen names were exchanged.  My teammate Jenna taught me how to send my first text.

These days, I look back on that year with something of a heightened attention to physical sensation – as if a winter wind cutting through my sweatshirt at dusk on the back field during practice, the taste of Dunkin’ Donuts hot chocolate on an autumn afternoon before play rehearsal, the sound of a bright blue locker slamming shut with a clunk, were the simple pleasures of a simpler time. Will I look back on freshman year at Brown and remember only the over-bright glow of a computer screen?

I’ve started to wonder, with a small trace of yearning, what a Facebook-free Brunonia might have been like.

And so, via Facebook (what else?), I turned last week to the class of 2008 – Brown’s freshmen in the days when I was a Lauralton Hall freshman, and the class who saw the arrival of Facebook firsthand that year—to find out what’s changed around here since the advent of friending, Facebook, flickering screens, and the internet at-large.

Across the board, sentiment among them is similar: irritation with Facebook’s “stalkerish” nature, a certain toleration for its pitfalls in light of usefulness in event-planning and long-distance contact, a love for complaining about it, and an amused memory of a time when the site was completely new and unknown.

“My impression was that ‘thefacebook’ (as it was then called) was a service provided by Brown itself. This seemed to fit with the whole send-us-your-photo-upon-admission thing,” recalls Brandon Diamond ’08. “Offering an index of student names, contact details, and snapshots made so much sense that it took me as surprise to learn that the school didn’t provide anything nearly as comprehensive as Facebook.”

Everyone I spoke with wanted to talk about the changes that have characterized Facebook itself, which have caused such uproar in recent years. Yeah, yeah, I thought, we all hate the new Facebook. What else is new? But as more and more responses turned up in my inbox, I realized that Diamond—who today is in the process of founding his own social networking site, socialkey.com—has it exactly right when he says, “Facebook solves a different problem today than it did in 2004.”

On a gray Friday afternoon in the bookstore café, Ed Cheung ’08 MD ’12 explains what many of his classmates have told me: that the site’s many changes have transformed it from a tool that fostered face-to-face interaction into one that is beginning to supplant it. During his freshman year, students posted their phone numbers and room numbers to their profiles so that friends could use Facebook to further seek them out. Today, Cheung says, “You just skip that whole step.” As far as event-planning went, he explains, “You would make phone calls!”

Evan Kalish, ’08, explains to me—in a Facebook message—that back then, the site was “a safe place to share your information, particularly because only authentic, real, other anxious Brown students were going to see who you were. Back then, we didn’t shield our profiles from non-friends like most people do today.”

“We also had a ‘Courses’ box – seriously, you input all of your classes and it knew what they were,” he adds. “Your friends could see what you were taking, and you could click to see all your classmates by course. It was beautiful.”

Alexander Dean ’08 remembers, “By far the central purpose of Facebook was to look up the relationship status and sexual orientation of people you were interested in. Now most people don’t even post that stuff, which, for me, defeats most of the point.”

Of today’s Facebook, Cheung says, “Now I hate it” – and all but one of his fellow ’08ers with whom I spoke expressed a similar dissatisfaction. That one exception is David Ellis ’08, who now works for Facebook and sees nothing problematic in the way of life the site has helped to create.

“Abstraction of social life can lead to alienation, and some classmates were addicated to MMORPGs,” Ellis tells me in a Facebook message. “But friends can help by imposing face(-non-book) time IRL.” I wasn’t following, but a quick Wikipedia search turns up some answers. IRL? Ah. Interesting.

In real life.

The Facebook of 2004 brought these Brown students together, by helping them find ways to connect in the real world. Since then, we’ve tolerated each of Facebook’s little changes, but those little changes have added up. These days, the more dangerous Facebook version 2009 is rapidly pushing us apart, to the point that we’re connecting less in the real world—blowing past each other on the street without even saying hello—all because we know we can access each other on Facebook when the need is more pressing and the timing more convenient.In the year 2009, there’s no need to maintain small relationships with kindnesses and cordialities—the site is doing that work for us, and we’re growing all the lazier for it.

My high school class joined Facebook halfway through high school. Thus, we joined as a community already shaped by two years of real -time spent in one another’s presence. The Facebook that Emma will know over the next four years, and the Facebook of my college years, is one which handily relieves its users, faced with new places and unknown people, of the effort required to forge a close community and create an individual identity within it.

“Can I imagine my time at Brown without Facebook existing?” asks Dean. “Easily. I doubt it would have been very different at all.” His classmates express similar confidence that the site, whatever its benefits and whatever its downsides, doesn’t make that much of a difference in the way the real world runs. “Overall, campus culture wasn’t revolutionized, but it likely suffered due to the addictive nature of the beast,” says Rody Tadenev, ’08.

“It’s just different,” agrees Cheung. “And that’s okay, right? Everything changes. Brown is a very dynamic place and always will be.” He laughs. “Brown used to be mostly Republican back in the day!”

“It’s the people that makes Brown,” he adds. “I don’t think the goodness that I found has changed.”

And yet a hint of nostalgia creeps into these former Brunonians’ recollections from time to time.

“To me it’s really sad,” says Tadenev. “And I look back to the Good Ole Days in Hope College, before news feeds, Scrabulous, and Google searchability.”

For my part, I have to agree—and wonder why—if the changes to this site bother us so much, we continue to put up with them, even as they separate us from one another more and more with every passing day. I’m a little nostalgic myself—though it’s for a Brown I never really knew.

My suitemate tells me about Brown in the days when her father attended, when social interaction meant Pembroke women inviting Brown men to dine with them in the Andrews dining hall.

In the bookstore café, Cheung tells me about a friend’s father, who used to ride his dirt bike up the stairs of Sigma Chi and jump out the third floor window with his friends into snow banks. We both laugh as we wonder how long it would take, in today’s world, for someone to whip out a phone and post photos to Facebook.

On a Friday night a few weeks ago in ADPhi, no one’s following the 1920s theme precisely. In this pleasant convivial hodgepodge of eras, in this whirl of suits and dresses and jazz music, I can’t be sure quite where in history I might be—but everyone’s dancing with style and gusto, and there’s nary an iPhone in sight.

I look around and see a Brown I could have loved just a little bit more.

Emma wants to know when she can come and visit me. She’s dying to experience the college life. I can’t speak for college days of old—I’d like to have known them myself. But as for the college life I lead?

Well, Emma, the funny thing is this: with the click of your mouse, you pretty much already know.