The Future of Community News In A School Missing Out On It's Community

The more elaborate and sophisticated the technology, the more prone it is to losing one link in the chain and jamming up. For example, two posts I uploaded this weekend do not seem to be showing their darling faces. I wonder where they went off to.

But that glitch is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about my school.

For those of you not in the know, I attend George Mason University and it is considered one of the most diverse academic settings in the country by the Princeton Review. This past Tuesday in my Online Journalism class, local community news blog BackFence.com co-founder Mark Potts spoke of the future of community news via online.

The idea is that much like the once upon a time idyllic picture of neighbors casually talking about local happenings from over the yard's fence, now those living in the same community can discuss whatever is happening online. You can post about a new event or service, as well as join in on a conversation about something else already posted - all things that are relevant to you because they are in your backyard. But then it was mentioned that we could have such a forum amongst the students of Mason.

Yet we don't. The school loves to promote their diversity, especially at pep rallies, Final Four basketball games and landmark events such as Senator Barack Obama's recent visit. But when the last streamer has been trampled and the last dance has had its time on the floor, the party's over and everyone goes home. A large percentage of the student body living off campus still makes us a commuter school, and commuter schools remind me too much of bedroom communities.

In a bedroom community, that social community spirit is threadbare because so many of the residents each week go elsewhere for their jobs, work long hours, and come back with barely enough time to rest before heading off again the next morning. And so many of the students at Mason do just this - they show up for class, and then they're off to where ever the rest of their lives happen. I used to be one of these commuters, and it was borderline mentally disabling trying to lead two full lives. So I sacrificed the campus life.

So the question I pose is this: Would enough individual students actually partake in such online "conversations" as opposed to just being interesting in casually reading them? The questions is not one of being able to to communicate, but choosing to communicate. We already have Facebook. Mason enacting a site much like Backfence would be a logical step forward in opening hundreds of rooms of communication - public forums that would transcend that ethnic diversity that we so proudly wear as a badge of honor yet it divides us. It divides us severely into clusters of likeness each time we think of our ethnicity, and we forget often that we are all students trying to get through the day, through the week and the semester.

We are all students with things happening around us that are relevant to us, yet we do not tell the whole of the body. Either that, or the entire student body is not listening.