Since the mid-1990s the Net has helped students academically in many ways, allowing them to register for courses online, communicate with professors outside class, connect to the library and do all kinds of sophisticated research. But now the Net also serves as the thread that binds together campus social life. Bulletin-board fliers, sticky notes on dorm-room doors, even the telephone are fading as methods for conveying information around campus. Nearly all dorm rooms have high-speed Internet access, and today’s Net-savvy college kids–the first generation weaned on the Web–depend on it to navigate their mysterious new world. “I don’t think we would be able to survive without Net access,” says Michael Mason, 19, a junior at North Caro-lina State University. “I mean, we check the weather online before we look out the window.”
The most visible tool in a student’s online arsenal is instant messaging. It may be difficult for ancient parental minds to grasp, but AOL’s popular IM–which lets you send notes to your friend’s PC screen–is now more important to college culture than the phone. Alexis Renwanz, a sophomore at Boston University, is typical. She keeps AOL IM active on her PC “pretty much 24 hours a day” and has 100 classmates, friends and family on her “buddy list.” When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision overturning Texas’s anti-sodomy law in June 2003, Renwanz–an opponent of the statute–excitedly told eight like-minded classmates about it over IM. Two minutes later, she was deluged by messages from two dozen other friends telling her.
For information and news about their surroundings, undergraduates turn to a host of Web sites. Many schools have social portals like North Carolina State’s TheWolfWeb.com, which lets students chat on bulletin boards, post photos, trade used textbooks and get the latest on upcoming activities and sporting events. Friends Jacob Morgan and Josef Akinc launched the site in 2000 by scrawling the URL on the Free Expression Tunnel, a campus graffiti wall. Today they have 9,000 registered members, and the site serves as the school’s village square. (One downside: it can be risky to post news of rowdy parties; police monitor it carefully, says Akinc, and may arrive with your guests.) Morgan and Akinc are now running the site full time and plan to roll it out to other colleges.
It would join several other Web sites that serve as online resources for college students around the country. TeacherReviews.com and PickAProf.com, for example, let undergraduates read anonymous evaluations of professors by their former students and help them avoid any mumblers or those disinclined to give good grades. The largest such site, Rate MyProfessors.com, currently has 207,000 evaluations of teachers at 4,000 colleges in the United States, including several scath-ing reviews of one apparently soporific professor at the University of Delaware. “Instant amnesia walking into this class. I swear he breathes sleeping gas,” wrote one contributor.
The Net is even weaving itself into the college dating scene, arguably the last stronghold of nondigital social interaction on campus. Suddenly ubiquitous sites like CampusFlirts.com, College luv.com and local destinations like www.MIT.edu/matchup all prom-ise to bring together like-minded single students. It’s an idea well suited to an age of 150-person lecture halls and crowded outdoor quads, where it’s difficult to meet classmates. But however successful such digital social resources may be, you can be sure that the Internet will never replace one vitally central–and analog–feature of college culture: the frat party.
