Student Association 2.0
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008When The Colonialist was started last fall, the complete lack of credible counterparts was surprising. GW is a pretty vocal university, yet most people seemed content to only learn about GW from the Hatchet. The Daily Colonial was there but hardly read. It felt like students didn’t want any people-powered sources for information.
Things seem to have changed.
As we approach The Colonialist’s first birthday, the amount of new GW blogs has skyrocketed. The GW Patriot has surprisingly gained a readership from all ends of the political spectrum. GWBlogspot has condescendingly conquered the incoming freshman class. Georgetown has even caught the bug.
And with in our niche-blog network, a micro-niche-blog battle has broken out. Logan Dobson was elected to the SA in the Spring and started a blog with this mission statement:
Inside The SA: The blog of self-admitted tool and Senator Logan Dobson, CCAS-U, as I try to navigate my fellow tools, wastefulness, and all-around bullshittery of the George Washington University’s Student Association.
While most of the content over the summer has been in preparation for his future reign as the Ron Paul of the SA, he has garnered attention from a lot of people. Loads of complaints have been raised about his open source governing which led to a closed door meeting with current EVP Kyle Boyer about the blog. While most blogs have found themselves in a relative lull over our summer vacation, his comment section has been both active and terrible.
(Photo of Sen. Dobson, creator of Inside the SA)
It seems like any post Dobson makes leads to a comment from GW and SA alumni Elliot Bell-Krasner, which then leads to someone awkwardly insulting EBK, which then leads to 35 more comments about EBK’s personality and status as GW mover/shaker. The resulting comment cluster-fucks led former Senator Bell-Krasner to start his own pro-SA blog called “Where No Senator Emeritus Has Gone Before.“ While the comments on EBK’s blog are mostly nonexistent, it seems to act as a place of constant rebuttal to anything Dobson or the GW Patriot have to say. One blog was created with the hope of changing the system, and another was created to try to defend it.
(Photo of Bell-Krasner, creator of WNSEHGB)
The question remains: What real impact will either of these sites have? There could be positive results. It could allow the student body to better understand the Student Association and foster a campus-wide debate about how the SA should improve. Or it could have the complete opposite effect. It could lead to petty SA infighting on a public forum. It could lead to bitter divisiveness and personal grudges over publicly displayed content deemed embarrassing to Senators. They are walking a fine line.
I would urge both sides to actually examine why they wanted to start a blog in the first place. If it was to present your very important opinion, maybe you should think again. If it was to try to help the GW community fix the seemingly broken and out-of-touch SA, then I’m interested to see where it goes. (If you don’t think the SA is conceived by most people as broken and out of touch, I’d advise you to talk to people outside of the SA).
The question I pose is this: Will these blogs change anything? How? Could they make the SA an actually respected and open organization? Will they fuck it up for the rest of the blogs by turning us all into a big troll-fest/flame-war?
What do the common-folk of GW think?
And please, please, please try everything in your power to not turn this into an comment battle over EBK. There have been enough of those.











I have been fascinated by this cluster-fuck of a website ever since I first heard of it. However, I refuse to post a link to it for fear that more people will accidentally set their gaze upon that car wreck. The following formula is my understanding of the website: