Introduction, Body, Conclusion

I'm afraid of the Internet. Well, let me rephrase that-I'm sort of afraid of what a bunch of crazed pre-frosh can do on the Internet. Hell, it wasn't too long ago when I was one myself, fiddling around online, just a couple of clicks away from making long-lasting connections the summer (or spring, or winter ... or fall) before moving in. And I'm not referring to the false promises of Facebook, nor the date-rape prospects of MySpace, not to mention the lots-of-therapy odds of College Confidential. No, I'm thinking of something far more dangerous; something that allowed us to naively create an over-involved network of friends before picking a meal plan, or receiving our UNIs, or even turning in our early decision applications. In the beginning, there was LiveJournal.

Before anyone who still respects me stumbles upon this information online, I've decided to come clean about this high-speed phenomenon. The thing is, for hundreds of us LJ users, freshman year started way, way before August. The perpetrator, LiveJournal.com, is designed to give you a personal blog that also conveniently compiles all of your friends' blog entries onto one page, including community feeds. Through the wonders of this site, those of us who couldn't wait to be students here intersected paths, and collectively jump-started our identities as Columbians on the Columbia2009 community we founded and developed.

If there were such a thing as an active "reverse alumni" network, we would have been it. Instead of looking back on our Columbia days with nostalgia, we were a group of "friends" looking forward to them with such enthusiasm that, before even going to our senior proms, we were already planning the adventures we'd go on together in college. We made promises to take each other to the Guggenheim, or wander the streets together with our cameras and notebooks-some of us took it so far as to fall in love with other members. I bet that if a reverse alumni coordinator had called us up and asked us to donate to a "pre-frosh fund," a lot of us actually would have.

This Web site became a space that let us collectively create and be happy with a life we hadn't actually lived yet. We could write an entry about the first six books of The Iliad or a story in that day's Spec or AlcoholEdu or the practice rooms in Wien, and get loads of replies from other not-yet-freshmen who shared our anxieties or excitements or knew the answer to our doubts. "August!" became our motto; we had a schedule of site-wide chats and lots of us fostered friendly relationships outside the space of LiveJournal (yet thanks to the Internet, still kept our distance). What made this specific online rendezvous spot unlike any other was the scale of possible intersection points: even if we didn't e-mail or IM one another, we were easily able to follow each others' lives. Our life blogs were available on the site simply by following the link on our username.

It was all a tad bit ridiculous. Instead of coordinating class reunions, we were living an eight month pre-union. The tools are readily accessible for this, though; the Internet is practically designed to let common-interest connections like these be made from a distance, with benefits like companionship generally highly outweighing the cost. These long-distance connections almost never have an expiration date, however, and ours did-we would, sooner or later, find ourselves on the same floor or the same lecture hall. But we knew too much, we had tried too hard to pretend that we could use our common hyper-illusion to come to Columbia as enough of a justification to be friends.

In my first column, I admitted that I should never have hoped to make real friends out of my Facebook buddies simply because we liked the same novels or TV shows, but on many levels, the connections from the LiveJournal community were supposed to be deeper. I had friends miles away that I would talk to independently, about daily life, as if I had just seen them at school and they'd given me a ride home, and we were simply continuing our conversation on AIM. Some sent me mix CDs, and would ask me for advice on whether or not to lose their virginity that weekend. On top of that, I was automatically able to follow the lives of all those who made regular appearances on my friends page-I could read their musings on the perils of being a waitress, their accounts of being mugged, or their worries about whether they could feel at home in the northeast.

The community stopped being a community the day orientation began. Other than two people, I haven't talked to any of them more than once, and find it completely awkward that remnants of these supposed connections are on a URL somewhere, but don't really exist. Now that I look back, it's the familiarity-from-a-distance that we all had with each other that probably makes it so weird to see any of these acquaintances. The funny thing is, I still have a LiveJournal, and the same people's entries show up on my friends page. The girl with the breathtaking pictures still takes breathtaking pictures, and now she gets them published in the school newspaper. The girl who documented her life in terms of boys, parties, and national politics now writes of sorority parties and internships at think tanks. The ones who couldn't wait for college to make better friends are still waiting, and hate how no one on their floor shuts up. We all came together with a craving for change, divulging our desire to be immersed in first-year life before the class of '08 even finished their first semester of college. Then we left evidence of that desire behind, and we're all well on our way, but we are all still practically the same-just in college.

Fernanda Diaz is a Columbia College first-year. The Fern Fifteen runs alternate Tuesdays.