“What happens at university can now stay at university” is the alluring tagline of Unii.com.  Joining the queue of potential Facebook successors, this new social media website promises to keep all user content hidden from the prying eyes of parents and potential employers. 

Marco Nardone, the website’s 25-year-old founder, hopes to capitalise on students who want to experience university without adult supervision. But does the issue of stalking parents really warrant the need to join unii.com?

What exactly happens at university that so desperately needs to stay there? It is true that a big part of the online fresher’s experience is “fraping” and baffling disco photography. However, we often use social media to give a Meta reiteration of our life that glosses over the dull everyday particulars. Perhaps the worry is less that our parents find out what’s really going on at university than that they use these check ups as their primary source to inform themselves of what’s going on.

Obviously, when we leave for university we are older and wiser, and no longer require protection. But it is understandable that our parents will assume, after having witnessed the time we spent glued to the computer screen throughout high school, that we are most accessible and best represented on Facebook. Unlike what Unii.com may suggest, the parental check up instinct is probably not to ensure that we are getting our moneys worth of a degree. Parents want to know that we are safe and happy. They may even miss us. 

However, going through recent photos and status updates promises to be a woeful attempt to indulge in sentimental longing. Stalking your kids is comparable to stalking your ex. You miss them and you’re curious, but you usually end up seeing something you wish you hadn’t. Sometimes it is much more blissful for parents to remain ignorant. In fact, most parents who own up to ‘facebooking’ their kids express their regret at doing so. 

Parent-child relationships in the framework of social media are a funny thing. Some of us live in fear of parental stalking because we are plagued with embarrassing messages and ancient family portraits that surface on our walls as parents grow increasingly Internet savvy. Alternatively, there is the argument that we will generally be more efficient at researching our parents than our parents will be at researching us. Surely adults would also prefer to keep certain aspects of their lives private from their kids in order to retain some illusion of parental authority and dignity.

As more of our personal life is interlinked with the Internet, we become concerned about who can see our data. Unii.com pretends to act as a sanctuary for content that we want to limit to a specific time and place in our lives. This is unrealistic. Pictures displayed on Unii.com can easily find their way to other realms of the Internet. Moreover, information we upload during our time at university is unlikely to simply disappear the moment we finish our degrees.

The public nature of social media encourages banality. No matter how we choose to narrow down the breadth of our audience, we select the content that we want to share according to who is looking at our profile and less according to the person we really are. Unii.com will provoke you to tailor your online identity towards being more of a student than a son or daughter. In this sense, perhaps the website is merely a way for us to overhype our university experience. We have the possibility to reinvent ourselves away from home, as ridiculously as we wish, without cringing at the potential amusement or disapproval of the people who know us best.

Josephine Huetlin is a Features editor for Easter term 2013.