Oscar Wilde once quipped that, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." What these words may lack in poetry they certainly make up for in pithiness. In many circumstances and industries this statement indeed still rings true. As the saying goes, there's no such thing as bad PR. But what about when such PR comes not at the expense of your company or brand, but at the expense of your own identity, or for what it's worth, your virtual identity?
In the fall of 2006, a latent beast was unleashed upon our campus that put us all at the risk of poor PR: our own uninhibited voices. Despite our own apparent familiarity with previously taboo topics of discussion, we were shocked this voice was in such stark contrast to our normal social pleasantries that many felt disbelief for the integrity and brute candor of our student body.
Most Dartmouth students are well aware of Bored@Baker, though almost all students interviewed claim they only visited the web site once or twice.
"I just don't think the '13s really care, nor is it all that relevant to us considering that most of the names that get posted up there are '10s that I don't even know," Virginia Miller '13 said.
As for the students posting, Miller, as well as the handful of other students I asked, all speculated that posting was a domain held almost exclusively by men.
"I don't think they're necessarily immature," Miller said. "I really do think they are literally bored at Baker and in need of an outlet for procrastination."
Founded in 2006 by Columbia University student Jonathan Pappas, Bored@Baker was met with something akin to overnight success at Dartmouth. However, disturbed by the growing grotesque nature of the cruel posts often attacking both individuals and specific campus groups Pappas soon decided to take the web site down.
In the meantime, a new web site, JuicyCampus.com, seized control of Dartmouth students' anonymous gossiping urges. JuicyCampus once again littered the campus with a fury of spurious tales and speculations until it allegedly collapsed due to plummeting advertising revenue during the national financial crisis. Dartmouth was not without a gossip medium for long, as Pappas took the "Bored@" web sites live again this Fall for round two with a brief intermission of service during December while he added new anti-spamming code.
From his new base in the tech mecca Silicon Valley, Pappas said in an interview that the lack of a forum where students could speak their minds without retaliation inspired him to create the Bored@ sites, and more specifically, Bored@Baker. "I just wanted to create a place where people could express themselves in a relatively free environment, while also recording the zeitgeist of Dartmouth," he said.
Pappas spoke with sincerity as he described his own discontent with both the malicious users and with the site's replacement, JuicyCampus, which he saw as a site "structured on the premise of talking trash about your friends." Pappas also added that he was not surprised that JuicyCampus no longer exists given that "you can't go on with some malicious thing and be successful."
Regarding the trash-talking posts that have been logged on the revived Bored@Baker, Pappas said that he does not condone hate-speech and that he thinks the new code has helped create a cleaner environment that is more attune to the sites ethos of harmless and anonymous musings and commentary. Such a goal, however, may well prove too ambitious even for America's most promising students.Anyone who has logged on to the site recently knows that Pappas' assessment is a generous one the type of judgment that a founder is inherently biased to see in his brainchild. Pappas is even working with an appropriately anonymous programmer at Dartmouth to help limit site abuse. Of course, it's difficult for Pappas to assess much of the content on Bored@Baker, as it refers to a collection of acronyms and lingo confined to Dartmouth's campus.
Pappas admitted to having some issues with site postings, though they are not serious in nature."Every once in a while a Dartmouth guy will post his own name out there just to see what response he gets, then he'll write in to me asking me to take it down after he didn't get the feedback he wanted," Pappas said.
Indeed, Pappas speculated as many may well assume that a lot of the name-specific content is actually generated by those people themselves.
Some students continue to receive the lion's share of individually targeted posts, and the name of one such student, Jon Carty '10, recurs nearly daily on the site.
"At this point, I think it's kind of funny," Carty said. "Why do these people waste so much of their time spewing pernicious nonsense."
A site search of Carty's name generates more than six pages of posts.
When asked to speculate on whom the perpetrators are, Carty said "they're probably a lot of closet cases just looking for an outlet for their own frustrations."
Indeed, much of the site's dialogue consists of posters speculating about gay hook-ups on campus. Regarding the site itself, Carty was unforgiving of Pappas.
"He's a smart guy, he went to Columbia, so how could he have been so naive not to think that given a site like Bored@Baker, you're only going to bring out the worse in people," Carty said.
I also spoke with Karen Sen '10 who, freshman year, dealt with a fair share of personalized Bored@Baker attacks.
"It's not that I lacked the self esteem necessary to ignore the crude statements that were made about me," she said. "It's the thought that these are my peers, these are the people that smile as I pass them in the hall and the people that I get to spend four years with at this college, that say such terrible things."
Sen expressed discontent at the fact that because Bored@Baker is indexed on internet search engines, her family members, friends from home and even prospective employers could read such scathing and untrue comments about her, or about anyone.
"What are my aunts and uncles going to think when they see Sen twins just walked into the library and [insert cowardly insult here]," she said.
Hopefully, as the anti-abuse code develops, the site itself can evolve into a platform not focused on exchanging targeted hate-speech and far-fetched rumors, but one where we can discuss issues relevant to the larger Dartmouth community. As per the larger question of what the site's content reveals about our culture and community, it shows that though we can put on an elegant facade of courtesy while in the public sphere, some are quick to cower behind the veil of anonymity.
Bored@Butler, Columbia's version of the site, is the only other Bored@ site with comparable traffic to Dartmouth's. As one may expect, the same sort of bathroom humor and nonsensical dribble fill most posts. However, there does exist a telling peculiarity of their site: it is laden with pro-Dartmouth comments. Are some Dartmouth students so attracted to this concept of anonymity that they find themselves wasting away the wee hours of the night arguing with unknowns at Columbia?
Let us hope that the abusive comments on the Dartmouth web site represent the views of a few sexually frustrated loners and not "the zeitgeist" of our school. The concept of the web site itself is a fascinating social experiment, yet we must tame our inner anguish out of respect for not only the sake of our peers, but for the name of our school. Bored@Baker itself is not the problem, rather it is our own lack of maturity. As for Pappas, he mentioned that he'd like to visit Dartmouth one day just to get a feeling for the culture that he's only read about on his site. I told him to keep a low profile or risk being hit by a more than a few snowballs.
