Posted November 6, 2001 Student Affairs Online, 2 (Fall)
When the Internet and the World Wide Web started hitting their stride - somewhere "way" back in 1994 or so! - one of the concerns of student affairs professionals was the impact the Net might have on the "humanity" of the profession.
Would we start seeing an erosion of our personal interactions with students and an increase in the number of online interactions - and if so, what would the implications of that be? Would the need for our offices, and our services to students, disappear as a result of students finding "everything they need" on the web, often from the comfort of their residence hall rooms? And would students themselves become more isolated - would "bull sessions" in residence hall lounges become a distant memory, replaced by online, seemingly impersonal "chat sessions"?
They were all fair questions to ask at the time, and they still are, of course. But in my mind, the Internet and the web have - perhaps counter-intuitively - actually added to the "humanity" of our interactions with students, and the interactions among students themselves.
One of the first things I noticed after the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11 was that people were "checking in" with each other, often via email. More specifically, people who barely knew each other were checking in with each other. I myself, for example, emailed someone in New York City that I'd recently interviewed for an article. In the "old days," I doubt I would have called him or sent him a letter to see how he was. But with email, it seemed only natural - even though we'd never met face to face, nor were we "friends" or even "acquaintances."
I've seen the "humanity" of the web in other ways too. Recently, for instance, I edited a book manuscript written by a psychology professor at Mercer County Community College in New Jersey (I live in Minneapolis). In all but one instance - and that one instance was after we'd already completed 99.9 percent of our work together - we interacted via email. But at one point, she "said" to me:
We have never met, or even spoken, yet I feel as if I know you.
I felt the same about her, I wrote back, shaking my head in wonder.
Then there's the students - for me, students who have questions about career-related issues. Every day as part of my consulting work for MonsterTRAK.com, students post all sorts of questions, a few of them routine, most of them anything but. Amazingly (or maybe not so amazingly), some students will literally pour their hearts out to you on an online message board - even though you're essentially a stranger to them (they only "know" you by your brief "bio" description on the web site!). In some ways it's almost scary. But in many other ways, it's like going back in time to an era when even "strangers" were people you could count on and ask for help in times of trouble.
Students are helping each other via the Internet as well. I just finished reading the book Quarterlife Crisis by twentysomethings Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner (a great read for anyone in student affairs, by the way). Among the features of the book's accompanying "Quarterlife Crisis" web site are several themed message boards where twentysomethings can commiserate with each other, empathize with each other, say "I feel your pain" to each other, and even motivate and inspire each other. The boards are, in essence, online support groups for twentysomethings from across the United States and around the world - resources that would have been unthinkable less than 10 years ago.
One of the profession's worries in 1994, as I recall, was the (remote?) possibility that there would be less demand for student services and student affairs professionals, and that the student affairs professionals who remained would be dealing with "faceless" students who wouldn't be interested in one-to-one, in-person meetings anymore. But in actuality, the opposite is happening and will likely continue. The students who previously would have contacted us no matter what are still contacting us and working with us. Meanwhile, the students who may not have contacted us before are using the Internet to take the difficult first steps they might have otherwise avoided. And through it all, we're beginning to discover that our work as student affairs professionals isn't going away, or even changing all that much. Nor is it losing its "personal touch" as we'd once feared. Instead, technology is bringing out the personal touch in all of us - in ways that are making the student affairs profession, and indeed life itself, more rewarding, more enriching, and more "human" than ever before.