Strolling through the Hop on a fine Thursday afternoon with a couple of good friends, perusing the form letters from the College that comprise the day's Hinman box content, wondering if, in fact, I should join the Sub-Committee on Intra-Campus Interrelational Human Affairs, one of my companions suddenly stops in his tracks.
"Gotta go check the BlitzMail machine," he announces.
My point in relating this mildly charming anecdote is not to deride those who refer to computers as "BlitzMail machines." Well, actually it is. When the purge comes, people who call computers BlitzMail machines should be the first to go.
But within this story also germinates an idea of the pervasiveness of computers in the typical Dartmouth student's life. Follow me on this: if anthropologists were to deconstruct the Camp Dartmouth civilization, they'd be hard pressed to locate anyone or anything outside the context of computers. BlitzMail is only the most obvious manifestation of the computerization of our collective consciousness.
In the beginning your computer is a new toy, seemingly non-threatening. Wild color patterns decorate your background. Your cursor can be a bouncing tennis ball or even a dancing Gumby. Every time a blitz arrives some clever sound bite will chirp for all to hear. Twice.
BlitzMail becomes addictive, at least temporarily. Those mass forwarded blitzes -- sure, they're almost funny the first time you get them, but by the time you've read for the thirtieth time "Top Ten Differences Between A Man And A Carrot" or "Fifty Reasons Why A Fruitbat Is Better Than A Woman" you've (hopefully) had your fill.
Fortunately, BlitzMail has almost no withdrawal. At home or off campus you hardly even think about it. Still, once you're back on campus, you're mainlining again.
Then there's Surfing the Net. Jetting through Cyberspace. Cruising the Information Superhighway. As glamorous as the catch-phrases make it sound, Net-cruising largely amounts to a glorified time-kill, unless you're savvy enough to know where the genuinely useful sites are.
Enough with the Net already. Pictures take twenty minutes to download. Half the time the site you're trying to get to is "unavailable" for reasons that the faceless byzantine Web-server refuses to explicate. And just what wonderful cyber-gem are we hoping to find anyway? Rick Astley in a chat room? The Official Jim J. Bullock Homepage? Wow, I just found a link to the alt.soc.sci.bin.hex.flim.flam. FAQ. Color me hardwired.
And good luck if your computer malfunctions. Cutesy icons of bombs with burning fuses and mailman under attack from sociopathic canines alert you to a problem. The computer will also gladly inform you that your malfunction was due to ERROR -23803, which certainly means a lot to me. ("ERROR -23803? I could've sworn it was -23851. Go figure.") That's why it pays to talk to the Kiewit consultant.
"My computer's crashed -- I press the keys but nothing happens!"
"Try plugging in your keyboard."
I don't know which is worse, that they're paid to answer that question or that we keep asking it.
Kiewit is a suspicious place. Every year Kiewit mocks the upperclassmen by giving the first-year students some splashy new model that makes the previous year's hardware about as relevant as a Commodore 64. Two years ago I laughed at the seniors and their puny black-and-white monitors, while my LC III hummed along like H.A.L. 9000. The next year when Kiewit issued the Power Omega Quadra Terminator my delusional techno-pride was swiftly quelled.
And let's not forget that Kiewit is storing on file every blitz we send. They shut down the server every night at 3 A.M., saving all our messages, ostensibly for our own protection. No doubt. I'm not saying there's some elaborate underground spy network monitoring our blitzes for drug transactions and encoded military secrets, I'm just saying that the rumor of Kiewit's having bulletproof windows is a little too widespread for my tastes.
Let's face it, computers have their little microchip mitts in most every aspect of our beleaguered Dartmouth lives. We make dinner plans over BlitzMail, sign up for classes with DarTerminal, write papers with Microsoft Word. Professors already put lectures and take-home exams on Public; makes you wonder why we even have class anymore.
At least I'm not one of these anti-computer reactionaries, living off campus somewhere in the wilds of Vermont, no working electricity, just a wood-burning stove over which I can roast my organic free-range tomato paste as I finger-paint spotted-owl portraits in clouds of incense while reminiscing about life on the last Phish tour. Well, not yet, anyway.
