User:Jonas Wisser

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

I am a nineteen-year-old second-year Classical Civilizations major and East Asian Studies minor at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. I work for Oberlin College's Center for Information Technology as a Resident Computer Consultant and Help Desk Consultant, and volunteer at the Bridge, a community technology center that provides computer and internet access to low-income citizens as an extension of the local library. In both capacities, I work predominantly with students and Apple computers. I have been awarded the John F. Oberlin, George B. Storer Foundation, and Bonner Foundation scholarships as an academically strong, community-engaged, low-income student.

Previous to attending Oberlin, I attended Nazareth Area High School in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. While there, I founded the literary magazine The Curb and the Nazareth Area High School Young Democrats, although The Curb has since collapsed and the Young Democrats have since become the Young Socialists. I was also active in the Student Government, the National Honor Society, and the concert band as a state-level clarinetist, and briefly with the theater department in a production of 42nd Street.

At Oberlin, I have continued my pattern of community engagement. In addition to helping with the creation of a "teen space" at the Bridge, I am an officer in the Oberlin Gaming and Roleplaying Establishment, the Oberlin Pagan Awareness Network, and the Noah Hall Council, and the organizer of the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Hall for the second year running. I'm also working on becoming a Mozilla Campus Rep at Oberlin.

On a more personal note, my (non-academic) passions are computers and the internet, music, reading, gaming, and writing, in approximately that order. I've recently begun creating a consistent internet identity for myself with the reasoning that even though I can create any number and kind of identities, it's my duty as a socially-responsible citizen to extend my real-world identity into cyberspace. I am anti-DRM and pro-net-neutrality. I whole-heartedly endorse the Free/Open Source Software movement (although I use a Mac), and hope the mentality is usefully extended into other domains, including this one. I recommend the book The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System by Siva Vaidhyanathan as an interesting study in the fast changes the freedom of the internet has wrought and continues to wreak on the world.