Jane Loughman

As Mallory Bechtel, GS ’24, sits in her childhood bedroom, I see four posters from musical theater productions behind her: Les Misérables, White Christmas, Bring it On!, and Whistle Down the Wind. The last, she tells me, was her first professional show—at the ripe age of seven, she was pulled from the training program to join the ensemble for the Houston leg of the 2007 U.S. tour.

While the past year has been disappointing for many of Columbia’s clubs in terms of opportunities and in-person collaboration, each of Columbia’s four literary publications—The Columbia Review, 4x4, Quarto, and The Blue and White—made the most of their situations by expanding, experimenting, and extracting from their old methods in order to adjust to their growing online spaces.

Is it possible to find one’s sense of self through the Internet? Many complain that social media creates façades and prevents individuals from expressing their true selves. While this can be the reality for many Internet users, there are people who feel freer online than they do in person. Online, users can engage in gaming, fandoms, or identity-based or sex-positive communities, as the Athena Film Festival recently discussed in its panel “Reassembling Identity: Social Media and the Path to Self-Definition.”