pantsfarm

A little while ago I remarked about the NYTimes Essay Contest about the “End of College”. I even managed to convince a friend to enter.

I’d been meaning to come back to this ever since they decided to put all of the essays online (about 450) in a search-able database. I’ve only looked at a handful of the essays, and like most people I’ve spent most of the time looking at essays looking for people I knew or the winner and runners up.

When I clicked on the link to the winning essay, titled “The Posteverything Generation“, I actually had expected something rather quite different from what was there.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s well written, although it struck me as a guy who’s a little too… I don’t know, smug? There some cleverness there but I finished reading it feeling a bit disappointed, and not only because it wasn’t what I had been expecting.

What I had expected, briefly, based on nothing but the title, was something relating to the use of the word “post” as “to bring to public notice” rather than “after”. I didn’t really think about it much more than that before getting to actually reading.

Given the things I’ve seen in the past about our generation being post-privacy, among other things, such as this NYMag feature from a while ago, or in a more general sense, the rise of “transparency” as described in Trendwatching’s “Transparency Tyranny“. Even somebody such as Mark Cuban has posted about how the Internet has changed things with regard to publicity.

I’m not really sure how all of that would have actually tied in to how college has changed in the last few decades, but still, it seemed like it could have been interesting.

Oh well, back to reading some of the non-winners I guess.