CampusTrap?

About three weeks ago, a new player quietly showed up on the battlefield of websites vying for Harvard attention spans. With a small release party and a single Crimson article, CampusTap, a Harvard-centric blogging community with the tagline ‘This is your campus—Go ahead, say something,” opened its doors. By most counts, the launch went well for creators Harry I. Ritter ’06, Adam J. Katz ’07, and Jeremiah L. Lowin ’07. They convinced a few high-profile Harvard blogs—Cambridge Common, Red Ivy, and the IOP Forum blog among them—to relocate to the site, and an in-house discussion about the then-exploding Larry Summers controversy, Summersville, became a focal point for campus-wide discussion of the administrative goings-on.

The idea behind CampusTap is an interesting one. The site seeks to encourage discourse by creating a forum in which Harvardians (many of whom, undeniably, like to hear themselves speak) can expatiate freely on subjects ranging from national politics to more banal questions like ‘Why doesn’t the dining hall serve more red spice chicken?’

In order to promote risk-taking and a willingness to speak, CampusTap follows a model popularized by the Facebook. The site allows blog authors to easily restrict their audiences to those with harvard.edu email addresses, or even to specific people—a blocking group or the board of a student organization, for example. In this way it creates what Katz refers to as a “walled garden”—a safe place amidst a sea of unfriendly or unwanted outsiders.

But that phrase, “walled garden,” has complicated connotations, both historically and in the context of media outlets. Online, it has come to suggest monopoly and content lock-in (that is, practices designed to maintain even unhappy customers by constructing barriers to exit) as much as it has privacy: America Online (AOL) was referred to in the mid 90s as a walled garden because they denied their subscribers access to the Internet at large and denied outsiders access to the content created within. This made it difficult for AOL users to leave and enjoy the fruits of the burgeoning world of e-commerce, though AOL ultimately relented and allowed web access to their subscribers.

In the Harvard community, where it is frequently observed that the diversity of opinions on some issues is already limited, do we really want to close our discussion off to a potential source of new perspectives? Is the Harvard bubble not already sufficiently insular? It’s difficult to say, when reading existing blogs like Cambridge Common, how much of the readership comes from outside of Harvard, but it is empirically not the case that the uninformed riffraff masses come in and preclude substantive discourse, so what gains are realized by keeping them out?

One possibility is that by offering to “protect” their content in this way, Harvard students who don’t want to be associated with certain opinions or viewpoints in public will be more willing to speak out. But those with presidential ambitions would still be foolish to relax their guard: we’ve already seen that corporate recruiters use the Facebook as a tool for evaluating potential candidates. There’s little reason to believe that the journalists of the future won’t find a way to get at past blog posts in the same way.

I can imagine certain situations in which the lines laid out by CampusTap do make a great deal of sense. While we may value openness for political discourse, it seems somewhat less important for discussions of Harvard-limited subjects like final clubs, and much less still for students aiming to air their personal dirty laundry. A number of blogs have appeared on the site which amount to semiprivate diaries of their authors’ lives—a way, in effect, for a group of friends to keep tabs on one another despite hectic Harvard schedules. This seems harmless—insofar as it increases comfort levels with blogging, quite valuable even. Still, when creating new discussion forums we ought to think carefully about in which category (public or private) they belong, lest we clamp down unnecessarily on conversations which should rightly have been open.

To be fair, CampusTap offers some intriguing community-building features independent of its “walled garden” structure. “Tags,” short one or two word phrases about the content of a particular blog posts, are aggregated onto a page called “Campus Chatter” so that readers can get a visual feel for what issues or people are hot topics of discussion. Blogs come with calendars attached so that student groups can use them to advertise events or meetings, and calendars for all the blogs you read regularly can be viewed together in one place. If widely adopted, this stands to add value to the Harvard experience.

And really, it’s hard to get angry at CampusTap for merely providing options. The default choice for blogs on the site is to be public—it takes a concerted effort (at least, clicking a checkbox) to hide away in the sealed enclave. Thanks in part to the efforts on the part of its founders to recruit pre-existing blogs and in part to their dedication to continued improvement, CampusTap seems like it will be around a little while. It’s up to us, those who will add content and contribute to the discussion that takes place surrounding it, to decide what shape, open or closed, that discussion will wind up taking on.



Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.