The start-of-term honeymoon is over, and campus is back to its usual bickering. Loving the Greek system, hating the Greek system, arguing about the college mascot. Alex Howe, wandering around outside Food Court, glancing maniacally in the direction of TDX and sharpening a mighty bundle of #2 pencils.
Before everyone descends into the traditional student versus student smack down, however, I would like to give you one recomendation:
Know your enemies.
In particular, know those enemies who might have the propensity to put you in the media, where your small slip-up could stick around for a long time. Today, the college years are marked by a deluge of coverage that simply did not exist before, and most (if not all) of that media coverage ends up online. It could be on Facebook, it could be in The D's archives, or in someone's blog.
It's iBaggage. And your parents could find it, and your employers could find it, and (perhaps worst of all) you could find it down the line and have to remember something it took you years to forget. The internet has many virtues, but its ability to drag up unflattering information about its users is not one of them.
Newspapers will be our jumping-off point, so here's the rundown. The Dartmouth Free Press is a liberal forum, The Dartmouth Review is a conservative one. The quarterly Dartmouth Independent, which is actually more of a blog-newspaper hybrid (they update frequently online), looks to create a forum for discourse and exploration between the two -- and anything in between.
The Jack O'Lantern, the (oft-slighted) satire publication that fathered Keggy the Keg interestingly has an impressive alumni record. The 99-year-old Jack O'Lantern boasts Dr. Seuss and Saturday Night Live's Norm MacLean among its alumni, as well as the writers behind Animal House and The Graduate.
The Review, a notorious bi-weekly conservative newspaper, sparked a chain of copycats at other Ivy schools and a chain of controversies at ours. Founded in 1980, The Review currently boasts 10,000 subscribers (in addition to its free, on-campus distribution).
For a paper with a love of controversy and a distaste for minorities, the Review has been remarkably docile lately. True, they still don't like you if you're gay or Jewish, but the days of the Review generating a steady stream of national scandals have passed, at least in recent years. For instance, the Review hasn't recently taken sledgehammers to an anti-apartheid demonstration (see:1986) or printed a phrase from "Mein Kampf" on it's masthead (see: 1990).
Beware, Review: one Dartmouth Indian baseball cap doth not an edgy conservative make.
Last but not least in the newspaper category, you're reading The Dartmouth. It's America's oldest college newspaper, it's published daily and if they publish some unflattering iBaggage about you, don't bother trying to get it removed from the online archives, because it won't happen. Just thank your lucky stars you don't write a weekly column that lands on the internet and move forward. These days, anyone with a thought or two and a keyboard can start blogging. If I had my say, I'd ask that the ninth circle of Irritating be reserved for IvyGate (www.ivygateblog.com), which combs Ivy media and picks up "news, gossip, sex, sports and more" to help Ivy League students everywhere feel more self-important than they would otherwise.
No discussion of our blogosphere would be complete without mention of the Columbia export, BoredAt, an online forum where anyone and everyone can post anonymously. Last March, The New Yorker coined BoredAt "the new bathroom wall." BoredAt now exists at nine colleges and is known to us at Dartmouth as BoredAtBaker (www.boredatbaker.com).
I resent the (ever mounting) iBaggage that pops up were I to plug my name into Google as much as anyone, but is complete anonymity a reasonable answer? I'm not sold, but whoever made the 130,000 posts on BoredAtBaker must be. I'd recommend that these anonymous posters worry about their iKarma.
