An information-technology malfunction early this week at Southern Methodist University offered students a harsh reminder of how heavily they depend on e-mail and other Web-based services and how helpless they are when something goes wrong.
“We’ve all gotten used to the digital age where we expect technology to work all the time,” said Joe Gargiulo, chief information officer at the university, “and when it doesn’t work as we expect it to, it’s a surprise to everyone.”
According to Mr. Gargiulo, a hardware failure in a unit that stored server data for the university’s e-mail and course-management software left many members of the campus community with sporadic or no access to those digital tools from Sunday evening until late Monday afternoon.
While several faculty members seemed largely unfazed by this development, a number of students felt at sea in the outage.
“I was unable to find out what was going on with my classes so I could plan out the rest of my day with what I needed to study, and such,” Monti Bultz, a first-year student, told The Chronicle. “If you don’t have a sense of what you’re supposed to be doing,” she added, “you don’t end up being productive and you sit around on Facebook wasting an hour or two.”
Ms. Bultz added that she scrambled to make it to a class on time Monday, only to find that the professor had sent an e-mail message announcing that the class had been canceled.
Thomas Sterritt, another freshman, said the snafu made it impossible to prepare for his class that day. “I wasn’t able to download files that I needed for that day’s classes,” he told The Chronicle. Furthermore, the “e-mail crash screwed up my evening because I had sent out messages saying I couldn’t be places and they were never received, so people were disappointed by my no-show. I think we are becoming too dependent on this stuff.”
Jacky Negrete, a student who describes herself as an “e-mail freak,” said that when she couldn’t send e-mail blasts to two of the campus organizations she helps lead, she went crazy. “Life without e-mail is hard to imagine,” she said.
Luckily, Ms. Negrete still had her Blackberry — or her “Crackberry,” as she called it. “The real crisis would be: What would happen if our cellphones did not work? Our world would turn upside-down.” –Steve Kolowich
