Michael Warner’s theory of publics provides essential grounding for understanding Reddit as more than a collection of posts. Warner argues that “publics have an ongoing life: one doesn’t publish to them once and for all (as one does, say, to a scholarly archive). It’s the way texts circulate, and become the basis for further representations, that convinces us that publics have activity and duration” (2002, 68). A public exists not through singular acts of communication but through continuous circulation; text must move through time and become part of an “intertextual environment of citation and implication” to constitute public discourse (Warner 2002, 68). This circulation principle distinguishes platforms like Reddit, where posts remain searchable and citeable across years, from ephemeral communication channels where discourse vanishes after immediate consumption.

Sarah Pink et al.’s principle of “non-digital-centric-ness” (2016) reinforces this approach. Their focus on relationships, social worlds, and localities guides the analysis of March 2020 as an event unfolding simultaneously online and on campus. r/CUNY is read as both networked public and local community, with digital traces embedded in material life.

Persistence: Solutions remain accessible across years. comment_koxv1co (Baruch, score: 51) preserves campus lore from “a few years ago,” comment_mn6abxk (CUNY, score: 135) shares 20-year-old success story of meeting spouse at Hunter, and comment_mcf39dr documents balance persistence from 2020-2024. comment_ksab2yr promotes CUNY Reconnect program for returning students, showing multi-year institutional memory preservation. Replicability: Tactical knowledge designed for copying and adaptation. comment_ewlyuik’s 5-step shopping cart strategy provides explicit reproduction instructions, comment_itwfhhb (3,756 characters) offers comprehensive financial survival guide, comment_ke4h1ml details step-by-step plagiarism defense using Google Docs version history, and comment_krbu6n9 provides multi-step first-generation college guidance, all structured as copy-paste templates. Scalability: Individual experiences reveal systemic patterns. comment_lo92u7q (CUNY, score: 95) “Everyone and their mother wants to major in computer science” makes individual major choice visible as system-wide pattern, comment_m9mqm92 (score: 183) “majority of CUNY cooked” transforms personal SNAP/Pell dependency into recognized collective condition, and comment_mcdyjks “Alot of people do not graduate ‘on time’” normalizes degree completion delays at population scale. Searchability: Students actively use Reddit search to find past solutions. comment_m9u60o2 describes “trying to find out how to join every club,” comment_jb2lv17 recounts “fought for my life trying to find a bathroom,” and multiple posts document discovering tactical knowledge through subreddit search, creating institutional memory accessible when students need it rather than when administrators schedule information sessions.

The CARE Principles (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) for Indigenous data governance (Carroll et al. 2020), while developed for Indigenous contexts, offer framework for community-centered research ethics. Applied to CUNY Reddit: ensuring research benefits communities studied, recognizing community authority over their narratives, researcher responsibility to accuracy, and ethical representation of vulnerable populations.

1.5.2 Dissertation Structure Pre-pandemic “normal” was already crisis (this chapter) Computational patterns reveal systematic inequality (Chapter 2) Lived experiences show survival strategies (Chapter 3) Reddit-participating students create supplementary education networks alongside formal structures 1.5.3 Contributions to Scholarship For platform studies: Architecture shapes crisis response capability For digital humanities: New methods for capturing marginalized voices For higher education: Vernacular infrastructure as functional educational infrastructure: peer tutoring networks (comment_fhdvsyc), resource sharing systems (submission_1my4vi6, score: 585), and 24/7 support mechanisms For public policy: The implications of reduced institutional support patterns

full technical treatment in Chapter 2, Section 2.1.2)

citational infrastructure he theorized as essential

2.3.2 N-gram Analysis Distinctive linguistic fingerprints CUNY-Specific Trigrams “the financial aid office”: 892 occurrences “constant issues with CUNYfirst”: 147 “take the shuttle then”: 73 “if the express is”: 89 Comparative Trigrams “direct all questions”: 48 (NYU/Columbia) “the admissions office”: 127 (private schools) “feel free to PM”: 89 (leisure for consultation)

Schedule validation

Where institutions maintain industrial-era schedules, students forced into perpetual crisis vigilance embody this sleepless consumer, monitoring deadlines and aid calculations at 2am not from choice but from bureaucratic necessity.

fundamental

Chapter 2: Macroscopic Computational Analysis

CUNY students explaining upvoting conventions to newcomers, directing questions to appropriate subreddits through 614 cross-campus redirections, and providing OP-directed encouragement achieving 21% above-baseline engagement (3.53 vs 2.91 average score) embody this principle.

directly instantiate Warner’s theoretical mechanisms.

—

finds empirical validation in computational analysis of CUNY Reddit metadiscourse

“rate my schedule”

January spike: 515 posts (Baruch 2019) Shopping cart discussions: 275 instances

precarity operates continuously, demanding constant vigilance that transforms night into an extension of crisis rather than respite from it.

2.6 Chapter Summary: Key Findings (1,500 words)

2.2.3 Semester Cycles and Activity Peaks

Predictable patterns of precarity Registration Periods January spike: 515 posts (Baruch 2019) Shopping cart discussions: 275 instances The “rate my schedule” phenomenon reveals distinctively CUNY coordination practices absent from private university discourse. Students post screenshots of their planned course schedules requesting peer review before finalizing registration—275 such posts appear across CUNY subreddits compared to 34 at NYU and negligible activity at Columbia. This differential signals more than preference; it reflects structural necessity. CUNY students navigate complex constraints simultaneously: course availability limited by budget cuts and adjunct hiring, work schedules requiring specific class times, inter-campus commutes demanding transit-compatible timetables, and prerequisite confusion from inadequate advising documented throughout Chapter 1. Private university students selecting from abundant course sections with minimal scheduling conflicts face no comparable coordination burden, rendering peer schedule validation superfluous. The practice intensified dramatically during the pandemic transition and persisted afterward, despite initial privacy concerns. Pre-pandemic schedule posts occasionally prompted warnings about doxxing risks—unique course combinations could identify students to administrators or professors—but crisis overwhelmed caution. Students recognized that the risk of selecting an unmanageable schedule, missing a required course only offered once annually, or creating impossible commute patterns exceeded the abstract threat of identification. Posts evolved to include strategic anonymization: cropping professor names, obscuring course numbers while preserving time blocks, describing course types without titles. This vernacular privacy protocol demonstrates sophisticated risk calculation where students collectively developed protective practices enabling necessary coordination without institutional guidance on digital safety. The discourse reveals schedule validation functioning as distributed infrastructural work replacing absent institutional support. Comments analyze schedule feasibility across multiple dimensions: “That’s way too many writing-intensive courses in one semester” warns against cognitive overload; “You’ll never make the Baruch-Hunter commute in 45 minutes” provides transit realism; “Take Professor X’s section not Y’s for that course” transmits institutional knowledge about instructor quality that official sources won’t document; “That’s doable but you won’t have time for a job” acknowledges economic constraints shaping enrollment. This multi-factor analysis mirrors professional academic advising but operates peer-to-peer because CUNY’s 1:1000+ advisor-to-student ratios make individual schedule consultation effectively impossible. NYU’s robust advising apparatus—one advisor per 200-300 students—renders peer schedule validation redundant, explaining the 8-fold differential. The pattern exemplifies how institutional abandonment transforms into student infrastructural labor, with Reddit enabling coordination that universities should provide but don’t. Finals and Aid Deadlines December: 578 posts peak AI detection anxiety: 70 posts May/December Food pantry mentions: 420% increase during finals Summer Gaps Reduced activity but increased desperation Work-study ended, aid suspended Housing insecurity peaks

—all building from this foundational understanding that

The temporal lag between student advocacy and institutional response

This chapter analyzes March 2020 as the ONLY primary treatment of the pandemic spike, with other chapters referencing this analysis rather than duplicating it.

Reddit preserves 14 years of unsolicited discourse spanning 2011-2025.

shapes what discourse becomes possible. Struggles that remain

When submission_1ic1a4p about federal aid suspension panic garners 315 upvotes, those votes represent 315+ students confirming “this is my experience too.” Unlike researcher-assigned codes or interview quotes selected for representativeness, Reddit engagement scores show what communities themselves consider important, accurate, and worth amplifying.

Focus groups have researchers facilitating. Institutional surveys have administrators framing questions. Reddit threads document peer-to-peer knowledge construction, tactical development, and collective sense-making as they happen.

This scale doesn’t replace ethnographic depth; Chapter 3 provides that.

Platform mechanics references (0.54% of comments, 406 instances) demonstrate

The monthly progression reveals the crisis arc: January’s 584 posts reflected normal academic stress, February’s 470 showed typical mid-semester decline, but March’s spike to 1,063 preceded May’s peak of 1,466 as the pandemic’s implications became inescapable.

This wasn’t simply platform adoption—the CUNY main subreddit grew from 929 pre-2020 posts to 91,505 post-pandemic (98x increase), but as Chapter 1’s validation analysis demonstrated, this represented genuine intensification with 34% more posts-per-user rather than merely more users discovering Reddit

2.3 Linguistic Patterns: Comparative Discourse Analysis (4,000 words)

it provides prophetic baseline evidence