With online notes, you too can be socially starved

By Elisabeth Marshall

Our misuse of the computer has gone too far; I'll finally have to join the ranks of the Luddites. Not surprisingly, it was one of those new dot-com companies that finally put me over the edge.

On Wed., Sept. 8, a new Internet venture called StudentU.com went online for the first time, promising free lecture notes to students at various state colleges around the country. Filled with advertisements for Playboy, designer credit cards, and various other college staples, the site attempts to lure potential consumers by posting the notes that their classmates have taken in lecture. While the general idea of either paying or begging someone to go to lecture for you is hardly novel, this is the first time that getting notes will be so easy, so cheap, and so eerily impersonal. The note-takers are anonymous and their notes are strictly functional—without embellishments, opinions, or questions—leaving the reader with little more than fragments of sentences relevant to the subject at hand, void of any personality.

StudentU.com does not provide a first-rate product; the notes are sparse and often incoherent, and the site's other features (such as its "Campus Store" and "Career Center") have more effective counterparts elsewhere. However, it is the convenience of StudentU.com that renders it especially noxious. Relying on the class notes of others is sometimes a necessary evil, but the bother and imposition that it causes provides a considerable incentive to go to class.

More importantly, StudentU.com is yet another electronic substitute for social interaction. When you go through the motions of acquiring notes from a classmate, if nothing else you must at least emerge from your dorm room and interact with another human being. Granted, the discourse between two students in this situation usually consists of little more than a sheepish plea and a quick exchange of notebooks; however, the apparant banality of such an interaction is precisely why it is so important. We take it for granted that college students will continually interact with one another—in part because Yale's residential system makes it pretty hard not to be extraordinarily social. But even here, and more so at colleges with larger, more anonymous campuses, students can easily become socially lost and completely isolated. Allowing them to shuffle through the day in large, impersonal lecture classes is a questionable practice that our universities should probably reconsider; giving students the opportunity to skip out on that little remnant of socialization that attending class does provide is a dangerous precedent that StudentU.com has cunningly offered to us all.

Of course, StudentU.com is not alone in its attempt to profit off the consumer's tendency to choose convenience (which usually translates into whatever requires the least social interaction). Homegrocer.com, a venture that promises to deliver groceries to anyone with a modem, hopes to eradicate from our lives the social routine of going to the grocery store. Meanwhile, the University of Washington, taking the ideas behind StudentU.com to a frightening new level, is seriously considering offering some of its courses completely online. One can imagine a child of the future, raised on TV and Internet gaming, attending college from the comfort of his suburban home before applying for his first job as a telecommuter. As StudentU.com proudly reminds us, "You don't even need to leave the house."

Of course, that's exactly where the problem lies. If technology continues to render it more and more of an avoidable chore, social interaction will keep declining in both quantity and quality. Alienation and isolation will rise, and both the individual and society will end up paying severely.

The temptation of using technology to ease our academic woes is an understandable one. With lecture halls becoming ever more crowded and impersonal, many students probably regard a service like StudentU.com as a victimless convenience. And as enrollments rise and resources become strained, more administrations will surely recognizing the benefits of online classrooms. Yet college is one of the last arenas in which a truly social community can thrive. We mustn't allow technological shortcuts to circumvent one of the most powerful lessons learned in college: the lesson of social interaction. I hope StudentU.com fails miserably in its trial run. Perhaps it will signal a short pause in the rapid trend towards a computerized academia and society, and allow us to consider the consequences before we all become the Microsoft-raised, socially-starved, glassy-eyed telecommuters of the future.

Elisabeth Marshall is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards.

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