You Can Never Break the Chain: Tracing UCU's (Online) Behaviour

by Sam de Visser

It all started with a silly little e-mail chain. In a long forgotten era, when this school was only a blip on many people’s radars, a giant social experiment still in its infant stages, there was only the email chain. Lost your keys? Send an email. Left something in a classroom? Send an email. Needed to leave an anonymous confession? You couldn’t, because the year is 1998, UCU is a baby, and the internet is only just starting to crawl into people’s lives.

UCU’s very first year book contains a ‘best of’-compilation of funny emails sent through The Chain. Compared to what we have now, these are tame—people losing keys, others replying where the keys are and giving an exact time and date of when they should come by because quickly sending Messenger texts is literally impossible. Compared to the wide variety of UCU-related Facebook pages we have now, that one hundred-person-wide e-mail chain seems horribly inconvenient, but also kind of nice.

UCU Students. UCU Events. UCU Confessions. UCU End of Year Memes Page. UCU Sales for Lekker Memes. UCU Rate My Cat. UCU Find My Plate. Another two hundred different pages I can use to bore you all to death with. The sheer plethora of UCU-related pages makes the email chain it all started with seem like a distant nightmare. In essence, we have done to ourselves what everyone claims to be so against: we’ve transferred UCU to an online sphere and made it so that nobody can ever escape. While the conversation about UCU’s reliance on Facebook is ongoing, even the platforms presented as alternatives seem to be chosen with the seeming online needs of the UCU community in mind.

What was UCU like before we moved all of it online? Naturally, the pandemic has accelerated UCU’s transition to the internet, for all the logical reasons, but it’s funny to think of what this place used to be like before massive UCU debates were moved to inadequate Facebook comment sections. I’ve done some browsing through old Boomerangs (did you know I’m in the Boomerang?) and they actually contain something that seems like reporting on things like GAs and the like. Now it may be a stretch to say that people cared more about these things at the time, because they didn’t, but could it not be said that there was way more incentive to attend them before wacky Twitter accounts and Facebook posts were dictating and documenting everything?

It may be reassuring for some to know that dumb requests on UCU internet pages were therefore made before these pages even existed in the first place. Hilariously enough, they are as much a part of UCU’s fabric of being as its campus, its classes, and its many committees. But the sheer expansion of UCU’s online presence, a natural consequence of the sheer expansion of everyone’s online presence, is kind of disturbing. With the pandemic still locking us in (#OneYearAnniversary!) we have more than ever turned all of UCU over to the internet and its algorithms.

Another fun thing: you know how all of UCU is interconnected now because of our Facebook pages? You know how you can get rice wine vinegar from a random unit by simply just asking for it, usually within minutes? You know how our social media has made supermarkets obsolete? You know how that’s seemingly impossible without the internet? You see those intercom phones on your unit wall? Well, a very long time ago those used to be connected to other units. You could call them through the intercom phones. Needed something from another unit? Just call them! In a way, the UCU internet has been around for much longer than it has actually been around.

The online identity of UCU, our interconnectedness, has been around for much longer than Facebook or even the UCU internet has. In some ways, this is a little depressing—lots of people seem to be dismayed by this Great Community due to our online behaviour, but this online behaviour isn’t just online. It’s our behaviour, like it or not. Facebook or no Facebook, the shitposting, the begging for random things, the useless debates, they’ll stay. Perhaps something to keep in mind when lamenting our stupidity next time—UCU dwells wherever it wants to dwell, and even without Facebook, or even the internet, it’ll find a way.