@PresidentAinlay: Ainlay joins FB, Twitter for Union

This past summer, President Stephen Ainlay  joined the ranks of social media, joining Twitter and Facebook in an effort to update the Union College community on his travels.

Ainlay explained, “[I’m] very new to Facebook and Twitter and social media in general,” but his idea behind joining the social networking world was that he wanted to keep the Union family updated over the summer months.

This idea “actually all owes to a Minerva House presentation where I heard Matt Milless lead a discussion where he was asking students how they are communicating with each other.” Ainlay continued, “What was fascinating to me was that students still obviously talk by phone….[including how] a lot of people at the time used text messages as the primary way to communicate. But they were saying how important Facebook was becoming as the way in which they decided to spend their time and share information about what was going on. So what I realized was that I probably had an antiquated way of sharing information [with just using the web i.e. Presidential page on the Union College website] and I realized that it lacked the dynamic quality that people like in Facebook and so we decided to do that.”

Ainlay shared a story about the connections social media helps to forge. After getting to know the parents of members of Union’s hockey team during the Final Four, it turned out that the mother of Assistant Captain and Carolina Hurricanes-bound Jeremy Welsh grew up in the small Ontario town of Brussels. However, until 1872, the town was called Ainlayville, named for the president’s great-great-grandfather.

Discovering this connection prompted the tweet, “O Canada! President returns to his roots-UnionCollege” @StephenAinlay on August 20th.

Said Ainlay about this interaction, “going back up there and having a barbeque with the Welsh family, that was all very, very special. It was an intersection with my own family

history and the college. People in Brussels, Ontario were just unbelievably nice. I mean, we walked the streets in the town during the evening and people all sit out on their porches and would invite you up on their porch, it makes you think what life used to be like.”

Ainlay remarked further on technology’s impact on society today, saying, “It’s complicated because part of what I liked about the Brussels experience, were actually things where you connected with other individuals. In a way technologies, at least at first glance, seems to distance you from individuals. And yet here, you and I are talking face to face about social media… we probably would not be having this conversation if it were not for social media.”

“And here I have a lot of people that have asked me about the Brussels trip and I have had a lot of people ask me what I was doing in Wyoming (a trip he made in August to celebrate the 96th birthday of John Wold, the primary donor of the Wold Center) and this was all a result of what I had posted [on social media sites]. So as a catalyst for social interaction, it actually works that way. I don’t think that it distances people, but yet that it actually allows you to share information and then it becomes, like I say, catalytic in terms of face-to-face conversations. I do not think that it takes the place of that.”

When asked what his personal and future involvement in the realm of social media would be, Ainlay responded, “ I think that one of the things for me is that I am using [social media] primarily as a tool to communicate better with people around me and regarding Union experiences. So what you will see on [my page] is not going to be lots of personal baby pictures, it’s going to be about Union, strategic priorities, events on campus, etc. [It will be] a way people can be connected with where I am and what I see as important. And it won’t be the only tool to be used… we will continue to do the presidential report, press publications… all with the goal of keeping the Union community on pace with some of the people I am meeting and talking to… it’ll be a little window into that world.”