Why are we doing this to each other?

Barstool is a company that was originally founded on the basis of covering sports. As Barstool began to expand, it began to cover more areas of media, mainly comedic things that are happening by the average person in our community. Correlated to Barstool’s rise in popularity came the rise of school by school Barstools, which mainly came at a college level.

At the college level, these accounts publicize what campus life is like by posting a range of media from coverage on sports games to funny things that people are doing around campus. These accounts work to help raise school spirit and give a look into what college at that campus is like. These accounts are easily accessible to everyone, so as people began to view how fun these accounts were, highschools began to follow by creating their own accounts.

Several high school accounts like Breck, Wayzata, and Minnetonka followed the same pattern as other Barstools: covering what life is like at that campus, especially funny public actions. However, as Blake began to create our own Barstool accounts, we broke away from the core of the idea of promoting unity in a community.

Blake’s Barstool differentiates itself from others by creating a joke of the people they are posting rather than laughing at the public actions. In addition, the account frequently posted images that were captured privately, violating the privacy of these individuals.

These invasions of privacy can be so easily mitigated by simply asking the person if it is acceptable to post the image of them before you actually do it. At a corporate level, even the head Barstool company goes through all of the steps to make sure that somebody is ok with their content being reposted. 

Another thing to do to make sure that a situation like this where something fun goes over the limits doesn’t happen again is to avoid groupthink. If you see people laughing around you, it is coded in us to laugh as well, but try to take a second to see if the topic being laughed at is appropriate or not instead of just accepting it because the people around you are. 

Finally, we as a community need to be nicer to each other. It is so easy to go through the motions of the day while being inconsiderate of how you are making the people around you feel, so we as a community need to take an extra moment to be conscious and considerate of the people around us so that we can improve school spirit and just generally be a more welcoming a positive environment.