Journalism in the Age of Social Media

I first met Nic Harter when he moved in across the hall from me in Ellingson Hall at St. Olaf College in the fall of 2002. We were freshman and both excited about the prospect of starting college. Later that year (or perhaps it was the following year), I remember that he burned a copy of the movie American Beauty onto a DVD, so that my friend Mia and I could watch it together. Nic was always willing to be helpful, and he was ambitious in the best sense. He had a broad smile and seemed to live life with a full heart. Certainly, time provides what the poet Eliot Khalil Wilson has smartly called “the honeyed light of memory,”1 but I firmly believe that Nic was a kind and generous person. In the spring of my freshman year at St. Olaf, I somehow managed to break or at least injure my left foot. Doctors never found a break, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I at least had a stress fracture. Either way, I needed to rest for several months, and so I used a wheelchair to get around from about January until about May of 2003. I became indebted to my college friends, including Nic, who often helped push me from class to class and generally provided assistance with everyday tasks while I was wheelchair bound.2