at Carnegie Mellon — and increasingly across modern youth culture — social life is contextualized by the following phenomenon: everyone wants to be a participant, but no one wants to be perceived. in the era of social media, interactions and community often exists as a public performance of the self.

a pun on meet-cute, meetcut's origin stems from the cut––a grassy patch of grass in the center of carnegie mellon's campus. like a spontaneous romantic encounter, meetcut reimagines social interaction as a shared public experience rather than a private or algorithmically mediated interaction.