Last September, Ellen Waite-Franzen, vice president of information technology and the College's chief information officer, spoke to The Dartmouth about the search for a new e-mail client to replace our antiquated BlitzMail system ("BlitzMail replacement delayed," Sept. 25, 2009). At the time I didn't care in the slightest. A nascent college student, I was far too preoccupied with making friends, getting lost and learning the rules of pong to form a cogent opinion. Now as the year hastens to its conclusion and the Council on Computing prepares to deliver its final report ("Study group submits e-mail client proposal," May 27), I find myself increasingly uneasy. It's a strange feeling, a dull anxiety grounded in the knowledge that, like the pinch of a doctor's hypodermic, inevitability can sometimes surprise by how much it hurts. It will be a sad day when Blitz is gone for good.
There's no denying that Blitz has problems. Its interface is stale, two-dimensional and by contemporary standards, cumbersome. It has no calendar, no adequate search function, no-instant messaging system, no way to star important messages and no automatic spell checker. Basically not too much about it has changed since it was invented in 1987 even as new crop of clients, mercilessly honed in cutthroat real-world markets, continue to innovate at a dizzying pace. Susan Warner, director of communications for computing services, may have put it best when she said, "[Blitz] is like keeping a black and white TV in your house. You can get the information that way, but why would you do that when there are so many richer methods?"
True. But I think Blitz is more like the DeLorean DMC-12. (You know, the car from "Back to the Future," with the gull-wing doors and gleaming stainless steal finish.) While both once symbolized the frontiers of ingenuity and technological progress, now, pitifully anachronistic, they represent stagnation. Once the models of change and possibility, they have been eclipsed by their predecessors. Yet, their very creation not only formed the foundations upon which superior models would thrive, but also called into existence the competition to realize these new paragons. And yet in their special 1980s way, each retains a kind of appeal that's extremely hard to resist. They've become part of history, and as such (particularly at Dartmouth), they connect us to a deep-rooted past.
In this sense Blitz has become more and more important in terms of campus life even as its technological advantage has slowly waned. Though Blitz has some unique features for eample, the ability to repress recipient lists, create nicknames, receive messages instantly, view bulletins and search for peoples' names it's Blitz's distinct role as a central component of the Dartmouth identity (I will refrain from using the "Dartmouth experience" since it sounds far too much like a B-side roller-coaster) that makes me sorry to see it replaced. It's more than an e-mail system. It's our system.
We've developed a culture around it. Blitz has essentially superseded instant messaging and texting (especially for those students in the River who can't get respectable cell service). Approximately 100 blitz terminals exist around campus and are so frequently used that according to the Blitz Wikipedia article, a 2001 pinkeye epidemic was attributed to the use of public keyboards. Blitz also has its own rather bellicose lexicon. We love to start blitz-wars, drop blitz-bombs and go blitz-jacking. "Blitz" has even made it into that elite pantheon of ambidextrous words, like brush and shape, which can function as both nouns and verbs.
It is important to remember in all this that tradition should not impede evolution. The current Blitz system is flawed and must be updated rapidly so that students can benefit from the kind of services nearly every modern client already provides. But it should stay nonetheless. That's because if Blitz is like the DeLorean, then its potential replacements Gmail and Live@edu are like the Toyota Camry. They might pack a lot of power and reliability into a compact product for an affordable price, but in the end they're pedestrian, commercialized and wholly boring. Ultimately, when you've got a beautiful chassis, like we do in Blitz, it's a shame to throw it away especially when all it takes is a bit of work under the hood and a new paint job to get back on the road again.
