“Are you tired of going into Catherwood and all the computers being occupied by NON ILR-ies? Are you pissed off that these infidels even found the two downstairs computers labs? NON ILR-ies are like cockroaches, they're everywhere....let's exterminate Catherwood... and take our shit back!”
The community I would like to describe is a very tight-knit community at Cornell. This is a community within the larger Cornell community. I am talking about the ILR community. The School of Industrial and Labor Relations is known for its emphasis on team-work. Most importantly, we are known for our outgoing and sociable, as well as motivated and driven personalities; ILRies are proud to represent this prestigious school.
Haythornwaite’s SNA analyzes the interactions between a community—what information is exchanged, communicated, and shared by pairs of individuals. We must look at “what kinds of relations are maintained in any particular network, what kinds of people maintain these relations and how these show the structure of personal or egocentric networks and of whole networks” (Haythornwaite). ILRies are more than just classmates; we are friends, roughing the loads of reading together. We have much social capital, for we have social network, common ground, and reciprocity. In ILR, it is common ground that everybody wants to help each other do well. ILRies are always sharing information about which classes are the easiest ones, and which professors lecture the best—we just want everybody to do well for themselves, and we are all willing to help one another. Commitment, shared values, mores, meanings, and shared historical identity are all methods of coming to a common ground point. The idea of reciprocity is that we get something in return, which goes hand in hand with the idea of common ground for this community. When we help others, we know that it will be reciprocated if and when needed. Another common ground idea is that ILRies are the best, and only we are allowed to use Catherwood Library. There are even smaller communities (depending on the extent of their emotions) who fully support the idea that we should “Take Catherwood Back” (see above for listed description). This comes from the common idea that ILRies are special, and only we are allowed to study and do homework in our library. The social network forms from the school having less than two hundred students per graduating class, and therefore, many students know other students through ILR classes as well as ILR organizations. From these three aspects, we gain social capital, and this confirms the existence of a community.
The CMC aspect of the ILRie community plays a relatively strong part in keeping the community together. Members of the community often join facebook groups called “ILR” + a class number; or “ILR: Tap into my Human Resources.” These groups are a fun way of keeping in touch and forming inside jokes about people who are not ILRies. Without these groups, the pride of the community would definitely decrease. Some ties are made stronger with the use of CMC to communicate because it makes it easier for people to communicate with each other, as we know is an important part to keeping the bonds in a community strong. The facebook group can be by invite only, therefore we have control on who we invite to join our community. ILRies also use CMC through means of ILR list-serves which inform the community about events within our community.
We ILRies are proud of who we are and what we study, and we will not let anything infiltrate our community! We will take Catherwood back!
3 comments:
Vivian, I really enjoyed your post! Being a fellow ILRie (and stats 213 student i might add) I completely agree with the idea of taking Catherwood back. Everyday when I walk in to the library, I notice people that should not be there and wonder "what's _____ doing here?" I feel that it is my territory, and that they are invading it. Us ILRies do have an extremely tight social network, filled with lots of common ground and reciprocity as you mentioned. I believe that it is due to our extremely small class sizes that we feel such a bond to one another, thus creating the so called hostility we feel when people dare to enter Catherwood as a non-ILRie.
But then I think about the late nights that I spend in Mann library, as a non-human ecology major or aggie. Maybe I do not feel bad because there are a lot more of them? Maybe it is because Catherwood is not open late, or else I would be there? These are questions that I am unable to answer, but I do completely agree that ILR's tight social network plays a large role in our quest to take back Catherwood.
As an AEM major and somebody who often studies in Catherwood library because it is in a convenient location and it is just a nice library I felt obligated to comment on your blog. I do agree with the way you linked common ground, social network, and reciprocity and how all of these arelinked within your school but I do have one question for you. Dou you really think that these things only exist in the ILR school? I think that it all exists in every school within Cornell.
Hey Vivian,
Nice post! Like Gallagher, I'm a non-ILRie who spends a little time in Catherwood. I think it's one of the hidden jewels of Cornell's library system and sometimes when it's convenient I stop by. I didn't know I was infiltrating anything....
As an engineer, my graduating class is thousands wide. But inside my major, in which my graduating class is about 40, I'm starting to see a lot of the same effects you've described. There's a facebook group (I think Gallagher is right, there must be one for every major), and we even have a study room in Clark that's starting to feel like our own personal library. I agree that surviving Cornell can bring students together, and I think you did a good job describing a sense of community that can perhaps be found in more places than just the ILR school.
And I'm still going to use Catherwood.
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