Haunted by Facebook, students can’t now reinvent themselves at university

My mum had a friend at university who had been called ‘Pudding’ at school. They’d sometimes be walking down the street, and someone who had known the now-svelte adult as a chubby 13-year-old would say ‘Hello, Pudding’. As I get ready to start at university myself in October, it’s in the knowledge that my schoolgirl self will be even harder to escape.

Reinventing yourself at the end of sixth form was once a time-honoured rite of passage, hindered only by a few easily avoided old acquaintances. In Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder frees himself from the self-consciously serious circle of his school days with relative ease: ‘At Sebastian’s approach these grey figures seemed quietly to fade into the landscape and vanish, like highland sheep in the misty heather.’ No one’s past much resembles misty heather anymore — social media has changed all that.

Were he arriving at Oxford today, Charles’s Facebook profile would bring his sixth form self along for the ride. He’d be tagged in photographs with a prefect badge pinned to a badly fitting uniform, a video of him making a pompous speech at his school prize-giving would be doing the rounds and his timeline would be an endless stream of exam-related posts from his all-male mates.

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His meagre number of Facebook friends would be further cause for humiliation. Anything less than 600 is considered embarrassing: three quarters of them may be people you met at a party four years ago and haven’t seen since, but don’t have them as friends on Facebook and you’ll look like someone who doesn’t meet many people at parties.

So having vomited through Charles’s window and subsequently added him on Facebook, Sebastian would have thought twice before sending flowers and a lunch invitation. Charles, too, would have been hesitant: it’s far harder to cut loose when the internet is on hand to remind you of who you were in sixth form.