Meg Heckman

When you work in a local newsroom, it sometimes feels like conspiracy theorists, gadflies and cranks have you on speed dial. The phone rings, and it’s impossible to know if the person on the other end wants to have a reasonable chat or, as was the case one December, to complain about an editorial by wishing the staff a “shitty Christmas.”

The oddest caller I remember, though, was a recent parolee who spent his days posting vitriolic comments on our website. He was upset that we had banned two of his online personas from our discussion boards, and he wanted to ask me – the web editor – some questions. How, he wondered, was he supposed to argue with other readers about global warming, gun laws and vegetarianism? Why were we letting other people maintain multiple profiles? And why hadn’t we allowed his third identity to post a particular photo?

My answers were short: Our rules specify one profile per reader, sir.  We didn’t realize other users had multiple accounts, but thanks for letting us know. Yes, I understand you really like that photo, but it’s borderline pornographic. The phone call lasted close to an hour. The guy was nice enough, his voice reflecting none of the anger in his online posts, but this conversation tops my list of reasons why I hate the anonymity of the web.

That editing gig ended years ago, but I still think that, unless you’re working to overthrow a corrupt government, you should connect your real name to any opinions you share online. So I was pretty skeptical when I learned about Yik Yak last fall. Yik Yak is the latest in a growing field of anonymous social networks accessed through smartphones. Users – typically teens and 20-somethings – share short posts about homework, food, professional sports, sex, booze, popular culture, the weather, their bowel movements, their roommates and pretty much anything else that floats through their minds. These posts are visible to other users within a 10 mile radius. It sounded stupid but, after some of my journalism students wrote stories about Yik Yak, I was curious enough to download the app. To my surprise, I didn’t hate everything I saw.

I’ve never posted anything myself, but I do occasionally thumb through the conversations Yik Yak funnels into my iPhone. It’s an odd combination of digital anonymity and the intimacy of sharing physical space, similar to the CB radio my dad used to listen to on family road trips. Transient. Personal. Funny. Crass enough that my mom would dive for the mute button every few dozen miles.

Back in my newsroom days, when it was part of my job to monitor website comments, I would spend hours interacting online or on the phone with regulars like that parolee with three personas. It was headachy work. Each day brought hundreds of new comments, most of them filled with rage. Three editors were responsible for filtering out unsuitable posts, recording our efforts in a shared log. Personal or ad hominem attacks were marked “ad hom.” There was a good chance that a post about the presidential campaign of a young senator from Chicago would earn the tag “racist.” Some comments were so stupid  that one of my coworkers developed the category “adds nothing.”

Scrolling through Yik Yak reminds me of this old system. There are plenty of posts that deserve to be marked “ad hom” or “adds nothing.” For some reason, though, Yik Yak feels different. It’s a community that, while rough around the edges, seems earnest, maybe even hopeful. That’s not to say that there aren’t real concerns around these kinds of anonymous social networks. They can be venues for racists, misogynistic trolls and cyberbullies and, because they’re popular among young people, they’re worrisome for dorm directors, teachers  and guidance counselors.

But hate and stupidity aren’t the only things in this emerging digital space. It can be funny as hell, a window into the minds of tech-savvy Millennials.  I’ve also seen something else amid the poop jokes and double entendres: hints at Yik Yak users’ capacity for compassion. This has been true wherever I’ve logged on. A student at the community college near my house posted about final exam stress and received dozens of encouraging replies. In Boston, someone asked for – and got – advice on which library to visit for an obscure book. In New York City, I saw this: “Fellow yakkers, I’m going through terrible heroin withdrawal please try and talk me out of going to score. I’m trying to stay clean.” In a matter of moments, someone had posted the number for a sobriety hotline.

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(This is the second of 50 essays I’ve resolved to write in 2015. To follow my progress, sign up here for the Inbox Essay newsletter.) 

It’s weird sometimes to work at the same university where I was once a student. Random, distant memories surface almost daily: The coffee cart where, in 1997, I bought my first latte. The accounting worksheets I struggled through while sitting at long, honey-colored tables in the library. The running trails I crisscrossed on days when I couldn’t sit still.

The classroom where I teach (and where I once studied) is named after Donald Murray, a Pulitzer Prize winner who founded our journalism program and wrote prolifically until his death at the age of 82. In some of his columns for The Boston Globe, Murray calls this phenomenon “double exposure,” the then superimposed on the now. He’s not the only writer to experience this kind of cognitive surprise. Robert M. Pirsig touches on something similar in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he writes about “lateral truths… knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction.” Sometimes, as I’m walking to my car at the end of a long day, I’ll see something out of the corner of my eye – a student who looks like a friend from my old dorm or a tree I studied under 15 years ago – and, suddenly, I’m displaced. The physical space is the same, but the now is, for a moment, gone.

There was nothing profound or unusual about my undergraduate career. I was a normal kid with average grades, nice friends and typical worries, but it’s still interesting to wade through those memories now. Many of my students are sophomores, so I’ve been thinking especially hard about that time in my own life. Freshman year seems too much like high school, a blur of adolescent anxiety. Sophomore year was different, the borderland between who I was as a kid and the first version of my adult self.  I began to find my voice as a writer and a person. It was when I took my first journalism class, started working for the student newspaper, cold called a boy I liked and asked him to dinner.

I was a devoted journal-keeper back then, recording the things happening around me and inside my head. It’s fascinating, as someone who now teaches writing, to read these journals, to see the change in sentence structure, tone and technique. It’s a little like watching a puppy clomp around the yard. The dog is clearly having fun, but it will be a while before she figures out what to do with her feet. In September, I was whining about a roommate in a way that now makes me cringe. In October, I described the campus in fall, mimicking the way my favorite writers crafted scenes. December’s entries are full of dialogue from conversations I overheard in the dorm. Around New Year’s, I started to sound like me, creating narratives of my own instead of tracing the patterns of those I’d read. In March, I tried a little poetry.

By the time summer came around, I was writing a love story — about journalism, about that boy and about the hint of who I might become.