Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

A Theory.

A little while back, in the course of announcing his new AOL journal (to provide AOL's new blogging service a big-gun introduction), John Scalzi discussed the September effect. This was back in the days before the Web took off - - pre-NCSA Mosaic era, when Gopher and Usenet were the main Net tools. What would happen is that each September, when thousands of freshmen arrived at colleges and universities and thus got what was then their first whiff of connectivity, these new Netizens would plunge into Usenet newsgroups and generally pay little attention to things like learning Netiquette and reading FAQs and getting the lay of the land. For example, on the Star Wars newsgroup I read at the time, one could count on messages like this every September:

"Hey, I really like Satr Wars! Do you think Lucass will make anymore? It would be cool if he'd make Timothy Zhan's books into movies! And in RETURN OF THE JEDI there's a scene where Han grabs Leigha's boob!" (Not an exact quote of any one post, but many of them really did scan like this, typos and all.)

Many a flame war started because of newbies rushing in where angels feared to tread back then, because of the "September effect". Later on, the effect died away as home Net access became more and more common, although I often wondered if the September effect might have been replaced by a similar December effect, as all those new Christmas gift home computers were plugged in for the first time. And now, I see a new kind of September effect possibly emerging, although it's not as annoying as the old flood of Usenet newbies could be. (And I never participated on the really high-traffic newsgroups where the September Effect earned its place in Net lore.) In fact, since it impacts blog traffic, it's actually a bit endearing.

What's happening now is the sudden uptick in Google hits on blogs. Alexandra commented the other day that she's seeing a ton of Google hits to her site based on the search term "Lascaux", which happens to be one of the words in her blog's title, Out of Lascaux. I suspect that college kids enrolled in Arts 101 classes are being instructed to write two-page papers or some such thing on the cave-paintings of Lascaux, which is a logical starting point for an introductory arts class. So the tykes are rushing to Google, plugging in "Lascaux", and arriving at Alexandra's blog.

This happens a lot here, as well. Just in the last week or two, coincident with the beginning of the new college school year, I'm seeing a lot more Google hits for the poems listed under "Poetical Excursions" in the sidebar. (ASIDE: I need to do more of those…I always enjoyed writing them.) Sometimes I can even glean a bit about the student's assignment just from their search terms, because in addition to the title they'll include a term like "allegory", which leads me to believe they are under instruction to "Describe how Rosetti's poem 'Uphill' is an allegory." And then there are the ones like this, in which the student has apparently plugged their entire homework question right into Google. These folks are probably under the impression that Google uses a natural language interface, kind of like AskJeeves.

I wonder how many students are instructed, in a Freshman Comp class, to write a brief position paper on, say, Iraq…and how many end up handing in something that sounds quite a bit like SDB. Probably a lot. I have to admit, though -- if there's a college student who's ripping off my defense of Attack of the Clones for a class, I'm only half-angry about it.