For many Gators, sharing a laugh over a meme about Zoom lectures is one of the few methods they can use to still feel connected to fellow students. This sense of community is thanks to the efforts of those behind popular UF-centric social platforms embodying the spirit of life on-campus from home.
The Black Sheep UF, a multi-platform social media account run by a team of seven students, entertains more than 15,000 followers on Instagram and 10,000 on Twitter. Content for its accounts is mainly inspired by niche experiences at UF— such as receiving an alert from University Police that the local Bojangles’ has been robbed at 2 a.m. or coming to the realization that no one uses the revolving door at Library West to save energy.
Ryan Novak, a 21-year-old UF telecommunication junior, has devised a method for maintaining the madness that is The Black Sheep UF’s Twitter account. But producing daily content as a social media contributor throughout quarantine has been challenging.
“The issue is creating content that still stays fresh,” Novak said. “You can only make so many Zoom-related memes before you’re just like, ‘Am I really about to do this again?’”
Though the fear of redundancy has kept its social media contributors on their toes, The Black Sheep UF has seen more audience engagement than average during the pandemic. Fellow social media contributor, Jenna Barry, a 20-year-old UF advertising senior, attributes this to the team expanding the range of its content as its audience has grown.
“It seems like since everyone is in the same boat, a lot of our content has been more broad,” Barry said. “More people are on social media, and everyone is kind of bummed right now, so I feel like a lot of people look for comedy.”
With so much shared frustration surrounding the pandemic, there’s been a revelation in how a lot of comedy comes from shared pain, said Novak. And somehow, expressing mundane desires such as hoping UF will eventually dump Pepsi for Coca-Cola has kept students connected.
“I like to think that people, maybe even if they aren’t actually communicating it, they kind of feel like they’re still part of UF, no matter where they’re at,” Novak said.
There’s more than one online community that aims to bring levity to the UF community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Swampy UF memes for top ten public teens, a Facebook group created by UF alumna Rebecca Ragan in March 2017 has accumulated more than 46,000 members. Over the years, the group has become notorious for its members' abilities to photoshop Florida Gators baseball caps onto any photo.
Brandon McKay, a 20-year-old UF biology sophomore, has always loved the community as a whole and said he was inspired to become one of three moderators working alongside 12 administrators in the group.
As a moderator, McKay said he typically spends around an hour a day on the page because activity within the group has remained consistent throughout quarantine. Maintaining a lighthearted atmosphere within the community is a task distributed evenly among the staff of moderators and administrators, who evaluate submissions and approve them based on inclusivity, relevancy and quality.
At the start of the pandemic, the Swampy memes staff made an announcement that they would not approve any memes centered around people who had contracted the virus, McKay said.
“That’s what the moderators are all about,” McKay said. “Making the Swampy memes page a good community for people at UF.
Although the pandemic has stretched the UF community far and wide, the “Swampy memes” page and other platforms like it have sent out a unified message that anyone having trouble coping with the times is not alone. UF has over 50,000 students, many of whom will never meet or share a class, but still connect with each other through liking the same meme, McKay said.
“I think that’s what the meme page does especially well in times like this,” McKay said. “A lot of us, we all come from different backgrounds, different places, some of us different states and different countries, but we’re all experiencing a lot of the same things.”
Contact Lonnie Numa at lnuma@alligator.org and on follow them on Twitter @lonaald.
The Black Sheep UF, a multi-platform social media account run by a team of seven students, entertains more than 15,000 followers on Instagram and 10,000 on Twitter.
