My complaints from two weeks ago about the lack of racial and socioeconomic integration in the dorms notwithstanding, each battalion of Northwestern students has, until recently, been forced to inhabit shared spaces for most of their social gatherings. Evanston’s limited number of bars and cafes, coupled with NU’s smallish campus and enrollment force all students to interact face-to-face at least some of the time.
Nevertheless, the cultural division between ElderBobb fraterno-jocks and South Campus Serious Students has long been a fixture of the NU social scene. But now the north-south split has expanded into cyberspace.
The fragmentation of NU’s student community is being helped steadily along by a host of new blogs and Web forums.
When RumorRoyalty first rolled out and the Boys of Beta became arbiters of fame and relevance, students everywhere faced a disconsolate choice: hang out at Beta, or start a different blog. Now we have JuicyCampus, which the Greeks share with the athletes. Theatre geeks quickly bought into the trend – or is it “caught the addiction”? – with an anonymous blog of their own. Web sites devoted to chronicling the Thursday evening exploits of oboe majors and the Muslim Cultural Students Association can’t be far behind.
The social isolationism these Web sites promote is certainly troubling, as are the demeaning comments posted anonymously on their pages. But our society has struggled with people’s desire to form insulated communities and spew catty gossip for decades. In those respects, NU’s gossip blogs are nothing new.
The real news here is that by recording and publicizing gossip, these sites have begun to form an unauthorized Who’s Who of Northwestern Social Life. Two things come to mind: Did NU ever need or want a social register? And do these sites accurately reflect the reality of the social life of NU’s students?
Logic dictates that the people who spend the most time sitting at a computer writing on these sites would have the least amount of time to spend interacting with the people they write about. So rather than giving us the genuine cross-section of student voices promised (JuicyCampus promotes itself as “the world’s most authentic college website”), these sites instead present primarily the work of a handful of self-important loners.
Oscar Wilde said “there is only one thing worse than being talked about. And that is not being talked about.” This goes a long way toward explaining why these nattering nabobs have gained such strength: irrelevance is a fate worse than social death. The internet is a powerful tool for doling out notoriety.
For students who have done nothing to deserve this fame, reports of their infamy suffice.
SESP senior Jake Wertz can be reached at [email protected].