By Conner
This is my first semester of graduate school. I was very much looking forward to joining a new social network. Generally, I find that most people would think of social media Facebook when presented with the words “social network”—encouraged, of course, by the fact that there’s a movie about Facebook with that exact same name.
Instead, what I’m talking about, in sociolinguistic terms, is the interconnected web of people with whom I interact on a regular basis. I don’t know about anyone who is reading this, but I’ve noticed my social network has assumed a strange new shape recently, one with a lot of little squares. I grew up in the 80’s and remember watching the TV show Max Headroom, about a person who gets digitized into a computer and can only communicate, stuttering and digitized, through a screen.
The only human I see physically on a regular basis is my husband. Everyone else–students, classmates, friends–is like Max Headroom: recorded, converted into 1’s and 0’s, and then reconstituted. Only then is it safe for me to see them.
I anticipated that my social network would grow when I began to attend graduate school. I thought it would be fun to get back into talking to smart people about smart things and feeling very smart and smug, but instead, I feel very distanced from my classmates. There is no ambient chatting before or after classes, and no group study or trips to get afternoon coffee the way I imagined my graduate school experience might be.
I am at least lucky to have been grouped up with individuals for my group projects who were interested in meeting up early to plan. Everyone confessed in our first meetings that we felt very confused and insecure. Nobody seems to be feeling very smart or smug, and even the teachers seem to feel hesitant in this new online environment.
McGill has just announced that it will be following a similar online format for the Winter semester. I am a thesis student and will probably be done with my coursework after two semesters. I worry that my social network will not be able to truly grow because I am distanced from my classmates. Everyone seems very interesting, and is full of their own experiences and expertise, but we seem unable to connect. I’ve certainly made friends and connected with people online before, but this feels impossible currently. I worry that we will not be able to all improve together. Selfishly, I even worry if this will impact my writing and thinking, and if the quality of the research I will attempt to produce will suffer accordingly.
I hope I will be able to meet at least some of my classmates in-person in the future. Perhaps the groundwork we lay now, the shared experience of online learning and pandemic, will grow into a different sort of social network. I look forward to having a smug cup of coffee together and being surprised at how tall everyone actually is in real life.
