The Boy Kings

me, in ponytail and sweatshirt, remotely manipulating the world from a laptop, armed with ideas about how the world shouldbe and the new ability to distribute them. From the laptop, I could write and distribute information faster than ever before. It was intoxicating to imagine, and Facebook’s sudden, faithful rendering in 2004 of the physical world into the virtual felt the same. What could you do, now that you could see and connect to everyone and everything, instantly?
    But what, also, could be diminished by such quick access? In the realm of ideas, it seemed easy: Who wouldn’t want to distribute and discuss ideas widely? However, in the realm of the personal, it seemed more complicated. What was the benefit of doing everything in public? Were there types of information that made sense to distribute person to person and mouth to mouth, rather than digital page to digital page? Is information itself neutral, or do different types of information have different values, different levels of expectation of privacy, different implications for distribution and consumption? Did I want or need to know, passively and without asking or being told, who went out and what they wore and who hooked up the weekend before? Should all information be shared equally quickly and without regard to my relationship to it? And, finally, and most important, as we ask whenever we begin a new relationship with anything, would this be good for me?
    Whether Facebook would be good for me in the long term was an open question, but in the immediate term it was, and rather quickly, to my surprise. It happened while I was perusing Facebook Groups, which I loved for their wealth of humorously delivered anthropological data. Reading them was much like being anthropologist Margaret Mead, but online, sitting on the couch in the comfort of pajamas and slippers. You could skipfrom the world of the lacrosse team to that of the small set of black Hopkins students, each with their own concerns and jokes and slang, in a span of seconds.
    In this, Facebook Groups seemed more fun and less creepy than reading people’s personal walls, which from the start had a slight, unseemly quality of eavesdropping on semiprivate, out-of-context, easy-to-misinterpret, conversations. The interjection of distant voices on friends’ walls was always vaguely unreadable, unpredictable, illicit. “Let’s play this weekend,” a girl would post on the wall of a guy I knew, suggestively, and it felt weird to read, not because I didn’t think girls liked him but because the utterance didn’t actually reveal anything that was particularly relevant or useful. A girl wants him, I now knew, but I already knew that. Lots of girls did. The technology invited me to speculate about whether he wanted this girl back and whether they would go out and what would happen next, offline, all of which was really, in the end, irrelevant to be speculating on in advance. If two people like each other, they’ll hook up, if not, they won’t. All this noise was just noise, but a very present noise, a noise that we all, now, needed to consume, whether we cared to or not. In those cold November days, with the winter quickly coming on, there wasn’t much else to do but watch and attend, curiously, to this new system that was just beginning, with a vengeance, to bring us online and publish the slightest social vicissitudes of our lives—the fact that someone likes us, the fact that we may be attending an event—to the world, for everyone to wonder about.
    One such November day I discovered a group called “We’re going to Brazil and you’re not, bitches,” referring toa Hopkins-led trip to Brazil that was happening a few weeks later. The group, like most Facebook statements that are about trumpeting some aspect of a person or group’s identity, had no other purpose than to state that this group of students was going to Brazil and everyone else was not, bitches. My first thought was “Why didn’t I know about this trip?” and then I recalled that without a public space outside of classrooms and the stacks, it was nearly impossible for Hopkins to distribute information about extracurricular activities. My second thought was, “I, too, am going on this trip, bitches.” I mean, why not? I had nothing else to do.
    I went straight to the campus study abroad office and asked them to put me on the Brazil trip, though it was only weeks away and they’d already processed everyone’s visas and