BLOGGERS CREATING NEW
KIND OF COMMMUNITY AT SMU

by James Keller

"I am sitting down and planning out the next few months," Melissa Muise writes in her online journal. "I am gonna get one of those whiteboard calendar deals, write down when all of my assignments are due... I've never been this busy in my life."

Muise, a fourth-year sociology student at Saint Mary's University, has written in her online journal, or blog, for two years. On it, she chronicles her life, writing about an array of topics from personal crises to what she's doing in school.

The blogging service she uses, Livejournal, also allows users to set up online communities -- groups of bloggers with common interests or circumstances. Users can post on a central community journal or read the personal journals of other community members in an amalgamated "friends page."

Last year, Muise found one of these blogging communities for SMU students, connecting her online journal directly with the 35 other SMU students who have signed up.

Aside from peering into the lives of her peers, Muise says she can read and write posts about what classes to take, which teachers to avoid and what problems she and other students are having.

"It's a good way to get information about Saint Mary's," she says. "It's a way to keep yourself informed and bitch about the school with strangers."

Earlier this month, for example, Muise posted an entry asking why a campus building was evacuated. Before that, she complained about SMU's new online registration system, SATURN. "I hate SMU sometimes," she wrote in that entry.

Fellow SMU student Deanna Lucas started the community last year. With thousands of communities on the Livejournal network, including many for other universities across Canada, there still wasn't one for SMU.

It was slow to get started, Lucas says, but more people finally logged on and signed up this past summer.

"It took a little bit to pick up, but this past summer people put up their class lists to see if anyone's in their classes, or ask questions like, 'when is the U-pass given out?' or 'what do you think of this teacher?'" says Lucas.

Lucas says she hopes more students discover the community and join. Even with such a small membership, she says, it still functions as a community. It's not necessarily a venue to meet new friends, she says, but it's a place to connect and share experiences--even if most of the members are complete strangers.

"I think it's a community in an online sense, because you talk, you communicate ideas and you learn," says Lucas. "You go online and you know these people go through the same things at school that you do."

Muise says having access to other students' personal online journals changes the way she interacts with peers who also use the service. After reading about another student's money woes, Muise offered to buy him lunch on campus. She says she had an advantage because she had read his online journal before they met in person.

"We didn't need to go through the preliminary stuff," she says. "I think that you connect with people on a different level than you would if you were to meet them on campus in class. You can jump right in because you already know what's going on in their head."