We need a better bulletin app

Once upon a time, students received all club communication through direct emails. It was called mass email, and this method of advertising filled student inboxes with colorful text, delightfully weird images and invitations to events large and small. It also flooded student inboxes with dozens of emails a day, swamping official academic emails with club information.

It wasn’t perfect and a lot of people disliked it, but it reached everybody equally. Everything was in one place. In spring 2020, CSB+SJU revoked clubs’ and organizations’ privileges to mass email, telling them to use the Bulletin App instead. Clubs and students weren’t impressed by the Bulletin App’s limited functionality, so most club communication moved to Instagram instead. This is where the problems began. Anyone who has seen “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix can tell you that social media networks no longer prioritize healthy and meaningful social connection between users, they ever did. Their business models and algorithms prioritize ad revenue through time spent on the app; in short, the longer they keep you on the app, the more ads you see and the more money they make for shareholders.

This means, especially after the algorithm change that made timeline posts no longer chronological, that Instagram has no reason to show you club events, meeting times or anything that would make you turn off Instagram to spend time with people in real life. For many clubs and students, Instagram is the easiest and most accessible advertising location. But people like me who limit their social media time (or delete the app) for mental health reasons end up not seeing many events at all. It’s difficult to get the word out about club events to everyone when students might check the Bulletin, Instagram stories, Instagram posts, physical posters, emails and/or the Master Calendar to see events. Most people tend to look at and post on social media and physical posters, which are the most popular of the seven channels.

Then, for all the algorithmic and social reasons listed above, nobody sees what anyone else is planning on these disconnected, fragmented accounts. That’s why you end up getting inadvertently counter-programmed nights like last Saturday, when the Attention-Starved Children show, Cirque Mechanics FAE visiting show and the Melanin Gala all fell within the same evening. None of those events were on the Master Calendar. Some conflicts are unavoidable, especially on weekend evenings, but we should all at least be aware of them as we plan. Student clubs already running on tight time budgets shouldn’t have to spend hours making a detailed poster and putting it on every channel just to get some turnout, nor should anyone have to trawl through Instagram for hours to see every event. I’ll even give the first person who replies a bag of chips if they can tell me when and where Ukulele Club, Bridge Club and Climate Justice Club regularly meet. We need a systemic solution to weekly event schedules, not just an overworked SALD employee desperately copying and pasting events as they fly in (props to SALD for trying.)

Improved communication would also lift up smaller or newer clubs and organizations that are putting on fun and engaging events. We need a return to the crowdsourced, creative spirit of mass email, with lessons learned from the last three years without it. What we need is an updated, improved Bulletin app or alternative app that doesn’t crash every time you open it, which maybe integrates with student calendars and the Master Calendar so we can plan around our peers’ events. Our weekly updates should automatically populate with colorful student events of all sizes, helping every event reach more eyes with less stress on organizers. Many of these solutions exist as institutional or third-party apps at other colleges. As readers of my editorials have heard before, we can’t and shouldn’t keep spending our time and energy on social media that causes more harm than good. We need to make these amazing devices that live in our pockets connect us with what matters.

Admin and our student Senates can do this by investing in an improved calendar or bulletin board system that removes barriers to student engagement, instead of creating more barriers. I would like to know what plans are in progress to address the fragmentation and disorganization of our current event scheduling and what more student input is needed to make that change happen faster.