Join our mailing list!
©2007
StudentAffairs.com
All Rights Reserved
|
The Internet Offers More "Humanity" Than We'd Thought
Peter
Vogt
President of Career Planning Resources,
Producer of The Career
Services Kiva
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.
Printer
Friendly Version
|
|
