We live in a culture dominated by the smartphone. There are many reasons that these objects are so ubiquitous. For starters, it is a socially acceptable way to avoid conversation on the bus. It’s also the easiest way to find your classroom out of all Duke’s many beautiful, yet look-alike gothic buildings, or to figure out the location of that next party. It also enables you to Snapchat the Chapel, Instagram your Red Mango concoction and Facebook stalk the cute guy you just met. Here are a few other apps that have the Duke campus by storm arranged in order of decreasing anonymity.
Yik Yak – the anonymous twitter
“Omg, my yak’s in the top five!”
“Did you read that yak about the ______ midterm” (insert name of notoriously hard subject)
From the dear xoxogossipsquirrel to the latest drama happening during mondaynightjarvis, yik yak pretty much says it all. Its anonymity allows things that might otherwise never be said to be heard. With anonymousness comes power, but negative yaks are down voted almost instantly into oblivion. Especially during freshman year when people are still navigating friendships, students who feel lonely yak about the feelings that they might not be able to share with people they’ve just met. One of the most beautiful things about the Yak scene at Duke is that they always get some love back from fellow peers.
The app is used to direct people to find help, it’s an essential tool for procrastination and it’s created a campus-wide collection of inside jokes. It keeps everyone updated on the happenings around campus and often saves you time as you figure out whether a particular event is worth it or not.
Friendsy – the college version of tinder
“I’m just downloading it as a joke guys”
“Omg, can you believe who I just got matched with”
Friendsy is the app that connects people in the same university together. You can swipe right or left on a person and can choose to either become friends, date or hookup with them. If you get matched with someone then your contact details are shared and you can start to have conversations. While the app’s purpose is to get people speaking to each other without the fear of rejection, its practical application sometimes varies. Many people around campus ultimately end up downloading Friendsy as a joke or to see what it’s like. Therefore, instead of actually fostering different relationships it’s used as trolling opportunity by people not really looking for Friendsy relationships. Here we’ve reached the semi-anonymous relationship stage.
Group Me – the app you never knew existed until you set foot onto a college campus
During O-Week FAC chats
“Why are you making us download this app again?”
“Is this an actual thing?”
The name of this one is pretty self-explanatory. Group Me is the app that connects people who already know one another and enables people to stay in touch on a slightly larger scale. For freshman at least, it’s used to coordinate trips to the marketplace for brunch and dinner. On other scales it’s an easy way to keep in touch with lab groups and coordinate different timings to get together to work on projects. It’s a great way to ensure that you’re not out of the loop and leaves out the drama involved in mass texting.
To sum up, if you’re planning on coming to Duke in the fall of 2015, these are a few apps that will give you a head start. Extra props to you if you include them in your application essays. If you’re at Duke and have somehow never heard of these apps, you should crawl out from underneath your homework and try them out. They are, after all, an integral part of Duke’s social scene.