The Chronicle reported today on the abuse of faculty by students in a class via Yik Yak. Steve Krause writes about the event here (it happened at his institution, Eastern Michigan). And, coincidentally, Jeff Rice has a general piece on universities and Yik Yak on Insider Higher Ed.
The basic story in this most recent event is that some unreported number of students in a class of 230 wrote over 100 messages on Yik Yak during a class meeting. Apparently many of the messages were rude, insulting, and abusive. We’ve seen this story before in the form of tweckling: different app (Twitter), same basic rhetorical effect. Of course Yik Yak allows for even greater anonymity that Twitter does. (Although, as we know, in the end, it’s very hard to be truly anonymous.) Nevertheless, student perception of anonymity certainly appears to have loosened social propriety.
Setting aside judgments of students, faculty, institutions, the designers of Yik Yak, “today’s modern, fast-paced society,” or whatever, what might be investigated in this event?
1. I don’t think we would say that anonymity directs people to free, unfettered action. As such, instead we might seek to uncover the actors and relations from which these rhetorical practices emerge. In my brief forays into Yik Yak, it appears that anonymity does not dissuade users from wanting attention. Users still want to perform and perform well. They want to interact, and they get taken up by the situation. As Latour would say, they are “made to act” or maybe yak in this case. This is not in any way an excuse or defense, but simply a suggestion that it would be wrong-headed to take these anonymous remarks as evidence of what the students “really think.”
2. That said, the web clearly bisects the conventional classroom and deterritorializes its operation. To use DeLanda’s appropriation of assemblage, we would observe that the physical aspects of the room–the orientation of the chairs, the lighting, the chalkboard, etc. etc.–all establish a specific territory which is expressed on a non-symbolic level. These territories are coded further by any number of symbolic interventions from the class schedule to university policies about student behavior, as well as systems that establish social relations between faculty and students. All of these items can also serve deterritorializing and decoding features, as when the lights buzz and flicker in a distracting way, the chairs are uncomfortable, the chalkboard squeaks, class scheduling creates conflicts, or students and faculty decide to start acting in ways beyond their established institutional roles. Similarly the appearance of wifi or cellular data connections in a classroom has the potential to function in a territorializing/coding fashion, when we use the technology toward pedagogical ends, for example. And, in this case, it can deterritorialize the classroom, potentially to such a state that the professor says she cannot proceed.
So what does that tell us about what should be done? The actions available to institutions are fairly obvious. They can geofence campuses to prevent Yik Yak use. They can prohibit use of devices in classrooms. They can track down and punish offenders. You might say all these actions presume that what the students did was wrong. Maybe, but in this context they reflect the operation of an assemblage in reasserting its territoriality. It’s desire to continue to persist.
Here’s a relevant part of this for me though. Let’s say the same group of students met after the class and made the same comments to one another verbally in private. Or that they used SMS to text one another the same messages, but not in a public forum. Or that they wrote them all out on a piece of paper. These are all very hypothetical situations as part of my contention is that they did what they did precisely because of the environment in which they were operating. Compare those examples with them taking that piece of paper with their comments, making a bunch of photo copies and handing them to their classmates as they left the classroom. Or shouting their comments during the class itself.
Where does this Yik Yak activity fall among these more familiar, mostly “pre-digital,” forms of communication? We can say that it is wrong to say hurtful, sexist things in private, but saying them in public is a different offense, and directing them toward a specific person who is in the audience is yet another. It is likely that the students failed to imagine that their professor would be in their audience. If they had, we could guess they would have behaved differently, even if they still felt protected by anonymity. Of course that’s only speculation.
Perhaps it would be interesting to “peek” into the EMU Yik Yak community and see if any self-correction takes place or not. Because EMU is not the only assemblage at work here. Yik Yak forms its own assemblage, right? Even though each user typically forms his/her own Yik Yak community based on the phone’s specific location, there is a Yik Yak EMU community. Of course it isn’t nearly as solidified as the college, so it’s hard to suggest that it would operate with some collective intent in the way a college could set a policy. Still I imagine there are many students who would think their peers actions here were unwarranted. As it is, I see back-and-forth on Yik Yak when someone makes a really offensive statement.
So it would be unsurprising for professors collectively or an institution to make some move to reterritorialize their assemblage by geofencing Yik Yak or engaging in some similar move. On the other hand, as Jeff Rice points out, stories like this one are not the norm on Yik Yak, which is typically more banal than anything else, even if the anonymity does lead to a degree of crudeness. Ultimately some mechanisms of social interaction arise to regulate behavior. Even primates demonstrate that!