International (Yik Yak) Love

St Andrews has once again been flooded by students, and our beloved Yik Yak is back to its usual calibre, with the frequency of mocking, heart-warming, insightful and downright funny Yaks increasing with the return of the University’s core inhabitants.

For those who remained in The Bubble over the break, the return of their yakking peers is a welcome sight after the ostensibly sluggish yak-game over the break. However, anyone who kept an eye on Overheard in St Andrews during our two weeks of holiday will have seen that, though St Andrews students may have been lacking from the town, they were absolutely not lacking from the app. Within very little time, St Andrews had demonstrated their yakking prowess.

Prague seemed a popular destination for St Andrews yik-yakkers with a number of posts searching for fellow KY16 residents.

Meanwhile, in Munich St Andrews yakkers received more up-votes than Cambridge! Team represent!

And stretching our tiny town’s world-wide influence even further, we even had representatives in Moscow.

One valiant St Andrean even attempted to find their fellows in Kenya. Their efforts are applauded, and we are truly sorry that your call for companions remained unanswered.

If anyone was in doubt that we were stamping our mark on the wider world, one only has to look at the frustrated yak-expletives of an anonymous Parisian resident who posted “WHAT THE HELL IS ST ANDREWS? A HOTEL? A SCHOOL? A REHAB PLACE?”

In fact, the posts on Overheard became so numerous that the Facebook page’s admin even began to remove yak-related posts due to their repetitiveness.

What is most interesting about this trend is its comparison with the St Andrews local yak feed of just days before. Checking Yik Yak in the days preceding Spring Break yielded the constant lamentations of ‘Can’t wait to escape The Bubble’, ‘Just two lectures left…’ and ‘SPRING BREAK!!!’ It is no secret that we live in a fairly small and isolated community, and in light of this, excitement about the opportunity to escape the notorious ‘Bubble’ is understandable.

However, what Spring Break has shown us is that, for a community who can’t wait to get away from our at-times claustrophobic university atmosphere, we sure are excited to reconnect with each other when we do.

In some of the most exotic locations the planet can offer, from Moscow to Copenhagen to Paris to Munich, and in spite of our general moaning about The Bubble, here we all are searching for the reassurance of other Bubble-escapees during our brief period of respite.

Do we just take St Andrews for granted while we’re here? Is that why, in spite of our many complaints, we feel the need to find each other once we get away?

Frankly, the answer could be that we’re just all a little too addicted to Yik Yak. However, I think that our university-wide Yik Yak addiction is a symptom of something else altogether.

If one ‘peeks’ at the yak feeds of other universities, they’re often dominated by low-blow yaks in which people use the app’s anonymity to voice everyday observations and attack others in a way they wouldn’t dare to personally. While often a forum of controversial debate, Yik Yak in St Andrews rarely displays yaks of a hostile nature; when it does they tend to be quickly down-voted out of the herd.

Perhaps our addiction to Yik Yak, whether at home or abroad, is therefore a symptom of the over-whelming sense of community and familiarity that this small town breeds. Above all, though, what became abundantly clear over our time away was the comment made by countless yakkers on their travels: ‘YOU CAN NEVER ESCAPE THE BUBBLE.’

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.