The Berkeley Beacon

Issue date: 11/13/08 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: courtesy of blogs.wsj.com JuicyCampus is proving gossip isn't just between lips and ears any more.

Gossip is like a drug. It’s bad, it’s done behind closed doors and it’s shameful. But it keeps bringing us back. We read Perez Hilton, we leaf through OK! Magazine in line at CVS, we watch The Hills. You monitor that Facebook news feed like a lifeline. You want to be in the know.

After stumbling onto JuicyCampus while perusing Facebook one unproductive afternoon, I was drawn in and immediately had that watching-a-car-wreck feeling: you know you should look away, but it’s so horrifying that you just keep staring. JuicyCampus is a Web site where users anonymously rant, rumor and gossip about their college and classmates. Right now there are 500 schools involved, and almost 137,000 posts.

I almost hate to write about it, because I hate to unwittingly promote the site. In fact, I almost hate the site itself. Almost.
As I scrolled through Emerson’s whopping 11 pages of gossip and libel I was drawn to the most ridiculous posts. Yes, I searched for entries containing my name. And my roommates, and my friends, my boyfriend and the organizations I’m in. I wanted to know what a lot of us probably want to know: What are people saying? Thankfully, I’m not interesting or scandalous enough to warrant an entry, and I’m nowhere to be found. Maybe after this piece, someone will log in and throw my name around with all the coke heads, stoners and students sleeping with trustees. Maybe I’ll be in the next thread about Emerson’s biggest sluts. Part of me says I ought to be over it; part of me says “this is risky.”

Through a little research, I found that Emerson has more pages of posts than Suffolk University, Emmanuel College and Boston College. Combined. Boston University has eight, Northeastern University has seven, Harvard University has four, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UMass-Boston have one each and Berklee College of Music, Simmons College and Massachusetts College of Art aren’t even on the site yet.

I was disappointed to see how heavily we’re into this degrading site, even after just more than a month since Emerson was added. Welcomed to the JuicyCampus gang on Oct. 1, Emerson was listed under the title “Will they be liberal with their juice?” on the JuicyCampus blog. Apparently, the answer is “Hell yes.” The first post went up on Oct. 2, and there continue to be additions to such thrilling threads as “Worst Couples,” “Ugliest Girls,” and “Least Talented WLP Major.” Some are more innocent, like “What’s your favorite cereal?” and “Where have the sour belts in the C-Store gone?”

JuicyCampus’ creator, Duke University graduate Matt Ivester, said the purpose of his site was to encourage free speech and, well, gossip. Unfortunately, JuicyCampus has devolved into a soapbox for every demeaning, stupefying, hateful jerk on campus. He claims the site is monitored to prevent posting of personal information or “rampant hate speech,” he told Saturday Night Magazine.

So, when someone posts “I wish they didn’t” in a thread about whether minorities “exist” at Emerson, is that not hate speech? Why is calling someone a “faggot” on JuicyCampus any different than scrawling racial slurs on someone’s white board in the dorms? When someone posts to say this girl is a slut, that chick is a coke head or this dude is a rapist, is that okay? Have we no shame?

Maybe it’s all true. Maybe so-and-so sleeps around, maybe whats-his-face actually tried to rape you. (In which case, you should probably be calling the police.)  Or maybe someone just found an outlet to grind an ax. Would I care if JuicyCampus posters starting calling me a cracked-out, ignorant bitch? Maybe. Probably. If I found a post spreading lies about my best friend, would I feel the need to dispel all those rumors? Yes. But then wouldn’t I be feeding into exactly the drama JuicyCampus wants me to feed into? Ugh.

There is a thread on Emerson’s page now that proclaims “JuicyCampus has got to go!” A few people have replied to agree, while others chose the classic neoconservative rejoinder: “If you don’t love it, leave it!” Someone cites the Mean Girls’ Burn Book, and we all know how that ended—someone got hit by a bus.

One poster praises the site for allowing people to say what they want without fear of punishment. “I can be as honest as I want with no retribution. Unless I said something about that time I shot those two police officers,” the poster writes.

No kidding, but half-joking posts like that can still get you in trouble. In December 2007, a Loyola Marymount University student was arrested for threatening a school shooting on JuicyCampus. His post was unsigned, but even Internet anonymity can’t save you if the police want to subpoena your IP address. In March, a Colgate University student was arrested after a Juicy post in which he wondered whether his classes would be canceled if he threatened to shoot all of his classmates. He could have been joking, sure. Bad joke.

Students across the nation have expressed their outrage and disappointment at the site’s content, and those who use it for its intended purpose of spreading gossip. George Washington University’s online news source, The GW Patriot, wrote an outline in October describing how we as students can destroy JuicyCampus. It instructs users to log in and post absurd things like poetry, homework, lists of favorite books or movies, links to photos of your cats, etc. The Patriot puts it plainly, writing “We are the reason JuicyCampus works and we can also be the reason it doesn’t work.”

An editorial in Carnegie Mellon’s newspaper, The Tartan, challenges its students to outsmart the site. They urge posts for buying and selling textbooks, sharing advice on classes and teachers and advertising on-campus events. 

I say we could all take a hint from the bloggers at GWU and Carnegie Mellon and use Juicy against itself, show Ivester that there is more to us than a bunch of Gossip Girl fanatics posting about our ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend and her eating disorder. Throw on some posts about the best professor you’ve ever had, the coffee house in Brookline everyone has to try, the slam poetry that you’re writing.

Use some of that Emerson innovation to short-circuit this booming, bawdy outlet for gossip.

Kasey Fielding is a senior writing, literature and publishing major and chief copy editor of The Beacon.

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