“Pulse shows popular listings and trends in the contemporary American collegiate social milieu as they belie our deepest collective and individual insecurities and lay bare the repressed turbulent longings and secret agonies that sear the very fabric of the tender souls of youth, in the last seven days.”
-Facebook Pulse mission statement, first draft

“Pulse shows popular listings and trends on Facebook in the last seven days.”
-Facebook Pulse mission statement, as it currently appears

I know you’ve thought it to yourself before, as you browsed Facebook, alone, on a Friday night—“Jeez, look at all these losers who all listen to Dave Matthews. God, Dan Brown? These people are philistines, don’t they know anything about literature? Dartmouth kids are total sheep, all they do is like, conform. I took Psych 1, I know these things. I’m going to go smoke weed with the only person who understands me—Kerouac. And maybe watch some anime porn.” Well dear expert-on-everything-about-society-except-how-to-function-within-it, now you don’t even need to spend four hours a day “pigeonholing and deconstructing” your fellow students—especially hot ’09 girls—on Facebook, because Facebook’s doing it for you!

It is, of course, tempting to take a glance at Pulse and do the “Ha! I knew all Dartmouth students were the same!” routine. Pulse is misleading in that way—but this is not the case. The only thing these lists of pop predilections reveal is that Dartmouth admissions is doing just a sporting job of appeasing that fickle god Intellectual Diversity. That is to say, there is not necessarily a smaller contingent of Thomas Pynchon partisans or kids who dig that Clapping Your Hands band at Dartmouth, than, say, at Reed or some other hippie school (look at me willfully confusing marginalized subcultures and not caring)—but the great diverse mass of Dartmouthers makes that group less obvious, and it is therefore those handful of media masters that appeal to everyone that make the lists. Observe: Artiste A likes a bunch of movies with French titles, and also Fight Club. Dude B likes a bunch of Jean Claude van Damme movies, and also Fight Club (and probably also Journey. And polo shirts). Guess what? Fight Club is the third most popular movie among Dartmouth moviegoers.

So then, let’s not all be discouraged at once that our tastes mirror *gasp* the average state schooler’s. Our top five bands all score big across the board (pitiably, the average college kid still thinks The Killers and Sublime are in—Dartmouth, however, banks on the reliably retro-trendy U2 and Bob Dylan). Five movies overlap as well—and I could have sworn the coincidences were more plentiful still when Pulse first debuted back in December. Of course, the real separating factor between us and the barbarian horde must be the “Favorite Books” section—and therein we topple from our Ivory Tower like a, uh, dead baby or something from some sort of high altitude, and also not unlike my mom’s estimation of me when she reads this article and discovers I’m wasting my writing ability on treatises about Facebook and dead-baby jokes, in addition to “Classics” (“So what kinds of jobs, exactly, can you get with that major?”). Fully eight of our ten favorite books mirror those of our friends over at Small-Nation-Sized State U who write all those “ur a homo,” “hw come u never call meeee????” “I am outside your window, watching you shower as I write this,” and “Beautiful Truck” messages on our walls, the questionable a priori that links “cosmetic beauty” and “being hit by a truck” notwithstanding. Lest we feel too pedestrian, though, we would do well to note that Harvard, too, reads the very same books, except their list includes Lolita as well—which we totally read, but we didn’t list it because honestly, we thought Nabokov’s lesser-known works were more demonstrative of his stylistic genius, right guys?

But the Dartmouth/Harvard face(book)off is trite—how do we stack up against schools small enough or weird enough to have Facebook predilections that actually bespeak the nature of their student bodies? How about MIT? They’re probably all “ooh multivariable calculus club” right? Nope—their second most popular organization is “Dance Troupe,” not that I’m saying that’s any less lame or anything, though. Juilliard? Those kids are all about Brahms, Mozart, Stravinsky, and Mahler. I don’t really listen to any of those bands, but I have always thought that Mike Jones was a real musician’s musician and he didn’t make the cut, so go figure. I think the throw-down everyone really cares about is pretty obvious though—Dartmouth…vs. Dartmouth. Scholars have debated for centuries which institution (that is, Dartmouth College or UMass Dartmouth) is more deserving of the appellation, but no objective conclusion could be reached until Facebook, the sociologist’s (/pervert’s) wet dream, cropped up. While our second cousins down south have access to some intriguing extracurricular options (“Best Buy” and “Stop ‘n Shop” would never get past the first stage of COSO approval here), their entire campus became tragically suspended in the space-time continuum circa 1996, such that bands like Sublime, Green Day, Incubus, and 311 (yes, 311—I meant “tragically” with the full force of the word) still dominate their airwaves. Speaking of time travel, the only thing Pulse is missing is Billboard-esque “Do you remember the Facebook interests of…” sort of hit list that would let us compare, say, Dartmouth 2006 with Dartmouth 1906 (Interests: “fisticuffs,” “decency,” “snuffboxes,” “hanging out with the dudes…all the time”; Groups: “We All Went to Private School, Harlot!” “Blue Staters Supporting the Secession of the Confederacy”).

Really, though, the most revelatory and hilarious part of Facebook’s new gimmick has to be the “Current Trends” section, in which “winners” and “losers” in each medium are adumbrated. This week, five students woke up and decided that Jay-Z was big pimpin’, while six wished to send the Foo Fighters a clear message, namely that they will never, ever step out from the long shadow cast by Nirvana (Pantera, meanwhile, remained consistent with ten fans). Oprah also lost ten adherents, every single one of them switching their allegiance to “Flavor of Love.” Esoterica (or, possibly, pretension) polled well this week, with Everything is Illuminated, The God of Small Things, and Siddhartha chalking up significant gains. The Bible suffered a lackluster week, though its two-man decrease probably speaks more for the metaphysical crises of two freshly-minted agnostics than for any overarching cultural trend (take heart, though, Good Bookers—the Bible still leads Origin of Species 192-6). Six disillusioned right-wingers voted no-confidence on College Republicans, while Young Dems mysteriously surged with eight new bright-eyed idealists, dreams yet uncrushed. Perhaps most bemusing of all is what compelled four people to reflect for a moment and then think, “All this time I’ve been trying to tell myself, and the world, that I have been interested in ‘camping,’ but I just can’t live this lie anymore.” Such was also true of “baking,” though you wouldn’t know it if you lived in Wheeler, as I do.

Facebook is endlessly fascinating (where “fascinating” is a euphemism for “addictive”) for me because it has to be endlessly idiosyncratic. A Facebook profile is a conversation between one person and Dartmouth College, as if one is making a blitz-introduction-meets-Econ-10-survey and CC’ing the entire school. We are, on Facebook, exactly who we want to be, or, more accurately, exactly who we want our faceless interlocutors to think we are. The cavalcade of profiles and interests in their infinite variety had enabled us to conjure up identities for our peers beforehand, but Pulse takes this to its next logical step. It effectively produces a composite of all our little facebook selves, and thereby projects a Facebook identity for Dartmouth College itself, a fairly brazen and remarkable thing, if you think about it. As Facebook might say, “This is us.”