茶. The origin of tea dates back to the Shang dynasty of China in the third century. The beverage was popularized in Europe by Portuguese priests in the 1700s. As of 2016, 62% of the world’s tea is produced by China or India. Tea, a shrub, has a stimulating effect in most humans. Despite popular conception, so-called herbal tea is not actually true tea, as only water infused with leaves from Camellia sinensis is proper tea — herbal teas are generally made with non-tea ingredients or with non-leaf sections of the sinensis plant to avoid caffeine content.
Wikipedia defines tea culture as “the way people interact with tea, and […] the aesthetics surrounding tea drinking.” All around the world, countries and states are host to many teahouses or tea rooms, a distinct class of tea-centered establishment that also often serve as centers of social interaction.
Many people produce tea by first boiling water and then pouring the water into a small cup, followed by submerging tea leaves into the water (either loosely or contained in a pourous bag). However, recently a new alternative method of tea creation has become trendy at Stevens Institute of Technology. Students are now brewing tea by sending scandalous confessions to strangers via Instagram, who them make them publicly available. This method of tea creation, which replaces the physical tea room with social media, has its own culture and aesthetic. There are many such tea accounts; some are more popular than others, but all have the same basic structure. People, presumably Stevens students, send private messages to the account with some scandalous news or controversial opinion, which the account then screenshots and posts (removing the name of the submitter in the process).
One of these accounts has 900 followers and close to 100 posts. These posts, betraying that the owner of the account is using Instagram in dark mode, are occasionally interspersed with Stevens-related memes or pictures of humorous scenarios that are found on campus. However, the primary focus is the “tea.”
The topics covered by the tea vary wildly. Many deal with relationship issues. For example, one post reads, “Visiting my girlfriend during Christmas made me realize I chose the wrong sister.” Another read, “I had a relationship with my professor and still ended up failing the class.” “My freshman year,” another post states, “I saw some girl who told me she was 16 neck deep in a 5th year.” One simply said, “everyone ugly.” Not all the posts are about relationships, however. Race relations at Stevens is another common source of tea. One post which received 20 likes reads, “I tried to get a bag of M&Ms from the vending machine during finals, and the cost was $12.50 for a single bag.”
The purpose of these tea accounts was initially quite mysterious. Many similar accounts were created and became popular during the Fall 2019 semester. One such account, which has over 395 followers but less than five posts, claims in its account biography that “[the account] is strictly just for entertainment. To unite students, not to divide.” This account, titled “Steven’s Tea” [sic], responded to The Stute’s request for comment. “The purpose of this page,” they wrote, “is to find common ground that undergrads can relate to get a sense of unity through the similar stuff we experience here at Stevens. […] The only thing I would say to the students, that do have a lot of complaints about this school, is that there’s a lot of ways to change things around here by joining various organizations like the SGA, etc. This page should only be used to identify the problem but it’s up to the students to make changes because only we have the power to make change happen.”
Some of the accounts approach constructing the teahouse differently. One of the older such accounts is centered primarily on “confessions” of students rather than general scandal. In the wake of the 2019 student protests, a very high number of submissions to this account centered on the topic of the protests. Both anti-protest and pro-protest tea brewers were submitting long-winded responses to each other via the anonymous confessions account. The comments on these posts often were quite heated, lengthy, and occasionally very personal. Many spin-off confession accounts arose during this period which adopted policies of not publishing confessions related to the protest in an attempt to restore lightheartedness and civility to the teahouse.
If any students would like to publish their confessions, scandals, or opinions on anything Stevens-related in a widely circulated and viewed format, The Stute encourages submitting letters to the editor via email to eboard@thestute.com.
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