By the statement “The Argus is an outmoded technic,” I of course mean that print as a medium is dead, and that those of us that still engage in reading such schlock place our study onto something that has died, and that the living writers are but zombies. The Argus certainly holds something still. But we will get to that.
What I want to focus on immediately is the fact that what goes on here is like the rotting corpse of a zombie: uncanny and unreal. The time is out of joint. This is not the way people engage with the world any longer. They—us kids—are on Instagram and TikTok and are getting AI to help with homework. The internet may have just become the perfect void to sublate our intentions into. Maybe there is something on the other side of all this noise to fill our lives, to keep us from falling asleep during the day.
The kids are on Instagram and TikTok. The world moves on. New strategies for emancipatory politics adapt to the dominant medium of the day. They have to. The Argus is not a tool of the students by sheer virtue of the fact that people do not engage with it on the scale that they interact with Instagram and TikTok.
This is, of course, only idle speculation on my part. The Argus’ Instagram might be lively enough to bring lots of traffic to their website. I am just here speaking of the existence of The Argus as a print medium.
It should also be considered that the students who engage with social media may be escaping into something less real, but maybe there is a way to counteract this by using these platforms for lived life.
My proposition is not at all to say that The Argus does not have a function here on campus; calling it outmoded simply implies that it has been taken over by more seductive, ephemeral media. In the world of social media, there is no delay. You can comment in an instant and you can have what you want shown to you.
Here on campus, The Argus sets the stage for discourse between students, giving those of us who read it some shared experience to talk about and grounding our experience of being in this place. It relates interesting things that are happening in our nominal community. I have enjoyed many articles I’ve read in The Argus, but all this praise does come with a caveat.
Given that The Argus is not the primary site of media consumption for anyone, let alone the people that work on it, being outperformed by social media, the positive effects of such print media have a stratifying effect. There are those who read The Argus, but many more of those who deign to contribute; this stratification constitutes the hyperreal status of The Argus as a thing that has disappeared yet is copied in the form of a dying simulacra—another zombie. Real life has moved on. The Argus only represents fleeting life according to a schema of respectability and cordialness that implies something here is real in a way we all know is not.
The type of community that The Argus ultimately serves is the image-based farce of real life sold to students looking to achieve something with themselves and who are inclined to seek confirmation from some prestigious and expensive institution. This hyperreal status is what The Argus contributes to.
We write here to create a representation of the real world, but our audience is mostly others who look upon this type of creation as an outsider, as an employer. We are here for status; that is why we write here. Because of this, we can only present the real-life world of Wesleyan as a simulation. Everything is mediated through hermeneutics meant to make ourselves attractive to others. We can only present to the world as we would like to be seen.
This may be appropriate given that vast numbers of the student body experience this school as a simulation, as not really real. This isn’t real, we say. This isn’t really real just yet. The only way out is to get out.
In conclusion, read some Baudrillard or something; I’m not your dad.
Daniel Stoltzfus is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at dstoltzfus@wesleyan.edu.
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