THE COMMUNICATION CRISIS

Snow, Bean boots, and emails.

What do these things have in common? Well, Hamilton simply has too much of each of them. But especially emails.

It began innocently, with an email here and there from HillFresh Laundry and Wellness at Hamilton in August, before I was even on campus. I thought it was a little strange that I was already receiving emails from organizations on and adjacent to campus just because I had enrolled, but I didn’t give it much more thought than that. Little did I know the flood of emails that would inundate my inbox.

Then came September, and I was on campus. As a freshman, I was already dazed by the novelty of College Life. Still, the number of emails began to climb: Gaming Club, The Office of Off-Campus Study, Dance Team, Hillel, Anime Club, WHCL, Hogwarts at Hamilton, Language Tables, Hamilton Christian Fellowship, Finance Club, Microfinance Club, Mail Post, Smash Bros! It was everything I never wanted. With each Gmail notification, I was thrown a different and singularly niche club.

I slowly learned to filter my emails, but they were coming in faster and larger quantities than I could have ever imagined. None of which I had signed up for. I began asking my friends at other colleges, NESCAC and otherwise, and it seemed that they were not encountering the same steep climbing wall of emails that I was, and I absent-mindedly wondered why there was such a discrepancy.

But the seismic wave that brought me to this article because of the noxious landfill it made of my inbox came on September 20th, just before the first climate strike. Every single club sent out the exact same email on the same day announcing the campus-wide protest. I could not tell you the number of emails I received, but for each one after the ones from relevant clubs, I wanted to spray an entire can of aerosol into the O-Zone.

It was everything I never wanted...

My outrage stemmed not only from the fact that getting too many emails is simply annoying, because also because I felt––and feel––that each club felt it was “doing something” by sending out a mass listserv. email copied verbatim from the original one; each club was so engrossed in itself that none cared about the apathy and disinterest that its email fostered for a legitimate cause. Dilution of meaning is a real phenomenon, and it is exactly what I feel happened then and will happen again in any similar instance.

There are instances where clubs should send out school-wide emails: when something that they are doing deserves the entire campus’ attention. Like when The Continental (no bias here) publishes a new issue, when Yodapez is having a show, or when the Sunrise Movement announces that they are holding a climate strike. These are rare and relevant occasions that prompt campus-wide emails, and they are likely to be presently undercut in value and meaning by the fact that every student also receives club specific information regularly.

So, do not get me wrong, each club emailing their respective members about something important makes sense, but when every student gets every email is when the problem transpires. Our campus is small, so posters in Commons and word of mouth do a great deal, and would reduce the number of emails.

More broadly, there is an incredibly simple fix, and one that every other college than Hamilton seems to have adopted. At the beginning of each year or semester, students should receive one––one––email with a number of listservs to which they can subscribe. Thus, every student will only have to read messages meant for them.

For now we are relegated to filter to mark as unread and delete and carry on, but I hope you will join me on my No Emails 2020-2021! Campaign.