With the current onslaught of websites like MySpace, Facebook, and Bored at Baker, Dartmouth students such as Kolleen Burbank '09 are losing confidence in the Internet's ability to stimulate intellectual discussion.
"[The Internet] is a good procrastination tool for people, Facebook in particular," Burbank said. "It's certainly not used for student groups or academics or anything."
Tuck students Jason Freedman and Chris Herbert and Colin Van Ostern, an associate director Tuck public relations, hope to counteract these sentiments. With the help of a focus group of students from Tuck and the College, they are launching a social networking website that will provide college students with a forum to discuss topics that interest them.
The overall purpose of the site is to allow students to cohesively voice opinions on a wide range of topics -- from on-campus social life to global politics -- in the hopes of enacting change on campus.
"If Dartmouth students aren't happy about something and have a constructive opinion that they want to voice, they can do it here," Freedman said. "This is the place that will be most persuasive because no administration wants other people to see that they are not implementing change."
Freedman, Herbert and Van Ostern decided to start the forum after realizing that college students currently have no way to voice their opinions on issues that they consider important.
"We spend so much time online now, and there's really no place to go and express opinions and then find out what everyone thinks," said Herbert, who is also the founder of tuckprofit.com, a humor website about Tuck. "Our idea is to create a site that allows people to exchange ideas and come to a vote at the end of it, and actually get somewhere. It's opinion that turns into action."
The website is designed so that a topic is brought up in the form of a question and students have the ability to vote in favor of, or against it. Though Dartmouth students will be the only ones able to vote, the site can be viewed by alumni, administration and anyone else. Users will only be allowed to vote once.
"Let's say the question is, 'Should Dartmouth compete against other schools that have Native American mascots?'" he explained. "You will be able to reveal a poll of current students and how they voted, yes or no, and the ability to break it down by gender, class, year, and several other ways," Freedman said. "If you voted yes, you can write your own editorial on why the answer is yes."
Students on the site will then have the opportunity to rank these editorials, allowing the most well-written to appear at the top of the list.
Though it has not yet been formally decided upon, Herbert predicts that the users posting the questions will have to include their name.
"The current thinking right now is that you can vote anonymously, but in order to post a question you've got to be accountable for it," Herbert said. "We want to avoid Bored at Baker, where you cannot be held accountable to anything you write."
The website will be launched in two steps. First, it will become available to the Dartmouth campus, giving Dartmouth students the ability to ask questions, vote on issues and gauge other people's responses to topics they find interesting. The site will then be opened to college campuses all over the country.
"Our plan is to use Dartmouth to drive what it is that the website entails," Freedman said. "After we test it at Dartmouth, we want to launch it nationwide."
Freedman also stressed that the website's content will be decided by the students. This power will come in the form of polls that allow students to rank different topics, causing the less popular polls to eventually disappear from the site.
"We don't feel it's our role to decide what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. It's at the hands of the students what they want to make the site," Freedman said. "What makes that unique is that it means that the high quality debate will rise to the top."
