Tom Coates has unearthed something that amuses me: Oxbridge Life, "a free interactive network for anyone who is studying - or has ever studied - at Oxford or Cambridge University. It helps both current students and experienced professionals reach out to fellow members of the Oxbridge community to make the most of each other’s knowledge and connections."
Obviously this would normally be quite odious for all the same reasons that McKinseys, say, is odious. But what tips this out of the realm of 'sinister' and into the realm of 'charmingly wrong about society and basically everything' is that you don't have to prove you attended Oxford or Cambridge to register! So where the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge provide the UK with genuine and generally regressive forms of social filtration (aka 'meritocracy') - generating the aforementioned 'Oxbridge community' - Oxbridge Life is a perfect hunting ground for people who idolise these great institutions but didn't attend them.
(Which reminds me of a job interview I had once:
Him: " ah! I see you went to cambridge... I've always been an Oxford man myself!"
Me: "oh right. Which college?"
Him: "oh... no I didn't actually go to Oxford")
One of the funniest bit of Oxbridge Life is the singles section, which has the strapline 'finally pillowtalk worth listening to'. What would this involve?! Sweet nothings about your punting technique? Dreamy reflections about one's first May Ball? But funnier still is the fact that the website looks, to my untrained eye, quite well designed and built, suggesting that someone takes this idea seriously enough to invest time and money in it. To the credit of Thomas Power, founder of ecademy, he has never claimed that his online club is especially exclusive (which ultimately is its main problem), but sells the idea in terms of the support it provides to lonely or unemployed professionals. By contrast, to establish an online network without any filtration mechanism, but to sell it in terms of elitism and snobbery, is utterly ridiculous. And yet, if it gradually undermines the Oxbridge brand (which is all it can do) perhaps it is a welcome intervention to British social hierachy.
Like Tom's post, this strikes me as a wild over-reaction to a harmless bit of online community-building. (Incidentally, part of the registration process is specifying which college you were at and when, so I think the opportunities for passing-off are fairly limited.)
Obviously I don't think I'm a superior being because I went to a Cambridge college, and I wouldn't want anyone else to have that illusion - not for any longer than it took me to get through the interview, anyway. Which I think points to the real difference between our perspectives with regard to this one. If you're in insecure employment and your social network's full of holes, you take all the networking assistance you can get, frankly. (And I bet there are plenty of Oxbridge graduates in that position.)
Posted by: Phil | December 18, 2006 at 10:17 AM
By way of a postscript, Salon on caste-based social networking.
Posted by: Phil | December 18, 2006 at 10:35 AM
No, by way of research, I successfully signed up claiming to be born on 1st January 1960 and having attended Balliol College Oxford in the 80s.
The question is: if it's the exclusivity of Oxbridge social capital that is being exploited, then how can there be any value in an online network which makes no attempt at closure? But if it's less elitist than that, and simply about bringing together people who were at university together, why not be less snobbish and use friendsreunited.com?
I never said this was dangerous, just very silly
Posted by: Will Davies | December 19, 2006 at 09:05 AM
Well, you went in with 'odious' and 'sinister', which make it sound a bit worse than 'silly'.
And I never said you wouldn't be able to sign up - just that actually getting any use out of it would be exactly as easy or as hard as passing yourself off as an Oxbridge graduate in any other context.
That Salon article is very good on all this.
'It's just yet more proof that cyberspace is hardly a transformative medium. What it's really good at is duplicating, in bits and bytes and packets, exactly the divisions that cut through the offline world.
Which means, naturally, that for every Brahmin group devoted to recovering lost glory, there's a Dalit group aimed at smashing the oppressive system that keeps "untouchables" down. And scores of additional "communities" --"Against the caste system," "I hate caste," "I hate caste and religion" -- that provide gathering places for anti-caste system sentiment.'
Posted by: Phil | December 19, 2006 at 09:33 AM
Anyone for tennis?
Posted by: henry | December 19, 2006 at 10:28 AM
rather!
Posted by: henrietta | December 19, 2006 at 10:29 AM