FaceTime at Wellesley College

A Panel of Faculty Notables**With contributions from student panelist Anna Friedman '04 and audience member Larissa Ranbom '02
Discussing FirstClass's Community Conference

Full Text and Audio

Online conversation is central to campus life at Wellesley. Within FirstClass, our campus-wide communications system, students, faculty and staff learn, do business—and talk. No forum is more visible or controversial than "Community** Interestingly, in two separate surveys done by Wellesley's Office of Institutional Research (2001 and 2004), only about 6-7% of Wellesley's students claim to read and post regularly to Community—a low number compared to the impact Community seems to have on the community.", the site of many encounters, both humorous and heated. The forum is not anonymous and participants come to know each others' voices— though not necessarily their faces—well.

The first Face Time forum on March 14, 2002, brought posters face-to-face to discuss the pleasures and problems of online communication. The discussion, led by 6 prominent faculty participants on Community, drew over 120 people, including 60 housed in an overflow "lurker" room who watched via telecast. By popular demand, the Mellon Committee hosted a second FaceTime session on February 26, 2003, this time bringing together a panel of faculty, staff and students to discuss recent "negative speech" on Community*Not surprisingly, the very term "negative speech" was problematic; our fliers advertising the event drew heated debate in the campus online forums.. Each session lasted over two hours, with much valuable discussion from the audience. Below, we excerpt comments from the panelists' remarks at the two sessions; their advice remains relevant in 2008. If you prefer, you can listen to this transcript section by section on the FaceTime page. Warning: because of the nature of the event, some of the audio is scratchy. But we guarantee you'll find it interesting!

15 min, 48 secs

What is Community?

Flick Coleman: Whenever possible, I favor anarchy over organization, and so I see something quite beautiful about Community. I see something quite unique—an overused word—about Community, I've tried to explain Community to colleagues at other institutions, and most of them have just thrown their hands up and walked away and then allowed as how they would never participate in such a thing if it were foisted upon them.

Flick Coleman: You can characterize it as full of sound and fury, signifying something, and one of our tasks is to figure out what that something is that it signifies.

Larry Rosenwald: As I was thinking over why I do post, I've realized that I thought of my posting as a matter of civic obligation. I read Community and post to Community for somewhat the same reason that I vote, and for somewhat the same reason that I speak in other fora that I'm part of, because that's what my sense of what it means to be a citizen of this community entails. That's why I read it, that's why I post to it.

Julia Miwa: I like to engage in debate. I enjoy a good discussion and argument, looking for flaws in people's logic, or trying to understand the reason that someone else can look at the same situation and come to a very different conclusion. And I like having my own arguments challenged.

Flick Coleman: One of the things that I think we have to think about is the fact that our online community is identified by our name. We are not hiding behind usernames as people do on typical internet chatrooms. And consequently when you get ready to say something, you should realize that people are going to know that you said that and that people are going to know that you said it a long time from now. That thread will disappear from Community in a day or two, but when you are nominated for the Supreme Court, something that you said on one of those threads is going to come back perhaps to haunt you, perhaps to support you.

André Isaak: I think that we need to also recognize that there is another problem that comes into this, which isn't merely the rules of engagement, but also the fact that the medium itself has rules which I think are interpreted very differently by different people, depending on how they first became aware of electronic communication, which is a very new medium. Somebody like myself who has grown up as a Usenet junkie has a much different concept of things like what it means to flame someone than somebody who has grown up on Community, and a lot of the problems that we see I think really do stem from the fact that people are coming into this with very different amounts of experience with the medium itself and then this is often leading to some serious misunderstandings.

Anna Friedman '04: I think that the concept of survival of the fittest on Community is not necessarily a bad thing, and the reason that it's not necessarily a bad thing is because we are inside the Wellesley bubble. Here, we're all given space to be brilliant women. We're all told that our point of view is valid and we're not discriminated against and all the happy fluffy diversity thing, and that's not the way the world works. We are in a male-dominated society. We are in a society where people like me who want to go into business are going to have to deal with sexism, discrimination, and a whole slew of things that really are survival-of-the-fittest concepts. So unless we develop a thick skin intellectually—now I'm not saying that those things are necessarily right, I'm just saying that they are out there, and to be able to handle them is one thing.

FirstClass Identities

Julia Miwa: I would say there's one issue that's the same, which is I'm always aware that there are some people that really only know me from what they read on these electronic conferences, and there are other people that know me personally as a colleague, or have worked with me. For every time you write a post there are dozens of times where you think you have an opinion on something and you don't bother to say it, either because someone else has already said it, or the moment seems to have passed, or you just can't figure out how to get it right. So that subset of things that actually shows up is in some ways kind of random—it's not the most important things to you. So I do have this feeling sometimes that there's this very skewed image—I don't know in what way... that there are people who probably have really unusual images of me if they've only read things I've written and never seen me in person.

Larissa Ranbom '02: In conversations with some students, some students say, "I can be a person on Community that I couldn't be in person," whether they feel uncomfortable expressing certain things orally or between people, they can be themselves in this electronic forum.

André Isaak: It's not that I become someone else when I'm posting. If I post something I'm not going to suddenly take on some evil alter ego or anything like that, but I generally feel more comfortable expressing a wider range of opinions to people in person than on electronic fora, simply because then I know who the audience is.

"I respectfully disagree"

Kathryn Lynch: It's harder to post on a public bulletin like Community if you know that most of the people out there are not going to agree with what you say. In fact, many of them may disagree passionately and may even not like you anymore once they realize that you actually hold some opinion that is generally considered to be noxious in this community.

Oftentimes the views that I hold tend to be a little bit more conservative than the majority viewpoint at Wellesley.

For people who don't ever really have to think, "Is my position a minority position? Are there a lot of people out there who are going to disagree with me?" to realize that for someone who always feels themselves in an embattled, beleaguered position to constantly be having to read sort of jokey, happy, spirit-building opinions that you disagree with, after a while you get kind of resentful and sometimes you lash back.

One advantage of holding a minority opinion is that it helps to focus your mind on that fact. It also is an advantage because you really have the benefit of having to think through everything that you say if you know that people aren't going to agree with you and they're going to be coming back with hard arguments.

If we really want to have a diversity of opinion at this institution, it's not the responsibility of the people who have the dominant opinion to express themselves, but the responsibility of the people who hold the minority opinion to express themselves. You can't expect the people who already have a community of belief to invite you into the discussion and make space for you—you have to make that space for yourself.

Anna Friedman '04: I think that one of the things that would help Community is the acceptance of a difference of opinion.

The broad spectrum of opinions should be represented on a college campus such that we can learn.

The flip side of that is—the danger in not allowing a difference of opinion is—a forced homogenization.

Flick Coleman: Now, we're going to disagree about a lot of things, but at the same time I think we have to listen to all of the voices that are out there, and listen to them with some degree of respect.

But that's what I really want to think about, how can we disagree and disagree vehemently and do so in the context of a community?

Rules and Roles on Community

Larry Rosenwald: The standard that I impose on myself when I'm deliberating is the standard of having something that's mine to say, that I really do feel impelled to say and clear in saying. Once I decide that I do have something to say, I try to act in accord with the following additional rules: I make it a practice to ask questions when there's something I'm not sure I understand, even if I'm pretty sure I understand it, especially if I'm going to oppose something that somebody has said, I want to be certain that what I'm opposing is the person's meaning.

André Isaak: I felt that it was really important that somebody be quite honest about this and express that the reason, at least why I post, is probably the same reason that many students post, which is that I procrastinate.

Julia Miwa: Sometimes I find myself torn with the decision about whether to post to a thread or whether to reply privately to the individual, and some years ago this was the subject of a big meta-conversation. I replied privately to a student, and she got really upset about that. There were several other instances where people felt like that was really offensive—that I was making the whole thing personal. Somehow saying the same thing to them in a public space was the less offensive way to go.

Julie Norem: I enjoy eavesdropping on Community, or lurking, I guess you say. I still find Wellesley a mysterious and somewhat opaque place after ten years, and I confess that part of that is that it's a women's college, which is something that I never contemplated when I went to college, and I really am interested in the differences. One way to get a feel for that is to look at the discourse on Community. Because again, it is different than the in-class discourse, and it tells me things about what people think and do here that I wouldn't otherwise have any access to. There are social science perspectives that allow us to make this very respectable—we call it social grooming. So it's not just gossip—it's social grooming where you actually do build a community by picking up tidbits of information and passing them along to others on Community. So, I justify my watching Community that way.

Beth DeSombre: A lot of the stuff that I got from Community in learning about Wellesley is stuff that I use in thinking about how to teach—that I try to use examples in the classroom that come from examples that I know people are dealing with in their real life, especially since I often teach about esoteric topics.

Larry Rosenwald: There are postings that I've done that are matters of providing expertise, occasional ones where I'm being a professor, and I'm talking about Yiddish or early music or Emerson or whatever I happen to know a factoid about.

Beth DeSombre: There's a lot to learn about how Wellesley works, and, while I don't for a second think that Community is representative of Wellesley, it's an amazing source of a lot of information quickly, information I wouldn't have found out without a lot of research on my own, information I might not have even known to go look at, and and some of that's useful for me just in figuring out how to think about Wellesley, how to interact with Wellesley.

Faculty Perspectives on Posting

Julie Norem: Posting on Community is difficult for me, and I hesitate a lot, and it's not because I have nothing to say. It's because it does feel as if the potential's there to just kill the thread. It's hard not to be a professor when you post on Community. So I can post on topics that have nothing to do with my professional expertise, like whether blowing bubbles actually causes a stain on a silk wedding dress, and that's comfortable, that's fine. Or I can post on things that are very centrally related to what I do, like on the depression thread where I actually feel as if I have some credentials that make sense. But the stuff in the middle is uncomfortable for me.

Beth DeSombre: I am very aware when I post on Community that I am a faculty member. And it's not only because of the thread-killer thing, it's because I don't have tenure3, it's because if faculty post, it's accorded a certain responsibility, and people react badly if you've disagreed with them and you're a faculty member. And so I am careful when I post on Community—I post a lot, but I'm careful. In fact, one of the reasons I go back and read it is not only because I feel a responsibility to respond, but because I'm scared about how people are going to have taken it. So this is not a stress-free environment for me. I get a lot out of it, I find it very useful, but I do find it a stressful thing, and I'm constantly aware that I'm a faculty member when I do it.

Julia Miwa: Sometimes I feel like there's a group of people being discussed as sort of the "other," and I feel like I'm one of those others. So, sometimes it's a faculty perspective. Sometimes it's a resident of the town of Wellesley perspective. But again, I think this comes from the fact that most of the people having a conversation are students who are mostly the same age.

Beth DeSombre: I've noticed that my time frame, the time of day in which I'm on the computer is very different than the time of day that most students are on the computer. So during the day there will be this thread that I find really interesting, and in between students coming into my office I'll read it, I'll post on it—and there's not much happening. I do use the computer at home, and so I'll check in at 8 or 9 at night, but I'm in bed at 10 or 10:30. I get up in the morning, and even if I—or sometimes I do check the computer first thing in the morning because I want to look at my course conferences, and there have been 35 messages on this thread, because students are operating on a different day than I am. Like many of the faculty members here, I don't want to post on something unless I'm pretty clear I've read the whole thing. Sometimes it's just completely overwhelming what's happened between when I've gone to bed and when I've gotten up in the morning.

There have been some posts in which people say, "Well, why aren't faculty participating?" which there are a couple of times when I didn't early on, and then people would say, "Well, why aren't faculty participating?" and I felt kind of sheepish or strange in response to that.

Larissa Ranbom '02: A lot of these I think is because it's things like the "National Coming Out Day" thread, mental health thread—something where it feels like if you look and you can see that professors are reading in "History"… Showing up in "History" could mean that you're just hitting the forward button over and over again, getting through this as fast as you can to get on with life—which isn't something that I've ever done. It's something that matters in ways that I think are unexpected.

You see that no one's responding, it makes it feel like this is just a student issue. I've never seen anyone post, "And my office is a safe space." Anything like that.

André Isaak: I consider my office to be a fairly safe space. When people have come there, I've never injured anyone or anything. I would never actually post a message to Community saying my office is a safe space, because that to me implies that the default assumption is that offices in Wellesley College are not safe spaces, and that is not in my mind a legitimate default that I would want to convey.

Flick Coleman: The problem is, I think, that there is somewhat of an assumption that if you do not post "our office is a safe space," et cetera, does that mean it's not? And so I think we have to think about what are the consequences, what is meant by reading a thread and not responding to that particular thread.

Julie Norem: So one of the things I was hoping we could talk about today because it came up very recently was this idea that not posting is an active response in a couple of ways. One is that you don't want to kill the thread. But it's also interpreted sometimes as an active response, from what I've read on Community, where people are not being supportive. So if faculty are not posting on a particular issue, they're not being supportive, and that really floored me the first time I read it, and so I've been thinking about it a lot, trying to figure it out… I can understand how it would feel supportive to have someone post, at least that they agree with you, but the idea that not posting is not being supportive—that's a tricky one for our community. I think that there are a lot of implications of that, and a lot of potential to not build community on Community if that's a widespread assumption.

Community and community

André Isaak: I think the importance of that is something that we really can't underestimate, something that is strived for on this campus is the notion of a campus web community, and, of course, that's why we name the conference "Community."

Audience member: It makes me think that the electronic discourse—maybe it's the beginning. Somebody made a comment that an email does not take the place of the conversation. And I'm wondering if it's the jumping-off point. It is the meeting of people, and that maybe that there's an electronic community that, as somebody said, of maybe 200-300 people are participating, and is that the Wellesley community? What is the Wellesley community? I remember hearing a professor from Duquesne University saying once that we need to decide what kind of electronic community we want to be. So those are just some comments, but I thought that was a great exchange of you two recognizing each other and knowing each other, but not realizing it. So now you can have a conversation.