I am a sophomore student at Western Washington University. Western Washington University has been known for its community and its overall atmosphere as a welcoming, friendly campus for many years. I can recall specific accounts when friends and family encouraged me to visit Western so that I could get a sense of that community and maybe one day attend the school. In fact, that is why I am attending WWU today.

Within the first couple weeks of the quarter, God blessed me with great new friends and a comfortable way of being. I found a laidback lifestyle in which school was the priority, but friends and sports were soon to follow. I truly did get the “Western welcoming experience.” Very quickly, my friends became family, and now I love them to death.

In contrast, my roommate situation is not as great. We barely speak to each other, and hardly know anything about each other, but they truly are nice guys and I’m finding our “strictly roommates” relationship tolerable. Here’s the reason why I believe we don’t socialize as much as we should: electronics are getting in the way. One of my roommates plays video games on his laptop most of the day, while the other watches videos on his phone. I find myself walking into an apartment in which the minds of its inhabitants are glued to an LCD display on a daily basis. I would have to say that out of all the places on campus, my own apartment in Birnam Wood is the least welcoming.

Take a look at the bus stop. At least 90% of the people at the bus stop are either listening to music with headphones or have ear buds in, or they are staring straight down at their phones, or both. A general genre of enjoying yourself is apparent here. Students almost seem to not even be aware of one another. Another example is the dorms. Even though dorms are designed to build a community, and to get everyone involved with each other, students still isolate themselves. Isolation, just as it does at my apartment, comes because of students’ overwhelming mass use of electronics, and even more specifically, social media. RA’s planned events can’t take place if you don’t have the students to make them work! This “public isolation” is a real problem that can be the root cause for depression, or in other words, the exact opposite of the “friendly Western campus” label that has been portrayed to the public in the past. That’s just one example of many I’m sure you can think of where student isolation can take away from something else.

This idea of a welcoming, friendly environment on campus is constantly being shaped or formed into something new by electronics. In particular, I think the electronic that is doing most of that work is the cell phone. What about cell phones makes us shape our own community you might ask? Apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Yik Yak, and even YouTube are the hands to this case of pottery in the social aspect of the community here at Western. Digging a little deeper, in what ways does social media shape our community at Western Washington University?

Let me point you towards the telescope that I am looking through. In our text for English 101 entitled Participating in Cultures of Reading and Writing, Paul Heilker writes an essay called “On Genres and Ways of Being.” Heilker explains his ideas of how we live our lives in genres, and how we can match ourselves up to one genre or another. Genres have a sense of freedom, rather than a sense of confinement such as a desk. Heilker states that we must reform school for the sake of our students, to better the learning environment. To adapt to genre as a way of being. He implies that our current system is limiting. Although, these genres do not only apply to the classroom environment. In a school as large as WWU, there is plenty of room for genres to thrive outside of the classroom. If Heilker is right, then what does that mean in terms of how our social media practices impact our genre framed communities?

This idea of genres, even though much more fluid than our current scope of the community at Western, still feels incorrect. Heilker fails to mention how one student could have/be involved in multiple genres, and/or transition through genres throughout their life as a student. Another way to look at it is that students are constantly evolving in their time as a Viking. Heilker’s essay makes me feel like students fit into genre boxes.

“Genres are human-created artifacts; they are technologies in that sense” (Heilker 97). Heilker’s groundbreaking ideas around the frame of genres are very intriguing. I think that there is an emerging idea here where Heilker is telling us that genres are tools through which we can use to frame society. Genres have a spectrum. As wide as the span of tools from wrenches to ban saws. They have a spectrum on the scale of relativity in which we relate one person to another. Some genres are more “introvertish” and some are more “extrovertish”. Genres have details of how much, depending on which genre a student may be in, they affect other genres or the community as a whole. For example, a genre in which students prefer to act with a “whatever” type of attitude will not cause any momentous changes in the lives of the members of a community. Alternatively, students who depend on study groups to learn in the most effective way, create their own genre, in which friendships can be made and community can be built. Heilker is correct about genres as technologies or tools if this is what he meant in this quote.

What if genres were actually toolboxes? With a range of tools in them, that could be interchanged or added on to? Heilker goes on in the sentence after the quote saying, “And like all technologies, they embody and enact ideologies, values, ideas about what we should believe, what we should want, and how we should be.” This is limiting. This is just like saying we can be one tool (one genre) and only be used for one job. I feel that our lives are much more complicated and easily shaped. Social media is a great example of that. I believe we are more like toolboxes. Tools can come in and out, and as technology advances, more advanced tools can be added to our arsenal which may or may not take the place of existing tools. Keep in mind tools are genres in this metaphor.

The actual box to our toolbox may get banged up over time from all of the different tools coming in and out, but this only adds character to us. The toolbox you are at 75 years old shows where you have been in life, what you have learned, and depending on the tools you have inside of you, which is different for everybody, you have found a way of being which suites you best. None of this can happen though if students are constantly separating themselves from the community via social media.

When students at Western interact face to face, this idea of a reformed Heilker with genres as toolboxes instead of tools shows, in fact, two different genres interacting, each student being a different genre. This is good because this pushes us as a society and broadens our genres. Which, in turn, evolve, making our genres advanced genres as I was saying just moments ago. The general over use of social media, with how addicting it can get, diminishes the potential of a higher quantity of face-to-face interactions on a daily basis, thus negatively effecting Western’s welcoming, friendly community. An example of this is my own on-campus, Birnam Wood apartment, but in fact, as I have given you just a few of many possible examples, it happens everywhere.

So which statement was wrong in my first paragraph? The last one. If you spend time enjoying yourself on your phone and on social media, you are in fact taking yourself away from the physical community around you. Thus negatively taking away from the community around you. Even if you believe that you are insignificant, that you will barely be noticed, or even noticed at all in a community, let me tell you that your shear presence, attentiveness and state of mind affect a community. Body language. It can be read by all. You can’t stop yourself from portraying some sort of feeling through body language, because you constantly are. Even if your body language is a depressed language, there are always going to be others who feel the same way. Stepping back into genre, if one felt like they were in a depressive state, and they possibly met someone else who was feeling the same way, if they were to start conversing, Bam! There’s the growth of a couple of genres. If others read a sad body language, it will either negatively or positively affect them. But do not worry about this! Life is all about the journey. Yet another quote I am sure you have heard before. The lows only grow us, shape us into a renewed, reformed genre in which we use our lows to learn from and then more frequently be accompanied by our highs. Therefore one’s absence from the physical community is the only way they and others around them won’t grow. This is all made on the assumption that growth is good of course.

Now, separating from attempting to be some sort of motivational speaker, lets look at the first couple of quotes I began this piece with. “Social media is a big waste of time,” and “people are on their phones too much.” If you agree with my thought process this far, then you would agree with me that the side of the issue where you are taking yourself away from the physical community is bad. To put it blatantly. So, in a sense, perhaps these two quotes are correct. Before you start hate reading, perhaps even click away, let me jump in and say this. Social media is a tool that connects family and friends in a way that benefits your relationship with them that phone calls and letters could not live up to. In fact, most of the time, I see people using social media for the right reasons. However, the fact of the matter is, even those of us who aren’t addicted to social media, who use it for all the right reasons, still affect others and their genres around us.

Social media is a blessing and a curse. Its technology has shaped society in a way that we will never be able to recede from. We are going to have to embrace it. Or individually choose to ignore it. Either way, it affects every one of us and our genres, along with those genres around us, on a day-to-day basis. So ill let you decide. Social media: is it your friend or foe?