NYT: All Quiet on Campus Save the Click of Keys

This isn't a story about technology penetration, wi-fi, instant messaging or email. It's about what happens in the wilderness when the very best technology is omnipresent, hidden by its very ubiquity. People use communications differently, and it's very likely a sign of how our current common technologies, like those mentioned above, will evolve in use. It helps define what media choices people will make and what means marketers may have at reaching them in the future.

At Dartmouth College, the small Ivy on New Hampshire's Connecticut River foothills, the 13,000 students and staff don't experience latency, the tiny delays between when they send something and it gets received. The College even created its own always-on email technology to eliminate the millisecond delays that - it turns out - can have enormous impact on how people perceive the application. Wi-fi Internet access is ubiquitous, as is broadband. The students, for the most part, don't tote around cell phones. If the weather's good, they might get Channel 9 on TV, or sometimes Vermont's PBS affiliate. They don't even use the land lines very often, yet they are connected to one another in ways media executives and administrators from other colleges haven't anticipated.