op-ed I confess, Internet talk is cheap

Author: Tristan Axelrod

I don't really mind being called a f---a--, or told that I suck b----. For s---- and giggles, I'd like to posit that I'm not, and I don't. In fact, I'll own up to the fact that I'm responsible for those comments, because I voted for myself as the best musician at Middlebury. I had no idea that was such a controversial statement - for the record it's an impossibly vague distinction that I could only argue in certain specific regards. I don't really regret posting the comment - I wanted to find out my reputation among certain people at Middlebury, and I did.

Beyond the fact of its social recalcitrance, beyond the disregard for its original purpose, lies the bare fact that MiddleburyConfessional.com furthers a social trend that continues to distance us from responsibility for social interactions and social values. Ultimately, it makes life less fun for everybody.

MiddleburycConfessional.com is the latest in a stream of communication innovations that started arriving in the mid-90s. I think the first was instant messenger. Suddenly you could construct a public persona without the nasty business of accomplishing anything. You could chat up girls with carefully plotted and edited statements, and you could ignore the cracks in your voice, your pimples and facial tics, and the cool kids who would tear you down at your slightest assertion of sexual competence. Suddenly you could control your image and organize your own life in the fantasy worlds of LiveJournal, Xanga, MySpace and Facebook. Those sites granted security through the sense that each of us could exist in a tidy box of preferences - with carefully chosen favorite movies, Web links and prioritized friend profiles, the Internet facilitated a more stylistically comprehensive performance of identity than any other outlet.

Setting aside the artistic implications of this phenomenon, I'd like you just to imagine life before the Internet and cell phones. I can't tell you how much it frightens me that few students here can actually remember such a lifestyle. Life had a slower pace. People had no impact on you and your social system other than through talking face to face or publishing in a regulated medium.

The difference is that the Internet explodes your conceived importance in the world, without the responsibility of maintaining responsible interpersonal relations. For instance, you can ignore the fact that at school nobody asks you about your favorite new album by posting a review on your Website. If you post comments on other people's Web sites, they may in turn look at yours, and soon it feels like a community - one to replace the physical community you abandoned for the Internet. It's a lifestyle change akin to choosing Wal-Mart over small, private stores. You can argue that it's cheaper and easier, but you have to remember that it's a choice that's being made.

With MiddleburyConfessional.com, Middlebury students are anonymously walking into Wal-Mart. Sure, the site was created by altruistic Oberlin students, but like Wal-Mart, everyone makes a choice, and some people choose to express themselves cheaply. I suppose for some people it's too difficult to justify the opinion that queers should be beaten, and the poor should be excluded from academia, just like for some people it's too hard not to steal dishes from the dining hall, or destroy other people's property while drunk, or cheat on exams. Fortunately, until now, Middlebury had a community that enforced responsibility for justifying such opinions, if not such actions.

That's how I always would have defined community. If people can't be responsible for each other, what is there? As I look back at my time at Middlebury, I'm reconsidering how well I really knew this place and these people.

I didn't have a cell phone until last October. I survived pretty well without it, reasoning that if people wanted me to be somewhere, they'd make sure I knew where to be. I bought the phone ostensibly because it would help with the logistics of my concert schedule - really, I was tired of being left out of the dinner plan loop by my circle of friends. Literally and figuratively speaking, I've still missed too many dinners.

It doesn't matter whether you're poor, drunk, on Facebook, own a cell phone or post on MiddleburyConfessional.com. As a person, you know where you shop, what you believe and who you want at dinner. You know that the choices you make to express those beliefs have a direct bearing on our community. I may be a f---a--, but I'm ashamed of you.

Tristan Axelrod '08 is from Washington, D.C.