Plans: A Hybrid Community

For a Grinnellian? It's a pretty crucial means of communication with campus, in my opinion — Plans lets you know about events, parties, etc. and also lets you check in with friends and acquaintances you don't get to see as often as you'd like (because we all know that the average Grinnellian gets forced by his or her workload to drop off the face of the earth on occasion). My position on Plans is that it's pretty darned sweet.

Plans is [sic] private system of interconnected blogs for the Grinnell College community. It is an online forum where people post messages about their lives, friends, current events, and musings. It is a virtual community that, in some ways, seamlessly overlaps into the "real" community.

As described earlier, the possibility of a hybrid community allows for the resulting benefit of gaining the strengths and avoiding the weaknesses of virtual and real community systems. The archiving abilities of face-to-face communication are severely limited while those via plans are well documented in many instances. Conversely, Plans fails to offer a way to break off into private, sub-conversations and then reconvene easily. In this realm, non-virtual communications or other virtual communications provide better systems to make up for this weakness. Indeed, Plans users use these systems for this exact purpose. Instant messaging, phone, e-mail, and face-to-face communications are used as extensions of Plans communication.

These communications are not random, though. Contact information was far and away the most common type of permanent information posted in plans by the 72% of respondents with permanent plan entries. The appearance of contact information shows Plans as one of many forms of communication at most and as only a starting point for communication at least. This is especially true in the case of alumni. When isolated into two separate groups, 91% of the alumni polled had permanent plan entries while only 57% of students did.

Three factors make for this divide. First, current students have access to the aforementioned StalkerNet which provides an address, phone number, picture, and more. Second, for current students, the user name for Plans is identical to their Grinnell e-mail account. Third, the geographic proximity of students makes it easy to seek out another user. All three of these factors are not available to alumni. This disparity should not be confused as showing that more alumni seek each other out outside of Plans just because more of them list contact information in their plan. While they may seek each other out more for some forms of communication, it does not apply to all forms. Most users maintain some communications with other Plans users outside of Plans with other users.

Interestingly, those communications are not even necessarily with people whom a user previously knew outside of Plans. Of the survey-takers, 31% said they had "befriended someone outside of Plans because of interactions on Plans." This number dropped to 22% when limited to students, but it can be presumed that student experience with Plans is on average shorter and that Plans-born friendships may take longer to develop.

Plans is a staple for many people on the Grinnell College campus. Plans even found its way into the campus newspaper, The Scarlet & Black, in a recent, end-of-the-year staff editorial which took the form of a satirical Plans Secrets format (S&B Staff Secrets).

The effect that Plans has on the outside world is equaled by the effect that outside information has on Plans. Just as conversations leave the realm of Plans to be manifested through a face-to-face conversation or e-mail, hot topics on campus find their way into many plans. A quick search on Plans for recent or current events demonstrates this. A search for "John Kerry" revealed 64 occurrences four days removed from his speech. The rapper Ghostface Killah who appeared the night before was mentioned 44 times on Plans. Even two weeks after the controversy over the Salad's reprinting of the Danish cartoon of Muhammad, more than 10 references were made to the article. A search for the impending finals in less than a week brought hundreds of hits.

As well as news, other regular information appears on plans. Many student organizations maintain plans to use for announcements of events and other group information. While this may be of little use to non-students, 40% of students had three or more groups on their auto read list.