For many, the appeal of liberal arts colleges lies in their emphasis on close student-faculty relationships. At Wellesley College, this is evident in its 7:1 student-to-faculty ratio and relatively small campus population—about one-third the size of the national average. This intentional choice is meant to foster meaningful connections within both social and academic communities. Given this emphasis, it seems natural to expect that the digital communication platforms developed and used at Wellesley today were thoughtfully designed to promote such a close-knit community. However, while alumni fondly recall the late night calls and the spontaneous, eclectic beginnings of technology on campus, today’s students face a different reality. They navigate a digital landscape cluttered with thousands of unread emails, heated student debates on Wellesley’s SideChat, and fragmented course management across multiple platforms—none of which fully meet the needs of students or faculty. As digital media has crept into our lives, have we lost the intentionality needed for genuine connections?
While it’s expected that communication evolved with the development of the internet, even during the 2000s and 2010s, was Wellesley’s community always this fragmented? As this blog post suggests, there was a time when Wellesley had beloved centralized all-campus forums (who could say that about Sakai?) where academic and social communications coexisted seamlessly. Now, a student might be managing three or more academic tools per semester—Sakai, Google Classroom, Gradescope, Email—while navigating an equally dispersed social media landscape with SideChat, Instagram, Facebook, and more. If such unifying forums once existed, what caused this digital fragmentation? Were the platforms flawed, or did changing community needs prompt their abandonment?
We argue that reassessing the history of digital communication at Wellesley—both its strengths and shortcomings—is essential for understanding how to evolve and enhance meaningful communication today. With this in mind, we pose the question: To what extent have digital tools improved communication at Wellesley?
We examine how Wellesley’s digital landscape has evolved over time, what prompted these changes, and their impact on the community while also presenting hard, numerical data of student perspectives. By doing so, we hope to suggest ways that digital and analog tools can be used to support meaningful and authentic interactions. As outlined in chapter 6 of Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues, we emphasize the importance of being intentional and thoughtful in our technosocial practices to strengthen the bonds within our community.