‘Social Networking Websites’ and Antioch College

Here’s a copy of the article I wrote for The Record for this week’s issue.With the recent popularity of ‘social networking’ websites such as myspace and facebook it’s inevitable that Antioch College communities, including current students as well as alumni have jumped on these sites in an effort network, communicate and socialize. However, you might not find some of these spots unless you know where to look. This article is not meant to be a complete list but rather a sampling of some of the ones I happen to have stumbled across. There are some that have a more interesting story behind them, like Friendster, while others are fairly self-explanatory. Probably the best thing about all these sites is that, at least as far as I can tell, no one ‘official’ from the college is running these virtual entities and thus some of the comments on these sites can get pretty interesting. Note, for many of these you’ll need to create an account to access them.

• Friendster – http://www.friendster.com/horacemann – Back when one of the first social networking sites, ‘Friendster’, first started there were a number of accounts created for objects, geographic places and businesses/colleges/etc. Sometimes referred to as ‘Fakesters’ these accounts took on a virtual persona of this object/entity but also provided a place for those affiliated with it to network and communicate. One such account was created for Antioch College and a number of people befriended it and all was well. However, the brilliant marketing minds at Friendster, the same ones that refused to sell to Google and instead let myspace steal their thunder, decided that accounts had to be for ‘real people’ and threatened to shut down this account unless it was associated with a real name, and thus the account became the official Friendster presence of Horace Mann. Since then Horace has been assisting Antiochian’s of all generations to network and a number of people have comments about Horace & Antioch. Take a look at his friends list and you might find some other Antioch-related ‘fakester’ accounts.
• MySpace – Probably the largest and most visible of the social networking websites out there, Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace probably gets mentioned on the news more than the Internet itself. Antioch College has a ‘fakester’ virtual presence here too: http://www.myspace.com/antiochcollege/ . However, Myspace didn’t shut down this presence and even took notice that there was a demand for groups wanting to network around bands, places, etc. and created a ‘real’ virtual presence for Antioch at http://schools.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=schools&schoolID=3535 Yellow Springs even has a group too : http://groups.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=groups.groupProfile&groupID=100118399
• Facebook – The latest craze in social networking, Facebook has an Antioch College group at: http://antiochcollege.facebook.com/friends.php?id=85700330&nk=16778074. Also The Antioch College Record has a virtual presence on there at http://antiochcollege.facebook.com/ profile.php?id=85700330 I only found out about this thanks to the current Record editors. Amusingly The Record’s facebook profile claims it’s in an Open Relationship with Bob Devine. (Don’t tell Callie!) If you have an antioch-college.edu e-mail address you can sign up as a current student and get in, but even if you don’t you can still create a mere-mortal account and befriend the Record. They’ve posted a few articles up there and some discussion followed in the comments (I’m personally hoping this moves over to the antiochrecord.org website, but that’s a separate issue). There’s also a way to view all 432 Antioch alumni (and I believe this includes current students) on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/classmate.php?n=16778074
• Linked-In – http://www.linkedin.com/in/horacemann – Horace Mann returns from the grave once again at this more business networking website LinkedIn.
• Livejournal – One of the older social networking/blogging sites, you’ll find a lot of alums from the 90’s here. You can view all LJ members who are associated with Antioch at http://www.livejournal.com/schools/?ctc=US&sc=OH&cc=Yellow+Springs&sid=3839 or view the Antioch College Students & Alumni community page at http://community.livejournal.com/antioch_college/
• Frappr – http://www.frappr.com/antiochians – Wouldn’t it be neat if someone took google maps and added the ability to put pushpins where members of a group are located? That’s exactly what Frappr does and even has some chat & commenting features. Go add your pin to the map.

Other Antioch Related Websites

• AMP – http://antiochmedia.blip.tv/ – While I’m sure everyone reading this at Antioch is familiar with AMP (Antioch Media Pulse) those of us out in the wild don’t get to hear about this kind of stuff often so I wanted to mention this for other alumni. Video blogs and other short productions from Antioch. Seems to have been dorment for the past 3 months, but I doubt it’s ‘quite dead yet’

• Antioch92 – http://groups.msn.com/antioch92/ – Originally created as the 10 year reunion forum for the class of 1992 it quickly morphed into the ‘Antiochians of the 90’s’ forum. Lots of topics are discussed here ranging from ‘what ever happened to’ to ‘what are you listening to now’ and everything in between.

• Antioch Record – http://antiochrecord.org/ – For the past few years I’ve been writing a rather lengthy note to each terms Record editors begging them to not only put the PDFs of each issue up on the web but to also post individual articles into a ‘blog’ so us geeks out here in the lands far far away can easily keep up with what’s going on. This terms editors were the first to actually chat with me on this and well, I’m a sucker, so I set up a site for them and right now I’m putting articles up myself. My hope is this gains some traction and The Record takes on updating this site as one of it’s duties each term, but only time will tell. This does provide the ability to post comments after each article which might make for some interesting discussions.

• Antioch College Alumni Site – http://www.antioch-college.edu/alumni/database/profile/ – The Antioch College website has an ever improving Alumni area these days thanks to the dedicated work of Gare Calhoun so I have alot of hope for this area. I don’t see why current students couldn’t sign up in here too.

• Antioch Sucks – http://antiochsucks.com/ – While I personally wish this site was ‘I have mixed feelings about Antioch’ and wasn’t so focused on anonymous communication, I would be remiss not to mention Yazz Atlas’s website critical of Antioch.

• Other sites – Try going on flickr.com or youtube.com and search for Antioch College. Not too much there right now but if these sites keep evolving as fast as they have been then there is bound to be more soon. Keep your ears and eyes open for the ‘next big thing’ in social networking and be a trail blazer. Horace needs more homes 🙂

What’s next? While all the above sites are interesting and fill various niches, none of them do ‘everything’ that we’d need in a ‘virtual community’ of Antiochians. My bets are on Gare’s alumni site on the college site right now, but he is the web guy for the whole university so I don’t know how much time he has in helping alumni network and communicate. I had plans to set something up at Antiochians.org too but so far there’s nothing really there.

I’m certain there are probably some places I forgot to mention, or just plain don’t know about. Y’all grew up with the Internet; tell us old farts what’s going on. Go find this article on http://antiochrecord.org/ and post other links in the comments. If you build it they will come.

-Matthew Baya ’92
CM ’92 – ’93
Asst. To the Dean of Students ’93 – ’96
Asst. Director of Technology Resources ’96 – ’97
Alumni Board ’97 – ’00