It’s a tangled web we weave.
Online communities have existed since the very first e-mails were sent from one mainframe computer to another in the dark basements of university science buildings in 1971. For two decades, Internet communication was the domain of geeks-people who found pleasure in the anonymous world of computers. The tech boom of the 1990s brought the World Wide Web to the masses, and the masses to the World Wide Web. In this throng of surfers, a tiny group of tech-savvy writers, often geeky but not geeks per-se, began creating independent and personal diaries, web logs of their lives, and published them for all the world to see. These were the first “bloggers”-people who wrote for themselves and whoever happened to find their website. As blogging caught on and bloggers discovered each other, spontaneous communities began to form based on mutual interests. At the same time, blogging services like LiveJournal were catching on quickly among high-schoolers, providing an easy-to-digest diary template and options for joining common interest groups. Outside these sites, however, something interesting happened. Bloggers began organized themselves into groups based purely on their own social network-people with whom they communicated in some way. Websites such as friendster.com, which allowed people to visualize the connections between their friends, brought this kind of social mapping a step closer to the real world. With the advent of thefacebook.com, social networking has exploded on college campuses across the nation, and Georgetown is no exception.
New sites are changing the way students, and younger people in general, interact with each other.
The blogging population has expanded to include leagues of high school drama queens and entire floors of dorms at universities. It seems that everyone feels the need to share their witticisms and plans for world domination on the many online diaries and social networking sites available. The peculiarities of each online community may seem complicated, but to bloggers, the pros and cons of each forum are obvious. And there’s no need to limit yourself to only one.
Facebook ‘em
The first-year experience is changing. Months before even glimpsing the communal bathrooms in Harbin Hall, students in this year’s incoming class enjoyed multiple options for communicating with their classmates, using means that upperclassmen never had available and might have found a bit unsettling if they did.
Take Adam August (CAS ‘08) as an example of Joe Hoya, first-year style. August found out about thefacebook.com from a friend at a Harvard summer school program. Thefacebook.com is open to students at 98 American universities to post personal information (picture, favorite music, books, quotes, class schedules, relationship status) and allows students to connect to friends’ information. By entering someone’s name on the site, a member can access that person’s profile as well as connect to his or her friends’ profiles.
August signed up on Georgetown’s site, connected his name to those of about six friends, and didn’t bother putting up a picture.
“At first it seemed kind of stupid,” August said.
Everything changed when he posted a photo of himself wearing a pink polo shirt, collar popped up. August claims that within six hours, about 30 people had requested him as a friend. For August, making new friends was as easy as sending people messages on thefacebook, getting their America Online Instant Messanger screen name or phone number, and eventually meeting at Georgetown.
It may sound like a geek fantasy, but apparently it worked. August met his current girlfriend on thefacebook this summer, and says they were “married” on the site before ever arriving on campus. August, his future girlfriend and their parents all met on the first-years’ first night at Georgetown.
Profiles on thefacebook.com don’t convey everything about a person though.
“Pictures can be deceiving, I’ll say that. The sad truth is that everyone is fake, on thefacebook it’s the same thing. At first everyone puts on an image,” August cautioned.
When it came to finding a roommate, incoming first-years used thefacebook.com to their full advantage. This year, the Department of Student Housing adopted a roommate-matching system called CHARMS that allowed students to post information online and then search the database for people with similar interests and habits, like neatness, smoking or sleeping hours. To upperclassmen, this routine may sound like a re-hashing of the superficial roommate surveys of years past. But this summer, some first-years combined CHARMS with thefacebook to create a winning formula. Erika Pagano (SFS ‘08) said that she and her eventual roommate both wanted to get the selection process out of the way early. After anonymous communication on CHARMS, they checked each other’s profiles on thefacebook before making a commitment. Thefacebook filled in enough of the details to make a difference.
“CHARMS is like an outfit and thefacebook.com is like the accessories,” Pagano said.
She should know. Pagano has been on thefacebook.com’s Georgetown site since she got her Georgetown e-mail address (an e-mail account at a member university is a requirement for membership). She estimated that she has 260 friends from Georgetown alone on the site, and she’s only been on campus for about a month.
“Apparently I’m a facebook whore,” she said. “That’s what my friends call me, because I have so many friends on it. But I know a good half of them.”
But August says thefacebook.com has been less useful for him since he arrived on campus-now he logs on only every few days. But he did think thefacebook.com was important enough to recently update his photo. He is now featured shirtless, chopping wood.
Mirror mirror on the wall
By now, most students have perused a LiveJournal, a type of online diary, for one reason or another. For those few who have yet to experience one, it suffices to say that reading a LiveJournal account can feel eerily like spying, especially when you’re reading about intimate details of strangers’ lives. Creating a free LiveJournal account is as easy as registering an e-mail address with the site. This simplicity is the reason why many people have chosen to use LiveJournals over independent weblogs, which must be designed and paid for. Accounts can be public or restricted to friends, and each entry can be filtered for a select audience. For example, if you don’t want an ex-girlfriend to read about recent exploits, you just restrict her name from reading certain posts.
Many students already had LiveJournal accounts by last March when Antonio Mina (CAS ‘05) created Georgetown’s own LiveJournal community. The community links anyone with a LiveJournal account and an affiliation with Georgetown on a common page, where they can read and respond to each other’s posts. Six months later, the community remains small with 87 members. The site describes the Georgetown LiveJournal community as “basically, a place for Hoyas and friends-of-Hoyas to talk about anything, preferably Georgetown-related, though off-topic stuff every now and then is OK, too.”
“It’s a way for Georgetown students, alums and prospective students and maybe even faculty and staff as well, to come together online in one ‘place’ to chat about Georgetown and just meet other people from the Georgetown community whom they might not have met otherwise,” Mina said.
This goal seems to have been achieved because students like first-year Pagano, and Mina, who is a senior, would not likely interact without it. Pagano has posted questions on the site, ranging from which professors to choose to directions around the district. Mina is one of the students who often responds. This communication is what he envisioned when creating the community.
But Mina says he doesn’t use LiveJournal to meet people. Instead he uses it mainly as a forum to share his thoughts with friends.
“Since people make the conscious effort to visit my site or view my thoughts through their friends’ lists, I don’t feel I’m intruding on their space. I can write about my new cell phone headset without feeling bad about wasting people’s time,” he said.
Mina shares responsibilities for maintaining the site with two moderators, Joshua Kwicinski (SFS ‘06) and Dave Stroup (CAS ‘06), a former Voice staffer.
Kwicinski uses LiveJournal as a way of keeping up with friends who are now scattered across the country. As for thefacebook.com, it no longer holds much appeal for Kwicinski.
“The facebook was hot last year, but now it’s just a resource for information,” he said.
As for its popularity among first-years, he doesn’t think it will last. “They (first-years) too will become jaded. They’ll be posting rants on LiveJournal with stylized photos,” he said.
The bloggers among us
Those who blog can be divided into two broad categories-the independent blogger and the LiveJournal user. The image of an independent blogger would be someone college-age or older, possessing considerable knowledge of computers and HTML format, who is very interested in current events and reads a variety of online news. Sometimes independent blogs make it big. Take dailykos.com, a “political analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation,” begun by Markos Moulitsas in 2002. Dailykos is one of the most-visited blogs online, and features links to other blogs and websites of interest. Another popular D.C. blog is wonkette.com, written by Ana Marie Cox early this year. The New York Times recently described her blog, which features D.C. celebrities and local stories, as “gossipy, raunchy and potty-mouthed.” It was wonkette that focused attention on Jessica Cutler, the Senate office staffer who wrote about her sexual exploits, paid and otherwise, on an anonymous blog, only to be discovered by Cox and propelled into mini-stardom and created a D.C. summer scandal.
“All really popular blogs reference each other,” Kwicinski said. “If you look at them, you’ll see that it’s a small group.”
Most independent blogs are political ones like dailykos.org, although the political slant can lean either way, he said.
Bloggers kicked off the recent controversy over CBS’s handling of supposed records of Bush’s military service, questioning the records authenticity: As a result CBS has been forced to back off its claim. “It was like throwing a match on kerosene soaked wood. The ensuing blaze ripped through the media establishment as previously obscure bloggers managed to put the network of Murrow and Cronkite firmly on the defensive,” according to the Washington Post.
The independent blogger is often in stark contrast to the LiveJournal user, who is usually in high school or college, and whose posts are characteristically emotional and melodramatic.
“They write to please their audience. If you took everything they said literally, you’d be surprised they hadn’t killed themselves,” Stroup said.
Virtual insanity
As integral as his web identity has become to him, Stroup has considered throwing it all away. From strained online relationships to students approaching him on campus and knowing his name, Stroup’s blogging life is never divorced from reality.
“I was in the elevator coming up here, and this kid said ‘You’re Dave from the Internet, right?’ And I said yeah. He said, ‘I’m Q the penguin.’ And I was like, ‘Who are you?’” Stroup said.
The best way to carry blog relationships into the real world is to meet the “friend” in person as soon as possible, Stroup said.
“Meeting someone over LiveJournal doesn’t generally lead to good things,” he said. “A lot of people try to find soul mates-the more practical application is meeting people near you. You have to meet in person as soon as possible-the longer you wait, it’s awkward and strange and weird. The only success stories are doing it very quickly. You get a feeling if there will be a real world friendship.”
Stroup even had his 15 minutes of fame when his personal blog was quoted in a USA Today article last year. The article resulted in over a million hits on the site that day, Stroup claimed. He had created a “Wanted” poster on his blog of the Cubs baseball fan that interfered with the action during the playoffs. Despite the sudden increase in traffic, the visitors weren’t on the site to stay. Readership is at more regular levels, with 150 or so hits per day.
Stroup didn’t expect that many visitors to his blog, but the possibility of an explosion in publicity is always there. And it’s impossible to know who exactly visits a certain blog, as one can only track information about a visitor’s internet browser, operating system, and the name of his or her Internet Service Provider-like georgetown.edu if the user is on Georgetown’s server. However, without extensive technical knowledge, there’s not much more information available to bloggers about who is reading what. The information they post, unless it is filtered on sites like LiveJournal for select members only, is out there for everyone and anyone. And that very act of making public so much-opinions, feelings, stories, home address-is a cause of concern for some.
No Identity crisis
Bloggers and researchers agree, typical blogs and facebook entries are remarkably honest. Of course, a lot of what goes into an entry is its presentation. People still aim to impress or convey a certain image of themselves.
David Huffaker (GRD ‘04), who extensively researched blogs for his graduate thesis at Georgetown last spring, determined that adolescents rarely mask their identity on blogs; instead they tend to reveal personal information freely.
“Most of the adolescents I looked at revealed a persona that seemed identical with their real-world identity. So they would talk about school, relationships, music, what they did Friday night, etc. It was very close to what I would expect is written in a private diary, only for the whole world to see,” Huffaker said in an interview.
Huffaker worked in Georgetown’s Children’s Media Center while attending graduate school. His thesis is titled “Gender similarities and differences in online identity and language use among teenage bloggers.” In it, Huffaker, who is now in a Ph.D. program at Northwestern University, compared research on computer mediated communication in general (e-mail, instant messaging, message boards, etc) with material on weblogs.
“I think the interplay of online and real-world identity construction is context-driven,” Huffaker said. In some parts of cyberspace, people need to express their real-world identity.
In other places, they have opportunities to play, or explore, or mutate. The relationship, however, is definitely changing, as virtual environments continue to permeate our real world. So as the popular notion of ‘ubiquitous computing’ continues, so will the boundaries between what we think of as real and virtual.”
Sites like thefacebook .com have multiple fields for personal information, from the name of students’ high schools, birthdays, home addresses, majors, AOL screen names and e-mail addresses. All of this is in addition to posting a picture, interests and anything else he or she wants to share. Students admit that stalking occurs in all forms, from simply spending hours analyzing other people’s photos to creepier incidents.
Pagano and her friends have a game where they find people’s photos on thefacebook that look so dissimiliar to the real student that the pictures are obviously modified or completely fake. Looking at thefacebook.com is not only addicting, but also it has almost completely replaced publications like the New Hoya Register in the eyes of students. The printed New Hoya Register is what Georgetown seniors are more accustomed to when it comes to “stalking” other students. The New Hoya Register is published at the beginning of every school year and contains the picture, hometown, high school name and interests of any first-year student who submitted the form. But now thefacebook.com appeals to students because it is accessible from any computer, contains much more information and has the friends feature which allows you to explore whole social networks virtually.
And you can learn a lot about someone without ever saying one word to them.
“People are stupid,” Kwincinski said. “There’s an impression that, oh, this is all just friends. No one’s thinking ahead to the guy next door who now knows everything about you.”
Kwincinski’s friends have had incidents of stalking related to livejournal, when a random stranger finds someone’s identity online and then shows up at the person’s house, he said.
Once you start . . .
It’s clear that blogging and social networking represent a step forward in the way Georgetown students interact. These new mediums of communication open doors for people who might not ordinarily connect on campus. thefacebook.com, for example, now allows students to check profile information and messages directly from their cell phones. As students become more mobile, opportunities will arise for social interaction that challenge the conventional.
Likewise, as blogging becomes more ubiquitous, the ways students receive information are diversifying. Traditional forums for news-gathering, gossiping, socializing and simply expressing one’s self are being replaced by faster-paced and more open channels. The experience of Georgetown students amply demonstrates that people will find new and unexpected ways to take advantage of developing communication technologies here and beyond.
