Yahoo News, as part of its "Born Digital" series, asked students and parents to write about how college has changed over a generation. Here's one perspective.
FIRST PERSON | "Have you seen the news? There was an explosion in one of the viewing stands near the end of the marathon," my son Andy, 18, texted me from Northeastern University on April 15 at 3:17 p.m., less than a half hour after the bombs went off.
There was no waiting for the next edition of the Boston Globe or fortuitous tuning in to a radio or television news program for the news to reach him. There was no uncertainty about what to do with a bombing occurring just blocks from the university, either. In a follow-up text, Andy explained he'd received an email from Northeastern telling students not to leave campus. When the manhunt shut down the city on April 19, Andy awoke to a series of texts alerting him that he was not in danger due to the shooting on the nearby MIT campus. He also learned by text his final exam for the day was canceled.
Our ongoing communications during day of the marathon bombings and following days highlight how different it is to attend college in Boston today from the 1970s, when I was a student at Boston College. The speed with which news travels and the means -- emails, texts, and online posts -- are distinguishing marks of Andy's times. When the phone networks go down, as they did after the marathon bombings, texting, emailing, and posting fill the gap.
As Andy noted during the manhunt, "Everyone from MIT is making obligatory 'I'm not dead' posts."
But some things don't change. Just like in my day, big news brought people together where they could comfort each other. At 4:30 on marathon day, Andy reported, "Everyone is in the common room watching the news."
There was the familiar scramble to account for friends who had been off campus when the alert was issued.
"I have some friends who were literally between the two explosions, fortunately they're all ok," Andy texted me at 5:11 p.m. on the day of the marathon.
When big events happened in my college years, news wasn't spread instantaneously. In the Blizzard of '78, phone lines were overwhelmed, so there was no communication with parents for days. When my dad had a heart attack prior to the student phones install date, it took the better part of a day for the news to reach me. My mother called campus police who walked over to my apartment and left a message with my roommates to check in with them on my return from Cambridge.
Waiting hours to contact home wasn't necessarily a problem in most circumstances due to our youthful veneer of invulnerability, but I imagine it was tougher on our parents. Then again, they didn't have the same type of terrorism to worry about in the 1970s. The likelihood of our being done in by a big storm is hardly comparable to the fears a parent experiences when bombs go off at a popular event just down the street from their child's campus.
I had expected Andy to be at the marathon finish line watching as he'd told me he planned to do. After more than a decade of living with instant communications, I can't imagine having had to wait hours or even days for reassurance of his safety, even though that was the norm during my college years.
http://news.yahoo.com/first-person-technology-keeps-parents-college-students-close-214300513.html
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