Digital Waves pt. 2: Social media at Pepperdine
A social history of digital life at Pepperdine from Facebook to Fizz
This post is the sequel to How Pepperdine computerized, my brief history of computing at Pepperdine in the twentieth century.
When David Davenport resigned after 15 years as president of Pepperdine University, he was just 50 years old. His resignation came as a surprise to many who had hoped he would continue to lead the university until his retirement.1 As we saw in part one of this series, Davenport’s presidency had been characterized in large part by the rise of the Internet. It was his administration that put a computer in every faculty office, established the university’s website, brought the Internet into the dorms, and prepared systems for the Y2K bug.
So it was no surprise that Davenport’s next venture would be online: in March 2000, at the peak of the dot-com boom, he announced he would take over as CEO of Christianity.com, a Silicon Valley startup aiming to establish a Christian presence on the Web. Davenport saw his new gig as a natural next step: “What is any more current or alive, in terms of Christianity and culture, than the Internet?”2
Christianity.com launched in August 2000 with significant support from venture capital, including $10 million from Sequoia Capital, which had recently invested in Google and Nvidia as well. But in spite of this backing, things went south quickly, with layoffs in the first year. The company apparently developed good tools allowing nontechnical users to write web pages, but it had trouble monetizing and burned through its cash quickly, becoming a subsidiary of Starwire Corp., a firm offering web content management services. Davenport was removed as CEO by the fall of 2001, after which he landed at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, a think tank where he had served on the board for several years.3
Thus, the history of Pepperdine in the twenty-first century begins the same way as the history of all computing in the twenty-first century: with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The next quarter century of technological development has brought many additional challenges, both curricular and extracurricular, from the adverse effects of social media on campus to the frustrations of fully remote instruction.
The history of Pepperdine in the twenty-first century remains largely untold. While it can be difficult to write history at such close range, ephemeral digital source material remains widely available. Now is the perfect time to be compiling this history.
Parts two and three of this series will jointly provide at least a first rough draft of the history of computing at Pepperdine in the beginning of the twenty-first century. For ease of navigation, I’ve split it into two parallel stories: this one about the role social media has played at Pepperdine (especially extracurricularly), and another one still to come, about the effects of academic computing on the university’s curriculum and co-curriculum.
Social media at Pepperdine
In the fall of 2004, Thefacebook.com arrived in Malibu. And students ate it up, taking immediately to features like The Wall and poking. Facebook may have been the biggest social media platform on campus, but it wasn’t the first. When The Graphic introduced Zuckerberg’s creation, it was explicitly compared to Myspace and Friendster.4 And students had been keeping up with their friends on AOL instant messenger (AIM) for years.5
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9a8302d9-966f-4977-b3cd-5d1d98cd0541_971x621.png)
But Facebook would prove remarkably influential, and not just among students. In the early years, a .edu
email address from one of a select number of schools was required in order to create an account, but that allowed faculty and staff to sign up as well. By the fall of 2005, many members of the Pepperdine faculty had Facebook accounts, including everyone from Seaver College dean David Baird to religion adjunct Bob Cargill, who even had a fan club on the site. Like anyone else, many faculty used their accounts for personal purposes, but some also advanced educational goals online. Cargill used it to coordinate with students—posting class reminders, answering questions, and just getting to know his students better.6
Much of the history of social media since the arrival of Facebook has been a story of fragmentation. My experience of social media is different from yours not just because we have different networks of friends but because we use different platforms and because algorithms serve us different content. This fragmentation makes it hard to write about social media in a way that’s representative, much less authoritative. But I can tell you that Facebook was hugely influential during my time as a student at Pepperdine in the early 2010s. I used it to find a roommate the summer before my freshman year, chatted with friends on Facebook Messenger, and used a Facebook Group to coordinate with my classmates while studying abroad in Florence.
Early anonymity
One of the most important ways social media affected Pepperdine in the early twenty-first century involved anonymous publication. Facebook had a relatively strong norm of using your real name and a recognizable photo of yourself, but social media evolved to allow anonymous accounts as well, with serious consequences for social cohesion on campus.
In 2013, an anonymous account popular among students was launched, called Pepperdine Confessions, in imitation of similar accounts for other universities.7 The page posted anonymized confessions from the community: mostly funny anecdotes, admissions of petty misdeeds or romantic interest, minor complaints, and requests for advice. But some took advantage of their anonymity to use coarse language and to target classmates for harassment.8
Pepperdine Confessions wasn’t alone—it was just one of many anonymous accounts popular at the time, including several on Twitter such as Pepperdine Overheard and Pepperdine Problems, active between 2012 and 2016. Themed novelty accounts on social media were mostly just for fun, like Twitter’s Ya Pepperdine Deer and Instagram’s Pepperdine Bananas.
Yik Yak attacks
The culture of anonymous social media posting at Pepperdine was inflamed in 2014 by the arrival of Yik Yak, a social media mobile app that allowed anonymous posts to be seen by users within a few miles’ radius.9 Many posts were in the same vein as Pepperdine Confessions, but some were more polarizing. In the fall of 2015, many in the campus community were upset by posts on Yik Yak they said were racist and insensitive.10
The inciting Yik Yak posts came at a time when the Pepperdine campus was in a particularly sensitive mood because of national news. Riots had erupted that summer in Baltimore following the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a young black man, and protests against racism were ongoing at the University of Missouri. Microaggression was the word on every tongue,11 and polarizing ideas and images were spreading widely on social media.
In imitation of the students in Missouri, a group of Pepperdine students calling themselves Waves Against Ignorance organized a protest on November 13, first in the Waves Café and then in the Thornton Administrative Center (TAC). The protestors carried signs and distributed a flyer listing five demands, including the removal of a relief carving of Juniper Serra from the cafeteria, mandatory sensitivity training for the whole community, a new diversity and inclusion requirement in the General Education program, and the blocking of Yik Yak on the campus network.12
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3eb485d0-ee0e-40ee-915a-324fc678c858_1024x768.jpeg)
The protest was well received by administrators. In a speech the next week responding to the Yik Yak posts, president Andrew Benton said he was proud of the protestors’ behavior,13 and former Seaver College dean David Baird—a historian of the much rowdier Pepperdine protests of the 1960s and ’70s—later remembered the 2015 event as “a well-mannered protest, which is the kind of thing you’d expect from Pepperdine students.”14 For their part, the protestors were “satisfied with the reaction they received from administration.”15 The Serra carving was removed in 2016,16 and the rest of the protestors’ demands were answered in good faith, though perhaps not as swiftly as they would have liked.17
Socials post-Floyd
The Yik Yak controversy was just one of several incidents in which social media—and online anonymity in particular—proved polarizing. In July 2020, perhaps inspired by protests following the death of George Floyd, an Instagram account called blackatpepperdine began posting anonymized stories alleging anti-black racism in the Pepperdine community. The account quickly gained a sizable following, and it even inspired a copycat account called queeratpepp alleging homophobia.
In March of the following year, The Graphic covered a backlash against blackatpepperdine, beginning when some Chinese students accused the account’s anonymous owner(s) of unfair treatment. A post in January had singled out the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) for criticism even though other individuals and groups facing accusations had had their names redacted.18 The blackatpepperdine account’s last post was later that month, though it’s difficult to say whether the dispute with the CSSA was a motivating factor in the decision to stop posting.
As we have seen with the Yik Yak incident and the blackatpepperdine account, anonymity was sometimes championed as a tool offering a voice to those who felt uncomfortable speaking under their real names, and other times it was denounced as enabling bad behavior without accountability.19 Anonymous or not, social media has a way of stoking outrage and sowing discord, encouraging mob mentality and amplifying the most extreme voices. This assessment may not be original, but it has been borne out by the evidence at Pepperdine over the last decade.20
And anonymous social media doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Yik Yak’s popularity with students faded relatively quickly following the controversy in 2015, but it saw a resurgence in 2022.21 More recently, the similar app Fizz seems largely to have taken Yik Yak’s place,22 with the same set of complaints about the effects of anonymity.23
Other uses of social media
Social media at Pepperdine hasn’t been entirely an inferno of outrage or a sanctuary for cyberbullies. Some professors have found productive ways to use social media for academic purposes. No one mistakes a tweet for a peer-reviewed article, of course, but that doesn’t mean social media is of no interest to scholars. For instance, there’s an active community of Pepperdine professors on X (formerly Twitter), who use the platform to advance their scholarly goals: Seaver political science professor Jason Blakely promotes his academic work (books, lectures, etc.); Caruso constitutional law professor Jacob Charles provides expert interpretation of legal news in real time; Seaver philosophy professor Tomas Bogardus solicits counterarguments; and Seaver great books professor Jessica Hooten Wilson documents works in progress. Each has a substantial following, extending their reach well beyond Malibu.
No discussion of social media at Pepperdine would be complete without at least a mention of the rise of influencers and content creators. Some students, especially young women, have become influencers on apps like Instagram and TikTok, monetizing their accounts by making brand deals and endorsing products online. Some enter with large followings, and others grow in popularity while on campus.24 Pepperdine’s location may be partly responsible for attracting this kind of student.
And of course, the university itself uses social media for a variety of purposes: official channels for making announcements, issuing statements, and coordinating during emergencies; other channels for athletics, alumni, news, and research; and all kinds of channels run by various schools, departments, etc. For the most part, the official channels run by IMC have used a restrained, institutional voice. It’s worth noting, though, that some of the athletics channels have distinguished themselves both by their superior graphics and by the way they sometimes dip into sillier or more irreverent styles, to great effect and no little acclaim.25
Social media at Pepperdine has not been an unalloyed good. And while it has played an important role in shaping the university experience over the last twenty years, it certainly isn’t the whole story of Pepperdine computing during that period. Part three of this series will cover the history of academic computing at Pepperdine in the twenty-first century, investigating curricular and co-curricular topics from pandemic-era Zoom school to learning management systems, the computer science department, and online degree programs.
Seaver College dean David Baird, e.g., said “As far as I’m concerned, he could stay here until he’s sixty-five or at least until I retire.” See Jason Johnson and Jennifer Cole, “President stuns campus, announces resignation,” The Graphic, 1 Apr. 1999: A1.
Beth Swinford, “Davenport dives into Web,” The Graphic, 23 Mar. 2000: A1, A8.
See Mark Kellner, “Is God.com Dead?,” Christianity Today, 19 Feb. 2001; cf. Julieanne Leupold, “Davenport leaves dot com for Stanford,” The Graphic, 6 Sept. 2001. See also Adam Lashinsky, “AOL Has a Message for Local Phone Companies,” The Street, 16 July 2001.
Elizabeth Guitten, “Thefacebook.com: connecting students one computer at a time,” The Graphic, 30 Sept. 2004: A5.
AIM needed no introduction for readers of The Graphic in 2001, when the newspaper reported that junior Kathy Yi was so excited for the release of the first Harry Potter film that “her away message on AOL instant messenger gives a countdown on how many days until the movie comes out.” See Christina Littlefield, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” The Graphic, 15 Nov. 2001: B6.
Audrey Reed, “Faculty and Facebook,” The Graphic, 17 Nov. 2005: A3. See also, Michael Alahouzos, “Religion class makes room for 52 more,” The Graphic, 20 Jan. 2005: A4.
Haley Laningham, “Troubling posts frequent anonymous social media,” The Graphic, 9 Apr. 2015: B2.
See “Pepperdine Confessions shows our darker side,” (editorial) The Graphic, 3 Apr. 2014: A7; cf. Lindsey Sirera, “Do the Ends Justify the Means? The Positive and Negative Effects of Cyber Shaming and Cyber Bullying.”
Emily Goldberg and Jenna Aguilera, “Yik Yak stampedes into the social sphere,” The Graphic, 25 Sept. 2014: A1.
See “Yik Yak Commentary,” The Graphic, 5 Nov. 2015: A9. Some of the posts in question were reproduced in Emily Sawicki, “Racial Tensions Surface at Pepperdine,” The Malibu Times: 18 Nov. 2015.
See, e.g., Joshua Gray, “Why I won’t stop talking about race,” The Graphic, 18 Sept. 2014: A7. Gray says, “We can be deceived by Pepperdine’s beautifully embracive culture to the point that we fail to recognize the micro-aggressions certain communities commit, such as walking off of the sidewalks as I’m walking toward you in fear that I may harm you or assuming a penchant for Roscoe’s because of the complexion of my skin.” See also SGA president Ima Idahosa’s opening remarks in “President’s Message”, 17 Nov. 2015.
Madison Harwell, “Pepperdine Students Protest in Solidarity with Mizzou,” The Graphic, 13 Nov. 2015.
See President’s Message, 06:50ff.
Quoted in Berkley Mason, “A historical analysis of racial tensions at Pepperdine,” The Graphic, 7 Apr. 2016: A5.
Ibid.
Chad Jimenez, “Mural removal sparks change,” The Graphic, 29 Aug. 2016: A5.
Optional diversity training became available through Seaver’s SEED program in 2016; the Christopher Columbus statue was removed in 2017; and a “diverse perspectives” requirement is part of the Seaver Core curriculum beginning this fall.
Bryant Yang, “@blackatpepperdine Shows That Racial Identity Can Become An Obstacle For Equality,” The Graphic, 1 Mar. 2021.
See, e.g., Karl Winter, “Are All Opinions Equal? Students, Faculty Weigh the Costs of Sharing Their Beliefs,” The Graphic, 6 Dec. 2021. See also the debate between Creadon (infra note 22) and Sahakian (infra note 23).
For instance, social media comment sections burned with heated rhetoric following an imprudent marketing email sent by SPP dean Pete Peterson in October 2020.
Emily Chase, “YikYak Provides Positivity,” The Graphic, 15 Feb. 2022.
Fiona Creadon, “Rave: Fizz Has Positive Elements,” The Graphic, 7 Nov. 2023.
See, e.g., Adri Sahakian, “Rant: Fizz Negatively Impacts Students,” The Graphic, 7 Nov. 2023.
See, e.g., Caroline Edwards, “Pepperdine Provides a Breeding Ground for Instagram Influencers,” The Graphic, 3 Apr. 2019; Beth Gonzales and Rowan Toke, “Social Media Shapes Pepperdine Influencers’ Identities,” The Graphic, 18 Nov. 2020; Audrey Geib, “First-Year Influencers Comment on Social Media Fame,” The Graphic, 8 Feb. 2022; Timothy Gay, “Student Content Creators Speak Out On The Clock Takeover,” The Graphic, 9 Mar. 2022.