App Removal: End of Thread
Benedetto Maniscalco | September 8, 2022
The morning of Aug. 10, 2022, the Warren Wilson College (WWC) app was deleted from the app store. Students share mixed reactions about the current state of inter-student body communication.
“I think that the app, rest in peace, was a really good tool for community organizing and also having information about what's happening around our community,” said Lander Sartin, a sophomore on the Fiber Arts Crew.
Sartin voiced a level of sadness in the app's deletion. They had a large presence on the app and frequently provided students with a meme to lighten the collective mood.
“It was a sad day when we stopped being able to post,” Sartin said. “I was personally hurt because I enjoy posting memes and being known for the person who posts memes all the time and I have been searching for another outlet.”
The new space for students to post is the student information board located on the MyWWC website. The information board includes forums for campus information, promoting events, lost and found items, selling goods and rideshare.
“I've seen the student boards now, but there's not another space that has that mass amount of students all in one location that we can just communicate easily like that,” Sartin said. “It seems like a lazy replacement to be honest and it seems like they didn't want to pay for the app or they decided that the app was causing the (cabinet) too much trouble.”
The app has accrued a rocky reputation among students throughout its three year existence. Many students deleted or did not use the app to avoid the conflict that persisted on the student feed.
“I would see stupid shit that other people were doing or just people like being awful to each other and then I kind of ended up being awful to them back and well, in hindsight, I definitely see that a lot of it was not productive at all,” said Leo Cantrell, a junior psychology major on the Mailroom Crew.
Cantrell is another prolific app poster. He considered the deletion of the app to be bittersweet and has been able to reflect on some of the negativity he had saturated himself with while on the app.
“In some ways, it's great that it's gone.” Cantrell said. “I don't have to worry myself about, like, what am I going to make myself mad about today but also it's like, ‘hey, that was kind of like an important method of communication for students to talk about stuff specific to Wilson.’”
Cantrell also voiced concerns about the student information boards that have taken the app's place. While there is the possibility to still post things that were a utility within the app’s student feed, much of it might go unseen by students not wanting to interact with the website.
“It does kind of concern me that we don't really have much of another way to speak freely that we can all see,” Cantrell said. “You can submit stuff to the student information board but it has to be approved and most of the people probably don't look at those emails, like you have to sign up for them in the first place.”
The boards have a feature that allows for students to subscribe to posts and receive notifications through their email. In conjunction with these communication boards, students are no longer able to send emails to the entire student body through student-l.
“Now what we've done is, you can't opt out of student-l, but you can choose to either opt in or opt out of the student information board,” Tacci Smith, Interim Dean of Students said.
Smith explained the overwhelming amount of emails students had been receiving through Student-l and how they wanted to make sure the very important emails weren’t being lost. Student-l is now dedicated to official college business and emergencies.
“My hope for campus in general is that we find ways to be in dialogue,” Smith said. “I think we relied too much on our phones on our computers and we're not doing that enough in person.”
“It's so much easier to kind of dehumanize someone and kind of write them off whenever it's just through a screen,” Cantrell said. “I feel like a lot of subtle bullying happened.”
The amount of cyberbullying that took place on the student feed was enough to alarm faculty. The work that went into conflict resolution became too much for staff members who found that the app was adding extra responsibilities to their jobs.
“This is a big piece of suicide and depression, and so in my mind I was like, ‘I don't want to be in charge of something that could cause that or is causing it,’” Smith said.
Sartin brought up situations that they felt were cause for more intense student-to-student confrontation on the app.
“The administration loves to call it cyber bullying and there were definitely some people who should have laid off some other people, but at the same time, some people wrote the stories for themselves,” Sartin said. “Like if you have assaulted or abused somebody, I don't feel any compassion (sympathy) for people calling you out on the app.”
Sartin also voiced that without the app, student organization and protest against campus protocols and/or administrative issues would be much more difficult.
“If they were paying for it and they're trying to cut costs, whatever, but it seemed like a place that students could organize for sorts of things like the college not doing the things that they've told us that they were doing,” Sartin said.
The tumultuous nature of student posts on the app had its role in the deletion of the app. However, cost played a larger role.
“When we got into it, it was free for us because we were part of the study and we were the small private liberal arts college in the bunch and then we got special pricing,” Smith said. “Well, that special pricing is over.”
The main reason for the WWC app to end came down to the steep rise in cost for the college as their one year of reduced rates had expired. The student information boards have been established to make sure the utility of the app could remain.