Our society has long taken pleasure in celebrities’ latest hook-ups and arrests. We justify our addiction to tabloids and TMZ by convincing ourselves that their jobs incorporate being admired and also dehumanized.
Students, however, may soon be more inclined to empathize with these stars. With the development of college gossip sites like juicycampus.com and campusgossip.com, we are all vulnerable to public scrutiny.
These sites allow students to anonymously contribute and search for posts written by their university peers. The concept doesn’t seem so bad until you consider that it amplifies malicious rumors and provides a sanctuary for their producers. Bloggers can expose peers’ sex lives or fabricate drug habits, without regard to truth or falsity.
The anonymity promised to contributors isn’t extended to those whom they write about. Often times, first and last names are explicitly stated.
I’ve removed the subject’s identification to avoid perpetuating the rumor, but consider the following statement published on campusgossip.com from the University of Tampa. “Should I start by telling everyone on this site how much of a slut (full name) is, or should I tell about how she was ski-poling her boyfriend’s fraternity brothers…?” Many crude and violating blogs like this exist. Furthermore, students may never know that their reputation has been publicly tarnished.
Northwestern has no posts on these sites. Such inhumane and juvenile behavior ceased with our eighth grade commencements, right?
Wrong. Making such an assertion about our student body is far too generous when sites like rumorroyalty.com exist. The blog claims to be fictional, but it reports and publicizes rumors, that are more than likely about real students. In addition to benign commentaries are less-than-subtle implications of promiscuity and substance abuse.
Though trivialized, college gossip is significant. My father once told me a tale about a town-gossip who wanted to reverse the suffering she had caused. She approached a well-reputed leader for advice. He presented her with a stack of paper and told her to drop a sheet on the ground wherever she went for the next week. After doing so, she returned to him and was instructed to go back and pick up each piece of paper. She argued that doing so would be impossible because the wind would have already blown them away. Like the dropping of those papers, the man explained, once you start a rumor, it travels too quickly to ever take it away. Likewise, the damage done through gossip pages is viral and irrevocable.
I respect the First Amendment’s protection of these sites. However, I am disgusted that students inflict an irreversible burden on their peers for fleeting pleasure and revenge. Rumors among students have and will always exist, but networks dedicated to fostering them multiply their potency. They regard students in a dangerously similar manner as they do with celebrities. With gossip blogs, we reduce ourselves to soap opera characters instead of human beings.
Communication junior Nausheen Shaikh can be reached at [email protected].
