A BB gun. Shelter in place. Fires.
All of these are emergencies that Pepperdine students experienced in the 2024-25 academic year.
Sophomore Maddie Wheeler said she sheltered in place during the Franklin Fire Dec. 9. She was in a room that did not have a view of the outdoors when flames were approaching Payson Library.
Wheeler said she opened up Fizz to see an alarming image.
“That’s how I saw the picture of the flames right outside the building [Payson Library] I was in,” Wheeler said.
Wheeler is not the only one who used Fizz during an emergency on campus. According to a survey conducted by the Graphic, 76% of 156 Pepperdine students use Fizz during emergencies.
While informative news was spread quickly on Fizz during the BB gun incident on Aug. 21, the Franklin Fire on Dec. 9 or during the Palisades and Kenneth fires early January, the platform is also a place where students could post or read humorous threads as a way to cope with the severity of each situation, Wheeler said.
Students Use Fizz for Information During Emergency Situations
Wheeler said she was relaxing in her dorm room during the first week of the fall 2024 semester when she got a call that there was a gunman on campus.
“They just said it was on John Tyler in the phone call, and then we didn’t know where,” Wheeler said. “We didn’t know how close it was to Seaside, and since we’re on the outside part of Seaside, we were a little scared.”
While Pepperdine authorities sent out multiple messages during the incident, Wheeler said most of the specific information on the location of the car with the BB gun came from Fizz.
“I saw a picture that someone posted on Fizz before they got on campus with the gun out the window,” Wheeler said. “And then right after that, I saw pictures that they caught him.”
Sophomore Gabby Cabai said she was in the Lighthouse when she heard about the BB gun on campus, and the emergency alert messages from Pepperdine did not ease her stress.
“I thought Pepperdine calls [about the BB gun] were informative, but kind of scary and concerning,” Cabai said.
Once again, Fizz provided information that Cabai said gave her comfort.
“I saw that they captured the guy on campus, so that was helpful,” Cabai said.
For the Franklin Fire, Wheeler said Pepperdine officials responded to the situation promptly by telling her to shelter in place at Payson Library. Once she was sheltering in place, she said she had one main news source.
“When I was in the library, overnight in the media room with my besties,” Wheeler said. “I was constantly checking it [Fizz].”
Wheeler said she was pleased with the amount of information students were posting on Fizz during the stressful night.
Wheeler was not the only one who felt this way.
According to a survey conducted by the Graphic, 65% of Pepperdine students who used Fizz during the Franklin Fire said they were satisfied with the app. Another 27% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.
An important aspect of what makes Fizz unique in emergencies is all posts are anonymous, Sarah Fishbach, associate professor of Integrated Marketing and Communication, said.
The shield of anonymity can have benefits such as students not being embarrassed to post factual information, Fishbach said.
“When people think that they’re anonymous, they think they’re untouchable,” Fishbach said.
This also comes with drawbacks such as false information and inappropriate posts that create chaos during emergencies, Fishbach said.
“Once that anonymous layer is on there,” Fishbach said. “It gives people freedom to be more vulgar.”
Despite this opportunity for falsehoods and vulgarity, first-year Alex Tran said he found valuable information on Fizz as it was happening during emergencies.
“The updates will always be a genuine and reliable source that actively informs everybody in a much more efficient manner than the updates from the school itself,” Tran said.
While Pepperdine’s Emergency Operations Committees declined to comment on their monitoring of the anonymous social media platform, Fishbach said there are faculty in the Integrated Marketing Communications department who monitor the app to see how students react to different situations and events on campus.
Students Post and Enjoy Fizz for Comedic Relief
Fizz is not just a place for news updates and factual information. Students look at the app during and after emergencies for comedic relief.
From a survey conducted by the Graphic, 26% of Pepperdine students reported they use Fizz for factual information or news updates, 16% reported they use it for humor and 58% said both.
There were many viral posts during the Franklin Fire, but one of them stuck with Wheeler.
“One post that I saw said something like at the end of the year, we should all get a degree in survival at this rate from everything that’s happened,” Wheeler said. “I thought that one was really funny.”
The recent fires were nothing to joke about, Wheeler said, but using humor as a coping mechanism is a common reaction for humans to protect their egos from emotional pain in stressful or tragic situations, according to a Positive Psychology article published July 8, 2020.
Cabai said she sheltered in place in the Waves Cafe during the Franklin Fire. There, she used Fizz to get away from the anxiety-provoking news.
“I would sometimes go on and send my friends [Fizz] posts, just trying to distract ourselves,” Cabai said.
Fizz Connects the Pepperdine Community
For the students studying abroad this past fall, Fizz became a bridge between Malibu and whichever international campus they were at, especially during emergencies, said sophomore Avery Smith.
“I did look at Fizz mostly to see photos that people would post, because text messages only go so far in an emergency,” Smith said. “Somebody’s [a person in the emergency situation] not about to give the most detailed text messages.”
While Smith still received the emergency message during the Franklin Fire, she said she turned to Fizz to get a student’s point of view.
The visual media the students from Malibu posted during the Franklin Fire is what made Fizz so valuable to Smith.
“A picture is worth 1000 words and a video is worth a million words,” Smith said.
Smith said one video stopped her in her tracks.
“So the video from the library, where it’s like the flames come up to the library, I showed my mom, that video at family Christmas, I showed my grandma that video at our second family Christmas,” Smith said. “I literally showed it to anyone who would look at my phone.”
While students abroad were in no physical danger from the BB gun incident or the fires, Smith said she used Fizz to stay connected to the Malibu campus and her peers who were there.
“It’s really easy when you’re abroad to tune out and get really into what your program is doing,” Smith said. “ I definitely tried to put myself in the shoes of people who were on campus posting those things.”
Now that Smith is back in Malibu for the spring semester, she said she has looked at the app less.
“Fizz has become less of a primary news source for me, as someone who’s on campus for the Palisades fire,” Smith said. “I witnessed it firsthand, and I didn’t feel the need to go online to view the same things that I was actually living.”
The app filled with jokes, news updates and even falsehoods was a platform of community, Wheeler said.
“I felt like everyone was rallying behind one another,” Wheeler said. “I would see posts of like people thanking first responders or like, ‘I just lost my house and everything was there,’ and people were commenting and saying, ‘I’m so sorry.’”
This aspect of Fizz was unexpected, said Wheeler.
“Random people were offering to help others, which I thought was really nice,” Wheeler said. “It showed how strong the Pepperdine community is.”
On multiple fronts, Cabai said Fizz is a key component of the Pepperdine community.
“Overall I think that Fizz is a really good way for students to connect as a community,” Cabai said. “Either for laughter, for information or just being supportive for each other.”
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Follow the Graphic on X: @PeppGraphic
Contact Emma Martinez via email: emma.martinez@pepperdine.edu or by Instagram: @emma.martinez17
