Title: Technology and Email

Informant Info: Mene Ukueberuwa is an Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of The Dartmouth Review. He is a ’16 (formerly ’14) from Princeton, NJ. He was interviewed on May 12, 2016 at the Collis Center in Hanover, NH.

Type of Lore: Verbal, Joke

Language: English

Country of Origin: United States

Social / Cultural Context:  Technology and in particular jokes about Jeff Hart’s email have become a part of the Review. It has become somewhat of a joke for Reviewers to refer to themselves as “vigilantly crusading against technology since 1980.” It is poking fun at how conservatives are often regarded as old-fashioned and against progress, making light of the legendary figure of Jeff Hart as well.

Transcript:

Well we’ve had some big colorful characters like I mentioned. One of them is our illustrious founder, Jeffrey Hart, who despite his brilliant side, the field of English and interpretation, definitely was not the most technologically savvy. So one of the funnier things was the fact that he never really quite got a grasp of email. But I think, one of the staffers or another young person in his life encouraged him to start using email as a communication medium. He took it up and he would actually type out the emails perfectly, you know like, good language, proper formatting, but then rather than send the email via the internet, he would actually just print it out and then put it in the post as a regular letter, and I think it was totally lost on him that he wasn’t getting it quite right.  

Collector’s Comments: The veracity of the story behind the email jokes is to be questioned, but staffers often make fun of their technological competence (or lack thereof) in a display of solidarity with Jeff Hart. For example, staff members may joke about how they would like to return to communicating by carrier pigeon and telegraph, rather than using more modern forms of communication such as “the interwebs,” whatever they are.