Social media always has the potential to offend, but the latest anonymous gossip app on campus, Yik Yak, contains so many sexually and racially offensive comments to “downvote” that my breath would be better spent blowing on Hell itself.
Instead, I’m opting to congratulate the two fraternity brothers who founded this sometimes entertaining (but always raunchy) public forum. They’ve created a platform for the nastiest minds of our generation to fester. All the ugly thoughts we’d never admit to having can now be shared anonymously with no repercussions.
This goes for you women haters out there.
Anyone who knows me is familiar with my feminist rants. Most days, I’d prefer not to peek into the minds of chauvinists who write off all women as attention seekers, yet continue to idolize our thong-clad asses over a meal in the MDR. Rarely would I care to know that you, fine sir, rate a girl’s hotness on whether or not you’d eat her pussy. I sure as hell would never stand behind the sentiment that “girls can’t drink without losing something…like wallets, phones, keys, dignity.”
But I need to know, or at least be consciously aware of, the sexist views that still exist on this campus. We all need to know that there exists a real danger to freshman girls, or that women who sleep with, God forbid, more than one guy, who are still viewed as sluts, whores, or what have you.
But let me remove my feminist lenses and get back to how yaks may also serve as proof for the new age’s obsession with entertainment, or even our species’ preoccupation with sex and expansion.
Why does anyone care to share their opinions online? Why do I feel compelled to write this editorial?
Obviously, I only write for The Chimes to see my name in print.
As for the reason behind Yik Yak’s allure, I see it like this―no one would share the most intimate details of his or her life (or even waste time trolling) on the app, if not for the three G’s: gratification, game, and glory.
“It’s mean, disgusting and degrading,” one girl said with wide, honest eyes, after I asked for her opinion of the app. “But I go on it all the time. It’s a bad thing to be addicted to.”
Addiction to instant and easy entertainment is real. After scrolling through so many yaks, I found boredom to be users’ main complaint. It seems so many people reflexively install Yik Yak so that they may have access yet another source of entertainment; harsh public scrutiny keeps our interest. Instead of seeking out other ways to alleviate ourselves from boredom, we yak.
Even after minds are made happy with gossip or exaggerated accounts of fun, Yik Yak helps entertain the body as well. Sex (or the description of one’s state of horniness) is the app’s most popular topic of conversation. I’m not entirely sure if anyone’s gotten lucky off the app, but the requests for sex are constant. These yak calls tell us that students wish to satisfy their desire to copulate even more than they wish to cure boredom.
Away from the Craigslist side of Yik Yak, I think it’s fair to say that everyone fancies having their thoughts approved of by their peers. With every “upvote” comes a heightened sense of worth.
Yet, one yak said, “I think it’s worse to have 0 upvotes than a couple downvotes cause it means your yak was even too boring to be hated on.”
This goes against all of what our 11-year-old selves thought to be good social etiquette, that being “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
So, the irony lies in how most people I interviewed, who unabashedly bashed this anonymous app for allowing people to “talk shit,” requested to stay anonymous themselves. In a time where battles over intellectual property rights and social movement Twitter trends pop up overnight, I’m now questioning whether we young adults want our words to hold accountable weight or if we wish to detach our names from anything honestly said.
The University of Alabama’s student newspaper, The Crimson White, quotes a girl saying “The [app’s] anonymity really dehumanizes people;” however, I agree to only some extent.
Yik Yak doesn’t dehumanize us as much as it ruins the illusory idea of how tame we think ourselves to be. So many people are quick to write off the app because we wish to censor man’s cruel nature. We try to deny social media’s power to objectify people.
Therefore, I find Yik Yak serves not as an embarrassment to whatever might have made life, as he/she/it already knows the limitlessness of our ugliness. This app only holds the power to embarrass ourselves.
