To see a puppy scampering through a pile of leaves on the Quad, look to Snapchat’s Campus Story. To see a sticker of Otto on a bong, look to Yeti.

A new app named Yeti is essentially an uncensored clone of Snapchat’s Campus Story feature. To summarize both platforms, users in the university area submit pictures and videos for a chance to be featured on a localized feed. Then, an all-powerful being, or group of beings, sorts through submissions and selects which are worthy of appearing to nearby users for the next 24 hours.

Both Yeti and Campus Stories are meant to show off images of college life, but the portrayals are strikingly different. Yeti has been called trashy and likely few would disagree. While the Campus Story generally keeps content PG, Yeti allows X-rated posts such as students puking on the Mount stairs, lines of cocaine captioned “I love college” and naked selfies in the bathroom of Lawrinson Hall. Go Orange.

With the mainstream use of social media, little is left to the imagination. This type of tech-enabled TMI may contribute to older generations’ critical view of millennials. Technology has given young people the ability to shock society with hard evidence of their indiscretions. Though today’s young people often get a bad rap, in actuality they may not be any naughtier than their elders.

Since Snapchat has earned widespread popularity, it has become stricter in choosing which posts it accepts to its feeds and in enforcing its Terms of Use and Community Guidelines.

Of course, millennials could not be tamed. Yeti allows students to post what Campus Story censors. Since the app’s launch in March, Yeti has accumulated hundreds of thousands of active daily users and the app gets over 10,000 new downloads every day.

Society shakes its head and files away incriminating Yetis for future reference. However, we should all consider why Gen-Y’s blackmail archive is so extensive.

With so much bad press, even Generation Y has a bad impression of itself. A recent Pew Research Center study found that millennials have a significantly more negative view of their generation as compared to members of Generation X, baby boomers or other age groups.

However, there seems to be an underappreciated factor at play: the rise of technology has likely contributed heavily to society’s negative assessments of Generation Y.

Today’s young people have grown up in a cyber-spotlight and Yeti serves as yet another platform to advertise indecency. For better or for worse, millennials were the first to grow up with the means to so easily publicize the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll that are so cross-generationally a characteristic of youth.

Had an app like Yeti existed for older generations, it probably would have attracted similarly questionable posts from a similar breed of users. They couldn’t share it, but that does not mean it didn’t happen.

If the technology had been available to them, there likely would have been sexting via Snapchat and drug abuse on Yeti long before millennials. Though it is shocking to see such hard evidence of some young people’s bad behavior, it is clear that it’s not unique to those under the age of 35.

What is new is the mainstream use of technology. Today’s young people have the ability to personally document the good, the bad and the ugly like no other generation before.

Twenty-somethings have long been considered young and reckless by their elders — the difference is that now we have the evidence right on our phone screens.

Alison Gala is a senior public relations major and Spanish minor. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at aegala@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @alison_gala.

Published on November 3, 2015 at 12:54 am