Blitz is Dartmouth. I love Dartmouth, therefore, I love Blitz.
My love for Blitz grew slowly, beginning with an initial fascination during my freshman fall, and peaking while I was abroad last term, cursing the frustrations of Microsoft Outlook and pining for the subtle delicacies that make Blitz so marvelous.
There are several key components of the BlitzMail system that make it so usable, unique and defining. And those are not three adjectives I just spouted out for the sake of aesthetically-pleasing sentence structure. Those are my three tenets of the Awesomeness Of Blitz: usable, unique and defining.
The computer terminals scattered all over the high-traffic areas of campus give Blitz its initial usability: proximity and ubiquity. And then, to enhance this usability, BlitzMail is its own application on the computer, not a web-based program. Some people prefer their Gmail, but I love that I don't have to start up another program, open a new tab and log in to be connected with the rest of campus. When my computer is on, my Blitz is on -- the fact that it runs by itself makes its convenience superior to other options.
Speaking of convenience, with the DND, we are lucky to be able to change our e-mail identity at will. I have friends at other schools with awkward variations of their initials, class year and birthday as their school e-mail addresses. Not me.
The very reason I love Blitz is because its shortcomings define the way we use it. I brush off the haters who call the system antiquated, and point out that it is older than many of the current students at this college. The simplicity of the program is what makes it so charming!
The lack of formatting on Blitz is often cited as one of the major downfalls of the program, but I see it as one of the best features, because of the way it necessitates creativity. Blitz provides the ideal forum for practicing how to make an attention-grabbing banner out of asterisks and percent signs, or for creating that ambitious depiction of whatever your event's theme may be using only parentheses and dashes.
Another so-called shortcoming is that Blitz doesn't keep track of a conversation like Gmail does, quoting the preceding text. This actually gives way to my favorite feature of Blitz: the fact that we can highlight a certain section of text and reply to that section only. It's absurdly convenient that we can just select that one funny phrase and reply, "Haha," instead of having to explain, "Hey, I thought that part in the third sentence where you mention the flying nun was really funny. Haha." This highlight-and-reply function creates quick and witty prose, even for those who are distinctly not quick, nor witty.
But why is BlitzMail defining? Blitz is wonderful in the way it creates its own set of social practices and conventions -- the choice of whether to reply to blitzes directly after you receive them, the awkwardness when you are already in a quick-response conversation and then receive a message that you would rather not reply to right away, or the hesitation in composing that perfectly witty reply to someone who you desperately hope thinks that you are witty.
With its own grammar and style, Blitz is like a secret club that requires time and experience to merit membership. I see using Blitz in the same way I view playing pong: as something that I will enjoy immensely during these four years in Hanover and associate strongly with my Dartmouth experience, but in all likelihood only engage with sparingly beyond my years at the College.
For now, Blitz is what ties this campus together. We may be in different clubs, eat at different dining halls, take different classes and care about different issues, but we all use Blitz.
Every day we engage in this unique collective experience, and through that interaction, Blitz defines Dartmouth.
