Welcome to the North American college campus circa 1995. Welcome to class registration by touch-tone telephone, exam schedules posted on the World Wide Web and grades sent back electronically. Online study groups. Less time spent in line waiting to be processed by the administration ladies. A virtual library piped through high-speed dorm-room data jacks.
Computers are changing campus life big time -- work habits, report cards and the whole library system, not to mention the all-important Saturday-night party update. As larval adult personalities take shape within the collegiate social cocoon, the Net absorbs volumes of journal entries, girlfriend pictures and whatever ephemera happens to define undergraduate consciousness at any given moment. Every year the college campus morphs into something more virtual leaving starry-eyed (abeit debt-laden) graduates wondering, "Is this my entree into the shiny, happy caste of information haves? Or is it just another excuse to raise tuition?"
Most of the paper-based rituals of college life are falling by the wayside. Remember that queasy feeling you got at the beginning of each semester when you found that envelope with your transcript in your mailbox? That is now an e-mail experience. These days, Joe College writes his term paper on a word processor, drags it into the campus file server and waits for the prof to download it, make some comments at the bottom and send it back. The ritual rush to the printer at 8:35 am for a 9 o'clock deadline is fading into folklore and with it the shrewd manipulation of margins and typefaces to make a paper appear longer or shorter than it actually is (how many of us mastered the intricacies of layout and typography while "stretching" a 1,000-word paper to a meaty, substantial-looking seven pages?).
Blue books, however, are hanging on tenaciously, at least for now. But other aspects of higher education are quickly being sucked into cyberspace. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), a major spawning ground for Internet applications, sophomore Scott Banister (http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/==banister) is watching the campus computer system wrap its tendrils around every facet of university life. "The network here on campus pervades everything," Banister says. "There are news groups for classes. If you're taking Psych 100 or whatever, there's a news group, and everybody's supposed to read it so they can be kept up to date on the latest homework corrections or the latest grading scale, and they can post questions about problems, and people can respond.
"And as for e-mail, it's become the communication method of choice," Banister continues, "because college students are always on the go, and you're never in your dorm room to get a phone call. With e-mail, you just mail it out, and they'll read it whenever they next step up to the computer. They don't even have to make it back to their room. While they're sitting in some computer lab anywhere on campus doing their homework, they can check their e-mail." Call it the Information Superhallway: Info is being tunneled out of the science center basements and library terminals into the dorm rooms of America.
Long before the rest of us experience fiber to the curb, college students are becoming blase about the latest technological trapping of higher education, Ethernet to the dorm. What this means, basically, is that the computer on an undergraduate's desktop is plugged directly into the Internet and is able to deliver text, graphics, sound, even video onto a screen with eye-popping speed. Imagine a high-end modem accelerated by a factor of four. Images don't slowly roll down the screen. They just burst into place. Ethernet to the dorm, the sine qua non of Digital U., is an attention-deficiency patient's wet dream. And a nation of Nintendo youth gets it for free (or, rather, "nonitemized," in the same way that gyms and libraries are "free").
Not that universities are providing this service out of the goodness of their hearts. In many cases student Internet use is growing too fast for central computer labs to handle. From Boston to Santa Cruz, Calif., mainframe administrators are crying Scotty-like from their basement workstations, "Cap'n, I dunno heow mooch more she can handle!" Wiring dorms is a way to decentralize the system and take some stress off the creaking masts of university supercomputers.
Even at Berkeley (http://www.berkeley.edu/), which is networked to kingdom come, the powers that be concluded that unless dorm rooms were wired ASAP, student Net surfers would dog the computer centers like arterial plaque and terminally overload the campus modem pool, muscling aside students who needed it for less interesting things like math homework. Thus, the In-Room Connections Project was delivered, squalling onto the Berkeley campus in spring '94 so students could explore other avenues regarding computing in a residential environment." When the project is completed, every residence hall at Berkeley will be equipped with a minimum of two high-speed data connections per room. (Ever decapitate someone across campus playing networked Doom from the comfort of your own couch? You will.)
Of course, there's also an element of collegiate one-upmanship to the hardware race. To lure paying students in an age of ballooning tuition costs, universities need to flaunt more than imposing architecture and a good football team. They've got to be wired. "Networking the dorms -- that's become something you have to do now to compete and keep up," says David O'Steen, advanced technology specialist at Wellesley. "But that's incredibly expensive." According to O'Steen, it's also a luxury that students will be hard pressed to match in their post-collegiate lives. "They're not going to find it in the work environment and certainly not at home. I mean, here people are used to having a T1 connection to the Internet, and when they graduate and they either go to work or they go home, and they're dealing with a modem, it's going to be quite a shock [to see] how long it takes to download photos of Hootie and the Blowfish."
As colleges take on hulking technology investments to maintain their techno cachet, operating costs continue to spiral upward. But administrators will just keep buying hardware until their institutions run out of money. It's oddly reminiscent of the Cold War. And where the escalation stops is anyone's guess, because the cyberspace race has become an end in itself.
At Wellesley, for instance, installing computers has taken on the tone of a Manifest Destiny, culminating in a 1995 operation code-named Normandy. Project Normandy was a thundering assault of computer installation: Two hundred seventy-five PowerMacs were hooked up and networked in a single day. Tracy Harris, a student who coordinated the project, describes it with martial fervor.
Usually when you install new computers, you do it in dribs and drabs, a department at a time, like, with only a couple of computers," Harris says. We had like 11 staff members coordinating it and about 20 students, and also about 20 people from Apple came by to help us install the computers. We just divided [the group] into different divisions on campus, and there was a field commander in charge of each division, and they were in charge of coordinating and getting everybody ready for the installment." One imagines brigades of Wellesley women descending at dawn like Valkyries with their computers, linking cables and blasting Wagner.
"More and more students have figured out the secret to Web publishing," says Carvin. "Take a leap, do something that's different than anything else on the Web, and presto! Instant popularity and career potential. For example, a friend of mine at Northwestern is a huge Lou Reed fan as well as an Internet guru. As soon as he had access to a Web server, he created a multimedia Lou Reed home page (http://charlotte.acns.nwu.edu/charm/html/ lou. Now it's the place on the Internet for all things Reed Interviews, discographies, guitar tablature -- you name it. Whenever anyone who has Internet access wants to learn about Lou, they go to one place -- which just so happens to be run by a 21-year-old longhair."
LEAFING THROUGH college-admissions brochures these days, you'll read paragraph after paragraph about all this spanking-new technology and how many learning opportunities it provides. After all, it's easy to justify technology for academic reasons: It reassures the 'rents that they're getting lots of bang for their educational buck and provides an easy segue into the tuition-hike announcement. It's less easy to justify, say, the Interpretive Dance Troupe home page. Extracurricular activities and student Web publishing don't make the brochure. But they dwarf the academic traffic.
Even a casual perusal of university World Wide Web sites (http:www.mit.edu:8001/people/cdemello/univ.html) reveals that student bodies are busy grafting online technology onto existing social and political cliques. It seems like every student organization from the improv theater group to the Ultimate Frisbee team (http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/mjlg/all-fisbee.html) is publishing in hypertext. The Web has become the nexus of the hip and geeky, a place where techies and nontechies hang comfortably together. It's not just the computer dub and the Society for Creative Anachronism anymore. There are literary types. And activists. And jocks.
And (gulp) fraternities. I swear to God.
For an Internet veteran, few things can top the shock of seeing, say, the University of Arizona's Kappa Sigma Fraternity page (http://radon.gas.uug. arizona.edu/==jon/KS/KS.html) unfurl on your monitor. Somehow, I never thought I would read the words Click here to find out more about the Greek System and what it can do for you.
But then the sound snippet of the Princeton Tigertones (http://www. princeton.edu/--tones/) singing "Who Put the Bomp" seemed equally absurd and improbable a year ago. Yet there are guys with names like Wentworth, Landon and Geoff crooning in all their preppified glory ("Nonsense, Binky, there's no such thing as an information elite. The African-American students are on the Internet, too"). Other Princeton Web pages include the Campus Crusade for Christ, Princeton for Elvis, and one each for the university band and a mime company.
Last year at UIUC, Scott Banister could barely keep up the extracurricular organizations' demands to hit the Web. He started running the extracurriculars' page in the fall. "And as the year went on," Banister says, "the number of requests for this thing just kept going up on this exponential and now there's like 50 or 60 of them. It got to the point after not too long that they were coming from all sections. It wasn't just the computer organizations or the engineering organizations. It was religious organizations, music organizations. We've got all kinds on there now. We have a page for a dorm-floor hockey team. It's like the fifth floor of this dorm has a hockey team, and they have their own home page. They've got this awesome logo. It's like the Ice Guppies or something."
There came a point when UIUC needed an organization just to keep up with other organizations' Web publishing ventures. "There were lots of people who were working on related projects," says Banister. "It just made more sense to pool our resources and help each other out." With that in mind he founded Web Monkeys (http://www.acm.uiuc, edu/webmonkeys/), a loose collection of students who publish their own Web pages and teach their classmates Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the formatting language behind the commands for Web publishing. Ironically, these informal, student-taught seminars are some of the hottest classes on campus as a Web page of one's own becomes the latest status symbol of the techno hip.
At Swarthmore, these tent meetings are taught by 20-year-old Justin Hall, the Tony Robbins of student Web publishing, who exhorts other students from the pulpit of his sex-drugs-and-sound-files Web 'zine, Links From the Underground (http://www. links.net) to express themselves in hypertext. "What are you when you compose your e-mail?" asks Hall from the pages of Links. "Your Web page? Your own graphics? You, too, are a digital artist! You are among the digital elite!"
From the time Hall first taught HTML to Swarthmore students, he was a man on a mission. would write with chalk on sidewalks outside the library and the cafeteria and the cafe and the administration building and the academic buildings," he says. "I'd make sure that if you went to Swarthmore and you were a student, you knew it was happening. I sent out blanket e-mails. I also made a deliberate effort to hit the literary crowd and emphasize to them just the idea of publishing: If you're a writer or you're a poet, this is a great way to have your work looked at and banged on and exchanged with other people, and it's a really exciting way to publish. So there were a couple different communities that I tried to get involved. I had a lot of women show up. I had a lot of African-American students show up. I had jocks and engineers and computer-science people."
Part Johnny Appleseed, part P.T. Barnum, Hall is wide eyed about technology and firmly convinced of its power to give everyone a creative outlet. In a sense, personal home pages are another way for college students to express their personal tastes, broadcast their new away-from-home identities and impress one another.
"I like pages with rough edges," says Rick Edgington, a Carnegie Mellon student who publishes under the Web pseudonym Crackbaby (http://www.contrib. andrew.cmu.edu/usr/re24/home.html). "I like pages that say something about the owner's personality. I tried to make my page look like a candied snapshot into my soul."
According to that snapshot, "Crackbaby's happy when he's surrounded by his favorite products (Kool-Aid, Lemonheads, Coca-Cola, beef) and when he hears really loud music (Bad Religion, Big Black, Concrete Blonde, Johnboy, Lungfish, Marilyn Manson, Picasso Trigger, Rage Against the Machine, Rancid, Shellac. Shorty, Tar, Therapy?, Tsunami)." His page screams, "I am Crackbaby, hear me roar!"
NOW THAT THE FLOODGATES of student Web access have been thrown open, there are literally thousands of Crackbabyesque statements of personal style exploding onto the Internet with each passing semester. "We're beginning to see an incredible unleashing of undergraduate creativity run amok," says Andy Carvin (http://edweb.cnidr.org:90/andy.html), an education and information technology fellow at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in Washington, D.C. "If you look back just a year or two ago, only a handful of students knew what the World Wide Web was, and even fewer realized that they could do some really incredible stuff with it. But now student Web pages are everywhere. Just connect to the home page of any college in America and you'll quickly reach a link to student pages. Dozens and dozens of them.
"We've also seen a drastic shift in the style of student Web pages," Carvin says. "Not long ago the typical college-kid Web page was a grad student who could only offer us an awful Polaroid mug shot with the text of his esoteric dissertation. Web pages were poorly conceived billboards of academic drivel Nowadays it's not very difficult to find student sites that are intricate, deeply personal soliloquies of expression. Write a cool poem in class? Put it in hypertext. Just got back those pictures you took at Gator Growl? Scan them into your computer. Web sites have become multimedia soapboxes, scrapbooks and storyboards for a new generation of college students."
Suddenly it's as if thousands of post-adolescent journals have been thrown open, detailing My So-Called College Life. Students have always tried on new identities in college; that's part of why they leave home in the first place. By the time they graduate, they've basically concocted the personalities they'll maintain for the rest of their lives. But for those four years (or longer), they're still shifting, saying, this is who I am. This is what I like," checking to see if it's sufficiently cool, discarding pieces that aren't and tweaking the apparatus every time they change majors or pick up mannerisms. Only now they're documenting the process for a global audience. En masse.
"In a sense," says Carvin, "when a freshman develops 'My First Home Page,' they achieve an incredible amount of release and freedom with it. Think about it. You grow up in South Carolina under Draconian parenting and with no ability to express yourself. Suddenly you're at Brown, and the computer-services department says, 'Welcome to Brown. Have a Web account.' You can do almost anything you want with it. Become an instant political activist. Create a scrapbook of all your new friends. Come out of the closet with panache and techno style. Write a scathing hyperbook and stir up a storm. If you can come up with a good idea and spread the word on it, people will come to you. Who needs good grades on a resume when all you need to show off is your brilliant URL [Uniform Resource Locator, or web address]?"
Whereas gifted creative types dropped out of college in the '60s and '70s to start magazines, would-be media jockeys are ditching classes to become Web publishers. And it is they rather than the publishing conglomerates of the world who are making the Web work as an entertainment medium.
"More and more students have figured out the secret to Web publishing," says Carvin. "Take a leap, do something that's different than anything else on the Web, and presto! Instant popularity and career potential. For example, a friend of mine at Northwestern is a huge Lou Reed fan as well as an Internet guru. As soon as he had access to a Web server, he created a multimedia Lou Reed home page (http://charlotte.acns.nwu.edu/charm/html/ lou. Now it's the place on the Internet for all things Reed Interviews, discographies, guitar tablature -- you name it. Whenever anyone who has Internet access wants to learn about Lou, they go to one place -- which just so happens to be run by a 21-year-old longhair."
All those students ditching classes to put up their Web sites are performing a labor of love. But they're also getting ready to cash in their URLs for lucrative jobs in online publishing, an industry screaming for new talent like a baby bird squawks for nourishing worms. As Justin Hall puts it, "There are kids who as of January didn't know about the Web, as of March had pages and as of May had jobs in HTML."
"The Internet is the first major employment gold mine to hit campuses in a long time," says Carvin. "And college students aren't dumb -- they can smell a potential career in their sleep. Now that companies all over the globe are clamoring for Internet presence, they're running to the classes of '94 and '95 for expert advice. In general the job market still stinks, but if you know how to code in HTML, you'll be several steps ahead of the pack. The Web is giving students the chance to be creative and strut their stuff, and big business is paying attention."
Oddly enough, their teachers are also paying attention. Maybe it's the current vogue of "media studies" in academia, or maybe the ivory tower has finally capitulated to MTV, but the multimedia goulash students compile in their hours is now earning college credit. At schools equipped with high-end Macs, video-grab boards and magneto-optical drives, a generation raised on media overload is pulling together term papers from snippets of the evening news. In the anthropology and sociology departments at Wellesley, says David Steen, "As a class project -- their final paper -- they have to write a paper and incorporate a snippet of video from the evening news or a cable show or MTV or whatever else. And so rather than having to describe something in text, you can actually click on it and see the news piece. Or you can have a couple of them so you can see how American news might have presented something relative to the BBC." Who could have imagined at the dawn of network television that someday kids would be added for watching it? Sure, we're in the middle of a media eruption right now, hurtling into the Third Wave cyberspace Information Age, blah, blah, blah. But it's still a little weird to see term papers on the subject of ESPN being turned in by Ivy League sophomores. It's kind of cool that kids are researching the sociology or channel surfing. But it's also a little unsealing. I mean, I wrote papers about jazz in college, and I thought that was pushing it.
Educators are similarly torn between the lure of cutting-edge technology assisted class work and the feeling that these projects being created are academic puff pieces. "There are real questions about what it is you're trying to teach people that we haven't dealt with yet," O'Steen say. "I think it's clearly easier to videotape something than it is to write about it because you're just sort of capturing what's there. I think there are education theorists who would argue that writing is forcing you to think hard about what you're doing and that thinking process of translating one experience into another medium -- seeing someone do something and then writing about it -- teaches you some thinking skill or analytical skill. And that's still a very open question. . . . But on the whole it's a positive thing to make it a richer experience. And it's drawing people into using the tools, which I think is very helpful. Because clearly this society is hell-bent on being a machine-based society, and computers are going to be in everything."
With this in mind, colleges are wiring up for the millennium. They owe it to all those fresh-faced leaders of tomorrow the future talk-show bookers, infomercial producers, telemarketing executives and online promoters of America."
J.C. HERZ is the author of "Surfing the Internet" (Little, Brown & Co.). This is her first piece for ROLLING STONE.