A Reunion of One’s Own
Connecting in the digital age
by Ellen Reeves
When I arrived at Harvard in 1979, one of the campus wonders was the Science Center, shaped, according to legend, like a Polaroid Land camera. Imagine: a camera that produced pictures on the spot—memories captured instantly, in color even! In the basement lived the Main Frame and its terminals; techno-geeks trekked across campus to use them, while the rest of us wrote our term papers on typewriters. There were no cell phones or voice mail; “text” was still something you read, not something you did.
Fast-forward 29 years. The Science Center still stands, but its innards have innovated; now it is wireless, as are all the dorms and Houses. Freshmen enter with laptops, cell phones, and an fas.harvard address; many sport iPhones and Blackberrys. There is no need to wait for the Freshman Register: most students have connected virtually even before they arrive, checking each other out on MySpace.com or hi5.com. They are already “friends” with their roommates and their roommates’ “friends” on facebook.com—a “social utility” in the terminology of today’s technology. Once on campus, they can use H-Link, a Web application that connects their courses and classmates with their Facebook accounts. Thanks to Facebook’s inventor, Mark Zuckerberg (who might have commenced with his class of 2006 mates had he not followed in Bill Gates’s footsteps and dropped out), Harvard students these days are all connected—at least technologically—for life.
By my fifteenth and twentieth reunions, technology had caught up with our class: we had a reunion website and e-mail had replaced “snail mail.” But in this, our twenty-fifth-reunion year, we underwent a technological makeover. Class-report entries could be submitted on line; we had our own blog. When a Class of 1983 Reunion Facebook group sprang up, within 24 hours I had dozens of “friends” and began catching up with people I hadn’t talked to for years. I saw pictures of them, their partners, and their pets. I found out that one of my roommates was divorced, one had gone blonde, another gray. I knew what they were reading, where they were traveling, what music they liked now. People I hadn’t thought about since graduation found me on line and said hello. I was having a reunion, and it was only February.
I began to wonder: in the digital age, do we need real reunions? Why bother coming back to Cambridge at all? You can watch Commencement on screen, without suffering in the blazing sun or pouring rain, without being trampled by parents desperate for a glimpse of their child’s $180,000 head. You can tour the campus virtually—even using the Wikipedia link to discover all the people who ever lived in your freshman room—and impress your family without buying a lot of expensive plane tickets. Camped in front of your computer, it doesn’t matter what you wear, where you sit, or with whom. You can avoid the trophy wives, the genius children, and the humble Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners. You will not risk being remembered for things you aren’t anymore. When you think about it that way, who would ever go back?
I would. I have never missed a reunion. But I should admit that I am the class secretary, the one who, for some reason, believed as a senior that I wanted to help connect classmates to each other and to Harvard for life. Since graduation, I have served on every reunion committee, all of my local Harvard Club boards, and countless Harvard and Radcliffe Alumni Association committees. I helped form a Radcliffe Shared Interest Group when the Radcliffe Alumnae Association disappeared along with Radcliffe College. I understand this behavior to be atypical; my sister Caroline ’84 is more representative. I had to sign her up for her own fifth reunion, which she had no intention of attending. I paid for her registration, I ordered her sweatshirt, and I even made her fly back from China. She had a surprisingly good time, and went on to serve on her own twentieth-reunion committee.
But for those who can’t or won’t leave home for Cambridge, the virtues of the virtual are many. Harvard at Home (www.at-home.harvard.edu) “brings the best of Harvard to you”; courses like Michael Sandel’s celebrated “Justice” are now being offered on line; Crimson Compass (http://post.harvard.edu/alumni/html/crimsoncompass.shtml) is Harvard’s on-line career networking service. Without waiting five years for a reunion, you can connect immediately with like-minded alumni, thanks to the Harvard Alumni Association’s Shared Interest Groups (SIGs), class websites, and list servers (www.haa.harvard.edu). You can reach out with ease across classes and Houses, geographical barriers and time zones.
The emotional obligations of on-line friendships are fewer; it’s a circumscribed relationship. “Reunions used to be an event but now they’re an environment,” notes writer R.D. Rosen ’71. “You don’t just parachute in and it’s over. You can almost not show up and have a better time. There’s a tacit understanding that you’re not strangers but you’re not friends. You don’t have to feel rude or regret that you have to tear yourself away from a conversation: with e-mail you just stop; no hard feelings.”
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