The Man Behind the Digital Curtain
by: Neil Smith ‘12Out of all the private colleges in Virginia—as of recently—Hampden Sydney College is one of the most active users of new media in communicating with students. Jared Christian Harris ‘12 was kind enough to discuss his role in the new developments with the Tiger.
In August, the school started using Facebook when Jarred Christian Harris approached Dean Mladen Cvijanovic about an idea. Harris saw that there was an available Facebook group page for the incoming freshman class of 2013. He thought that it would be wise for the school to use Facebook to send school information about new student orientation, general help, etc, and it could serve as an accessible and permanent Q &A public archive for deans and students to reference. Since the predecessor facebook groups were student-run, Harris decided to claim the HSC “Class of 2013” group before anyone else. After talking about the idea, Dean Cvijanovic and Harris married the Facebook idea with New Student Orientation.
Around the same time, Harris was the first H-SC student to friend Dr. Howard on Facebook, while Dr. Howard sent out emails requesting suggestions. Taking advantage of Dr. Howard’s request, Harris sent him a few suggestions via facebook. Shortly after this event, the
Deans saw how Facebook was an effective tool for communications and created a position for a new media student life liason. A Facebook page was created for the college, which the college started promoting by using campus email and Facebook ads at an affordable cost. The Facebook page contained informative pictures and videos. The page jumped from 0 to 3,000 fans in 3 months. Dr. Howard followed the site and remembered Harris from his comments on his Facebook.
Harris’s hard work and creativity landed him a position to help Drew Prehmus. Though Harris provides Prehmus with thoughtful suggestions, Prehmus has the final say and runs the page. Upon the creation of the Dean of Students page, it was presented to higher ups in the college and they found it to be impressive and decided to implement the site. They realized new media had the potential to improve the school’s communication capacities. Harris works with Prehmus on new media ventures and is responsible for what he calls the “crazy custom content that we do and that almost no one else does.”
Harris’s hard work shows itself in the quality of the website with features like the Impressive Belize Clip which he finds to be rewarding, since the process for building the web page is challenging, given the knowledge of html code required to produce a quality website. Harris is also responsible for filming the student election videos, which are posted on the website. Receiving 20-100 emails a day, Harris sees himself as a new media evangelist, where he “spreads the gospel of new media.”
As far as the future of new media in the college, it appears new media will play an even larger role in college communication in the future. For example, the incoming class of 2014’s new media is already in development, which will contain a video of Cameron Adams displaying and describing the freshman dormitories. It is currently posted on the webpage which Harris also filmed. Also, in the future, the scho¬¬ol will hav¬¬¬¬e a brand new website, with a Student Government page. According Harris, one should “prepare to find a lot of Campus information on Facebook.”
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