Abstract
My technical work and my STS research are connected through the crisis of loneliness among college students. My technical project, Common Grounds, is a privacy-first mobile application that my team built to help first-year and underconnected students discover nearby peers who share common interests, to lower the social friction that prevents students from forming meaningful friendships. My STS Research Paper, using Langdon Winner’s framework of technological politics, investigates Instagram Stories as a technology that actively compounds loneliness it for specific groups of students instead of alleviating it. The two projects focus on the problem of college student loneliness from opposing directions, as one builds a new technology to address it and the other dives into how an existing technology, Instagram, deepens it. Together, they show the fact that design choices embedded in a platform are never neutral, and engineers bear real responsibility for the social consequences those choices produce.
My technical project, Common Grounds, is a mobile app I created with my group using the framework Flutter, meaning it can be used in both Android and iOS. A student can create a profile with basic information such as a class year, major, and a set of interest tags. Once there are two users who have shared interests and are within a certain distance of each other, an icebreaker notification with the shared interest is shown to both. When both students acknowledge and agree to connect, the app shows limited details of each user and opens an in-app chat between them. This app is specifically aimed at students who are the most susceptible to loneliness, including first-generation, international, and LGBTQ+ students.
My STS Research Paper argues that Instagram Stories does significant political work by privileging well-connected college students while marginalizing first-generation and international students through three design choices: the 24-hour posting format, the engagement-based algorithmic ranking, and the public view count metric. Drawing on Langdon Winner's framework of technological politics, I demonstrate that each choice advantages students whose social circumstances align with the platform's design logic while disadvantaging those whose do not. Together, these three choices constitute a political architecture that deepens the very loneliness Instagram claims to reduce.
Each project makes the other's points stronger. My STS research gave me a sharper awareness of how platform design can create inequality, which I understand more clearly after creating Common Grounds. Winner's observation that technical systems do political work regardless of designer intent pushed our team to treat privacy and equity as structural commitments from the start, not features to add later. On the other hand, building Common Grounds gave my STS analysis engineering-level clarity. Since I had firsthand experience with how a design team chooses what an algorithm should prioritize, I was better able to understand why Instagram's choice to rank Stories by prior engagement is a political decision, not a neutral technical one. In my engineering career, I want to truly make a greater effort in planning and thinking about any technical decisions, as they can have great social consequences.
