Yik Yak and the knowledge community

Yik Yak is an anonymous, location-based social networking application that is extremely popular on college campuses across the United States. Because it is known mainly for the controversies it breeds, both scholars and professionals have largely overlooked Yik Yak's complexities and have instead focused on its more negative traits. This article discusses Yik Yak as a site for critical research, especially in the field of technical and professional communication. Yik Yak fuses physical and virtual space, places an emphasis on interactivity, and subverts traditional user hierarchies. By examining these characteristics and the posts that users generate, this article explores how Yik Yak serves as an impetus for the formation of knowledge communities---communities in which individuals work together to create and maintain collective knowledge. This article also advocates further critical study of Yik Yak communities and posits Yik Yak communication patterns have important implications for communication designers.