The eclectic posting on the SMCC App

These days, every college and university has their own mobile app; SMCC is no different, with an app that shows all sorts of useful information like your course schedule, events happening on campus, and even a link to this very publication. Other schools’ apps that The Beacon looked at end there, but SMCC takes a different approach by incorporating a social platform for students to communicate. Users can tag their posts with a number of categories including lost & found, housing, and job opportunities. Scrolling the main student feed combines all of these tags into one – mix in random, untagged posts and the vibes from post to post can be quite jarring. For this reason the SMCC app is often ridiculed in conversations on campus, but how bad is it really?

A brief scroll through the student feed will show posts from official school departments, student-posts of varying degrees of seriousness, a Bible lesson and perhaps an absurdist meme. This peculiar assortment of posts could give an outside viewer the idea that SMCC is home only to unserious jokesters and religious zealots. This is obviously not the case; SMCC has a student population of about 9,000 and clearly not all of them are active users on the app. During the pandemic, many people turned to online communities for social interaction. This resulted in people, especially young ones, becoming chronically online. When one is chronically online it is very easy to get sucked into an echo chamber of beliefs, ideas, and sense of humor. In the experience of this writer, being chronically online increases a person’s likelihood of posting on a public forum in a manner that could be viewed as “weird” from the outside. Whether or not these prolific posters could be classified as chronically online, the majority of posts examined by The Beacon are harmless fun being had.  The following photos are posts from a three day period; names have been cropped out. 

Free expression is foundational in a healthy community but a large number of posts present on the SMCC social app say very little. A platform such as that on a college campus is best utilized to buy and sell textbooks, find a study group, or share campus news, but it has become a localized version of twitter with very little useful discourse. The app clearly isn’t for everyone but ultimately it seems like the SMCC social app isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so if you want an eclectic scrolling experience check out the SMCC app.