Pledging for likes: How social media snuck its way into a two hundred year-old institution
By Anabel Prince
Greek-letter organizations have been around for almost 200 years. Instagram was founded in 2010. What was sorority life like before online presence mattered?
I made an Instagram account when I was 14 years old, two years after the social media platform first appeared in 2010. Back then, it was still acceptable to post a picture of your dinner with no filter and the hashtag #yum. That’s an absolutely unthinkable act now. Photos of celebrities and my high school classmates filled up my feed of a couple hundred followers, as “influencers” hadn’t struck the scene yet.
A few years later, I noticed a big change. People no longer posted just anything on Instagram. Suddenly, the picture quality mattered. Their teeth were whiter, their skin more tan, their locations more exotic. Captions became a bigger deal, too. The simple “Lunch! #salmon #yummers” wasn’t cutting it anymore. Followers now expected wittier captions, and hashtags became a promotional tool.
This change coincided with my freshman year and my introduction to campus Greek Life organizations. Suddenly, my feed filled with dozens of perfectly made-up girls sporting trendy outfits posing with others just like them. Move-in week corresponded with rush week, an event marked in Athens by hundreds of soon-to-be freshmen girls marching up and down Milledge Avenue in 90-degree weather wearing four-inch heels and white dresses, visiting each sorority house and ranking them day by day. Sororities that like certain girls invite them back to the house throughout the week, and then at the end they’ll either drop you, or offer you a bid to join the sisterhood.
Rush week has operated the same way for decades, running like an efficiently-oiled machine run by perfectly manicured hands. Greek-letter organizations have been around for almost 200 years. Instagram was founded in 2010. What was sorority life like before online presence mattered?
It’s 2019, and more than 98% of college students use social media. Those aged 18–24 reported using Instagram and Snapchat more than any other age group, moving Facebook and email up into the older generations. In 2007, 19.9% of UCLA students reported using social media for more than six hours a week, which went up to 27.2% in 2014. Now, the average person spends about two hours a day on these sites, accounting to 14 hours a week. Since 2010, social media use has increased by almost 1000% for people aged 18–29. With most students now living a large portion of their lives online, social media has snuck its way into many of our already established systems, sororities included.
Let’s go back a bit. It’s 2008, and most colleges just want Facebook to come to their campus. “I remember being a freshman and literally putting in a request on a weekly basis to Facebook to open it up to [my college],” Brady Keeter, a 2008 alumna of Delta Delta Delta at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said. “It was the place to be. You wanted to have a profile on Facebook.”
For current college students, Facebook walked so Instagram could run. Keeter recalled sharing photos from sorority events on the site so she could keep up with her friends at home while also documenting her new college experiences. Transferring to UNC Chapel Hill from the smaller UNC Wilmington, Facebook had already been on campus a year when she arrived. “It was still relatively new, but we were all on it. There was a Tri Delta group that you wanted to be associated with, but it wasn’t a predominant way of how we communicated,” Keeter said.
Instead, they shared information about meetings and parties through posting a calendar in the sorority house and then emailing it out to all the members. Many sisters also lived together on and off campus, meaning they largely spread information about upcoming events through word of mouth. “If you were in the house enough, you just kind of knew what was happening,” Keeter recalls.
So how did sororities even survive in the 80s and 90s? Jen Cox, a 1992 Tulane University alumna, recalled her experience as a sorority member back when IRL was the only option. During her college years in these pre-social media days, Cox recalls word of mouth as the main way information got around, as opposed to the Facebook Messenger groups and GroupMe chats sororities use to communicate today. She’d find out about parties from flyers posted around campus or her friend’s boyfriend who was a member of a fraternity.
But things have changed since then. Jen’s 18-year-old daughter graduates high school next month and still feels unsure about rushing in the fall. “She’s like ‘Look at these girls on Instagram from these sororities, [and] if I decide to do that, I’m gonna really need to beef mine up,’ and I’m like, ‘What?,’” Cox recalls. “She said, ‘I know it’s ridiculous, but it is how they sort of judge you.’ It’s almost like a pre-rush.”
While aspects like these make Cox’s daughter hesitant to rush, she can’t deny that the Greek system brands themself impeccably: an already made-up community on campus, access to parties, and hundreds of potential new friends just waiting for you upon arrival. “Social media is just too big of an obstacle to ignore. The thing that was different in the early 80’s, early 90’s, is that they only saw me in real life, and I only saw them in real life,” Cox said. “What my daughter described, there’s this whole period where they’re judging you based on what you’re putting out there, and your brand of yourself.”
The word “branding” comes up a lot when talking to people about social media. When a sister posts a picture in her letters, she’s representing the sorority. She’s their brand. Because of this, most sororities establish early-on that active members should refrain from posting any content that could reflect poorly on their image.Most commonly, they restrict any photo where an underage girl has a drink or an illegal substance, but some go as far to ban photos with members of fraternities on campus.
The concept of a finsta, or fake Instagram, is mostly used by high school and college students to post about their not-so-public activities, restricting their followers to just close friends, or people that they’d be cool with seeing them do a keg stand on video. According to Denise*, a UGA Sigma Kappa alumna, sororities have taken to another use of the fake Instagram account, utilizing it to monitor sister’s pictures for content.
Sororities have also taken to not just monitoring what their members post, but also restricting them. Sigma Kappa, much like other sororities, strongly encourage their sisters to refrain from posting pictures that include underage drinking, drugs, profanity, and partying with fraternities. “If they have a drink and it’s very noticable, I mean even if it’s a Solo cup where it’s like a ‘Oh, that could be water’ kind of thing, you still don’t wanna post that,” Denise said.
Sororities didn’t just create these rules for Instagram — they seem to have been there from the beginning. Keeter recalls her sorority establishing guidelines for what photos from events members could post on Facebook. “It was kind of uncharted territory at the time, so there were so strict policies around it,” she recalls. “In general sororities and fraternities can come under scrutiny, right?”
It seems that generally, sororities implement these policies to enforce smart social media practices. And can we blame them? In four years or less, their members will trade out cowboy themed date nights and philanthropy events for professional job interviews. Maybe they’ve been onto something since the beginnings of social media. “You wanted to be more careful about what you were out there putting on social media, just until everybody really understood it,” Keeter said. “I don’t think we still completely understand it.”
