For some St Andrews meme pages, popularity comes and goes within a matter of months. Others, however, rise to the age-old fame of St Fessdrews. Despite how long they hold our attention, these pages show the great creative extent to which St Andrews students will go to have a good laugh whilst studying here. Whether it be on Instagram, Facebook, or Tik Tok, I am always on the lookout for niche St Andrews content to entertain me as I walk to class or wait in the notorious self-checkout line at Tesco. One such page whose fame has skyrocketed this year has been “overhearddrews”. As the name suggests, the page is premised on posting absurd conversations overheard throughout town. The posts are hilariously simple, only consisting of a black background with a ridiculous quote (or conversation) a student has overheard and the location of where it took place. Student-voted rankings for the best coffee shops and pubs in town, or even for the best student housing, also appear on the Instragam page’s stories. While one might assume such simple content risks obsolescence, I argue the attention and engagement “overheardrews” has gotten this year will keep the meme page going for a long time to come.
Larger Instagram pages premised on what we overhear in public have existed for years, even becoming social media brands themselves. In 2015, Jesse Margolis created the Overheard brand based on a conversation he heard at an Erewhon in L.A. Since then, he expanded “overheardla” with other accounts on various social media platforms, covering other locations such as New York, London, San Francisco, Austin, and some university campuses. In January 2023, he sold his brand to Doing Things Media which owns a portfolio of other meme accounts such as Animals Doing Things, Middle Class Fancy, and Recess Therapy. Thus, there is clear communal value to the lightheartedly “irreverent” content Margolis produced. This caught the keen entrepreneurial eye of Reid Hailey, co-founder of Doing Things Media, who stated, “We’ve found success building niche communities” through meme pages such as Overheard.
The concept and value of the “niche community” is exactly why I believe overhearddrews is doing so well and will continue to do so. The humor of the account lies in the common identity and shared experiences we have as St Andrews students. We all relate to the experience of overhearing an absurd conversation or two while in this tiny town. In fact, the humble size of St Andrews (where you are bound to run into someone you know at some point in the day) mixed with the university experience of growing pains, sleep deprivation, and maybe a little too much alcohol, makes St Andrews the perfect grounds for content specific to overhearddrews. Even their rankings bank on our shared experience of having to navigate and live on our own in St Andrews, sparking lighthearted debate on the discoveries and interests we make along the way.
Another reason I believe the account is doing so well is because of the surveillance it encourages. Everyone’s intrigue and slight fear towards being ‘overheard’ plays out precisely in the way Foucault describes in his theory of self-governance and model of the panopticon. He describes the power relations of surveillance saying one “must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so” (Foucault 1977, 201). This is precisely how overhearddrews functions: we not only listen in on other conversations, but we begin to listen in on ourselves. This year, I have repeatedly ‘overheard’ conversations such as: “Imagine if this ended up on overhhearddrews” or “We should DM overhhearddrews!” Indeed, knowing it only takes a direct message from anyone for a quote to be posted fuels a shared paranoia amongst the student body. Yet, I must stress that this is all in good fun. No one is out to incriminate their peers and all quotes are necessarily left anonymous. Yet, overhearddrews is conducting an interesting social experiment we are certainly getting a kick out of. I also imagine Foucault would find the meme page as intriguing as his famous panopticon!
Every time I think people are moving on from the meme page, I hear its name jump out in conversation when I least expect it. Now, after reflecting on how overhearddrews rose to fame, I realize this is no coincidence. Overhearddrews has captivated our niche St Andrews community by appealing to our shared identity and experiences whilst also fostering a lighthearted atmosphere of surveillance. In these ways, I have given up my attempts to place a certain timestamp or expectation on overhearddrews. Its fame is clearly ‘hear’ to stay for a while to come.