Before this academic year even began, new and returning students were alerted of Wofford’s updated and digitized approach to student life. “Presence,” an app which has since been renamed to “Involve,” was to be used across social and student life events at Wofford for the upcoming year.

From a student understanding, “Involve” was the Office of Student Life and Development’s crack at modernizing their operations and offering a platform to help on-campus event-holders be more thorough. The app even offers a display of upcoming events, perhaps a useful tool for students looking to engage with Wofford’s social calendar. 

One of my main grievances with “Involve” is not with the app itself, but with the onslaught of apps pushed onto us today. There are hundreds of unnecessary apps offering digital ‘solutions’ to aspects of our lives that simply do not need to be made digital. 

In the past five years, nearly every on-paper process has found its on-screen equivalent. Even our small campus has dozens of apps: alongside “Involve” exists “Guardian” for safety and “GET Mobile” for checking one’s supply of TerrierBucks. 

I suppose these apps undoubtedly serve a purpose, but their existence more so speaks to our culture’s strange desire to move everything to a digital space. Apps for a multitude of fast-food chains clog up our phones and create miniature digital systems of something that can be accomplished in a drive-thru line. 

I think about concert tickets and restaurants being reduced to QR codes and wonder if just because something can be made digital, should it?

As the school year progressed, Wofford students came to see just how deeply integrated the Wofford administration expected “Involve” to be in our social activities. I couldn’t help but dread the incorporation of another app into my daily agenda.

Further, “Involve” appeared to supersede its humble identity as a social hub and become, perhaps unintentionally, a security tool. In an earlier issue of The Old Gold & Black, several members across different fraternities commented on how “Involve” had been helpful in monitoring each house’s attendance, replacing the formerly on-paper process. 

While I acknowledge these benefits of “Involve,” I can’t help but become more critical of the app and its use across campus. Constant digital monitoring feels somewhat infantilizing to college students. “Involve” begins to feel like less of a helper and more of an eerie technical presence across student life. 

A key goal of “Involve” is to cement itself as an intermediary between students and organizations, a goal which I find to be incredibly irrelevant at Wofford, where campus events boast regular large attendances and organizations are active communicators with the student body. Our community is too small and close-knit to reap substantial benefits from an app like “Involve.” 

I am by no means being directly critical of the college’s safety efforts nor do I believe that my personal and trivial feelings towards the “Involve” app should outweigh the well-being of the college and its students. I instead express my frustration with the general direction that our culture and social experiences are headed towards. 

Our daily digital experiences attribute more and more purpose to our phones and these single-purpose and temporal apps. The development and incorporation of these digital systems probably takes more time than would be saved by their use. The flashy experience of making something digital blinds us from thinking if it’s more practical or efficient in the first place.

In future decades, how will we reflect on our lives today and our time at Wofford? I wonder if we will further digress into app culture or look back on signing into every conceivable campus event with a QR code and wonder why we ever bothered to digitize such a trivial task.

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