I never get cell phone service in Lou's. On more than one occasion, I have accidentally flagged down a waitress as I guiltily raised my iPhone high above my blueberry-peach pancakes, hoping to catch a single bar of service.
"It's frustrating," Libby Buttenweiser '15 said of the "dead zones" in Hanover, of which Lou's Restaurant is only one example. "When I'm stepping into one, I feel so out of the loop."
You know we're spoiled when nothing irks us more than a half-mile radius of no reception. Cue the time-lapse rewind, and we arrive to campus in 2003. Students anxiously line up at the Blitz terminals in Novack, hoping to check for any new blitzes before 12s. Rewind some more to 1979, and the terminals are nowhere in sight. If you asked a student where to find a computer, they'd point you in the direction of the only computer a mainframe monster housed in the now- nonexistent Kiewit Machine Room.
In a matter of three decades, Dartmouth has seen an overwhelming change in the technology available for inter-campus communication. Once upon a time, students relied solely on the spoken word to dispel information about the day's happenings. Nowadays, it's hard to imagine living in a world in which our friends aren't a quick text away.
"I even use [my cell phone] to check Blitz," Austin Moore '15 said. "I remember visiting campus a few years ago and listening to an admissions tour guide rave about how important Blitz was for the Dartmouth Experience.' I wouldn't say that's the case today."
As Moore suggested, with the improvement of cell phone reception and the 2011 shift to "new Blitz," terminal stations seem to have gathered dust. This is a shocking development for students who attended the College in the early 2000s and considered their interactions via Blitz a "cultural institution," according to Laura Glickman '07.
"Whenever I had a spare minute and there was a computer somewhere, I'd check my Blitz," Glickman said. "We loved it."
Even two class years later, Blitz was still just as popular, according to Zack Zehner '09.
"We would check it religiously," Zehner said. "First thing in the morning, last thing at night, after every class, midway through frat parties, etc."
Upon its introduction in 1988, BlitzMail was bound to become a social phenomenon. In 1987, a group of College software developers created a working email system for the Dartmouth campus after a "two-month blitz of effort," former system administrator and Kiewit network manager Stephen Campbell wrote in an article published on Dartmouth's website titled, "Campus Email for Everyone: Making It Work in Real Life."
"The name stuck," Campbell wrote.
Hope Rennie '90 said she relied heavily on both Blitz and instant messenger during her undergraduate years.
"I was in with a crowd that was very into computers," she said. "We were constantly emailing each other."
Although the realm of computing was largely confined to those who were tech-savvy in the late 1980s, the new technologies had started to catch on by the time Rennie graduated in 1990. By the turn of the millennium, students and faculty at Dartmouth used BlitzMail for everything from academic exchanges to social chatter. In fact, the system became so popular during this era that a pinkeye outbreak in 2001 was partially attributed to germ-infested keyboards at Blitz terminals, according to 2003 article in The New England Journal of Medicine.
"One of the first things that struck me as I was up over carnival was how nobody was using the terminals," Zehner said. He added that during his time, before smart phones became popular, "there was almost always a queue for terminals."
As much as the student body embraced Blitz, the system was far from perfect. Without instant access to their inboxes, coordinating changes in plans was no easy feat.
"It was always so difficult to find people when you were going out," Glickman said. "It was like two ships passing in the night."
But if the era of BlitzMail was "the night," the '70s and '80s were more like an abyss. In the late 1980s, students had to trek to their Hinman boxes to receive printouts of their emails. In the 1970s, email was the stuff of science fiction novels.
John Donaghy '75, a writing professor, said he currently uses both email and Blackboard to communicate with fellow faculty. Naturally, he recalled a different experience as a student.
"Everything was sufficiently [communicated] by word-of-mouth," he said. "The campus just felt smaller then."
Ellen Oppenheim '79 said she would congregate with her friends in Thayer Dining Hall between classes to discuss the evening's plans.
"Besides that, our means of communication on campus were whiteboards on our doors, notes and through our Hinman boxes," she said, "Amazing, right?"
This means that if a class was canceled, students would roll out of bed and head over to the lecture hall, only to discover they had been stood up by their professor. It means that families kept in touch via letters delivered by the Hinman Post Office or through weekly phone calls from a payphone downstairs. in residence halls. But most importantly, it means that every aspect of the extracurricular scene from sports practices to club meetings to lunch plans with friends was committed to a schedule.
"You would make a plan, and you would stick with your plan," Oppenheim said.
Oppenheim argued that the lack of communication technology during her time at the College encouraged better social interactions.
"You were more inclined to ask the person next to you to join you for coffee, simply because that was the person you were currently in contact with," she said. "It pushed you out of your comfort zone."
No one would argue that these new technologies have inconvenienced our daily lives, After all, Dartmouth is expected to keep up with the status quo to provide a wholesome learning environment for its students to ignore these advancements would be to shortchange the very students they wish to serve. But perhaps we have surpassed a healthy threshold of interconnectedness. Perhaps we haven't. Either way, modern technology is here to stay, and as Oppenheim said, "You do because you can, we didn't because we couldn't. That's just the way life was."
