BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : DECEMBER 11, 2000 ISSUE
BUSINESS WEEK E.BIZ -- NET CULTURE Net Man on Campus It was a Proustian journey into the misty reaches of the past. My freshman-year roommate and I were back on campus at Carnegie Mellon University to see how much things had changed since we arrived there as fresh-faced teenagers 30 years go. Stan Muschweck is now an advertising bigshot in Pittsburgh. I'm a journalist in New York. We've both seen unsavory things in our lives. Still, it was a bit of a shock when we knocked on the door of our old room in Scobil Hall and met the current denizens. Sitting back-to-back at two huge computer monitors were sun-deprived seniors Marc Gioglio and Jarrod Roy. They were playing Diablo II on the Net. The floor of the room was covered with scraps of trash and dirty laundry, which gave off a funky smell. I exclaimed: ''Didn't your mothers teach you how to live?'' Truth be told, the level of slovenliness on campus probably hasn't changed all that much--but technology certainly has. When I arrived at CMU, engineering students still used slide rules. As an English major, I didn't touch a computer until 1973, and that was a one-night stand. Once, after midnight, I played Lunar Landing, a crude computer game, on a PDP-10 mainframe in the then-new computer science building. My only other contact with technology was the clunky tape recorders that we campus activists carried into the dean's office when we presented our list of 10 non-negotiable demands. CMU wasn't the most radical place, but it achieved its 15 minutes of fame when lefties pelted Republican South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond with marshmallows during a visit. Now, CMU is a hotbed of Netism. Gioglio, a physics major, says he spends probably two hours a day playing online games. Another resident of Scobil Hall, freshman Richard Bohn, uses his dorm computer and the Net to conduct video-conference love fests with the girl he left back in Andover, Minn. (No nudity, he swears). Other freshmen use the Web for downloading music files via Napster or to view bootleg movies. Then, of course, there's the school-related stuff: registering for classes, filing homework assignments, and e-mailing profs. This preoccupation with all things digital seems to have swept aside most other concerns. There's not much going on in the way of student activism. I met two members of the eight-person Earth Club--earnest kids who are working with the administration to bolster the recycling program. ''It's amazing. Our school is supposed to be so innovative, yet it does so little,'' mused Matt Martin, a physics grad student studying string theory who is the Earth Club president. I wondered: Whatever happened to the tactic of throwing burning trash cans through the front windows of the administration building? Stan and I discovered a couple of hot-button issues. There's the Napster brouhaha, of course. A couple of the students were sent to intellectual-property sensitivity training sessions after they were fingered by the recording industry for illegally copying music files off the Web. But an even bigger issue is entirely local. When residents of dormitories download huge video files or play multiplayer games via the Web, they slow down the network in their building to a crawl. That means their fellow students don't get quite the performance they'd like on the network. Some enterprising souls devised a program that identifies who's hogging the network. These bandwidth vigilantes pay polite visits to the miscreants, patiently explaining to them the consequences of their actions and urging them to modify their behavior. ''We only get socially conscious when people take up our bandwidth,'' quips Bohn. One thing that hasn't changed at CMU is the sensitivity of some people in the humanities programs to the school's tech-heavy culture. At Carnegie Tech, they sometimes feel like second-class citizens--forced to defend things like the teaching of Shakespeare and Chaucer. But Peggy Knapp, one of my English professors, hasn't given up on the notion that literature is relevant--even to engineers. ''People get emotionally invested in literature,'' she says. ''With Beowulf under his belt, an engineer feels more freedom to reimagine and change himself and the world he lives in.'' Those kinds of personal journeys are still being undertaken at CMU. Jill Palermo, a junior from Cleveland, just switched her major from architecture to art. She decided she didn't want to slave at a computer in an architecture firm for the rest of her life. Instead, she envisions creating cultural centers in low-income communities. ''I believe that technology has to coincide with the arts to make a whole,'' she says. ''I'm the arts half. I'll need to find others to do the tech half.'' She may seem a bit self-absorbed. But with idealistic sentiments like that floating around, maybe things at the old alma mater haven't changed so much after all. By Steve Hamm _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP					e.biz Contents for Dec. 11, 2000 issue RELATED ITEMS The Wired Campus TABLE: Digital U. TABLE: Web Teaching Takes Off Net Man on Campus INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online

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