Facebook is used to make announcements to RUC students. The internal RUC website (outside of Facebook) is littered with FB references.

There are social events that are officially school-sanctioned which appear exclusively on Facebook.

Some might say “fair enough” because social events are non-essential and purely for entertainment. However, RUC has organized all the coursework around group projects. A culture of social bonding is considered important enough to justify having school-sanctioned parties on campus. The organisers have gone as far as to strategically divide student parties and to discourage intermingling across the parties so that students form more bonds with the peers they work with academically. Social bonding is an integral component of the study program.

Announcing these social events exclusively on Facebook creates an irresistible temptation for non-Facebook users to join. Students face an ultimatum: either become a serf of Facebook, or accept social isolation. It also destroys any hope of existing FB users who want to break away from a Facebook addiction from doing so. Students without Facebook accounts are naturally in the dark. Facebook non-patrons may be able to catch ad-hoc hallway chatter about school events but this is a reckless approach.

When the official class schedule is incorrectly published, students who discover the error in advance announce it on Facebook. Facebook then stands as the only source of information for schedule corrections, causing Facebook non-patrons to either miss class or show up for a class that doesn’t exist.

Unofficial student-led seminars and workshops are sometimes announced exclusively on Facebook. These workshops are optional but academic nonetheless.

Sometimes information exists on the school website and is duplicated on Facebook. The information becomes very well buried on the poorly organized school website because the maintainers are paying more attention to the Facebook publication that they assume everyone is reading. Specifically the study abroad program has two versions of the document that lists all the foreign schools for which there is an exchange program. One version is obsolete showing schools that no longer participate. Both versions appear in different parts of the website. The schedule of study abroad workshops is so buried that a student relying on the school website is unlikely to know that the workshops even exist. Removing the Facebook distraction would perhaps mitigate the website neglect.

RUC does not instruct students to establish Facebook accounts. There is simply a silent expectation that students are already Facebook serfs. Some of the above mentioned problems can come as a surprise because Facebook excludes non-members from even viewing the content, so non-patrons don’t even have a way to see what kind of information they are missing. There is an immense undercurrent of pressure for RUC students to become addicted loyal patrons of Facebook’s corporate walled-garden.