When I first heard of Bored@Baker, about halfway through Fall term, I was appalled, enraged, scared, amused and entertained by the variety of posts. I decided I'd never participate.
For all of last week, though, I braved Dartmouth's hotly contested gossip web site, I submerged myself completely in the sea of Dartmouth students' innermost thoughts to bring you one week in the life of a B@B-er.
It doesn't take long for one to realize that every single post on B@B falls into one of five categories: Greek House rankings, hookup requests, personal or social commentary, and classic riffs on: AGORA, Cuttings Northside Caf, Linda Gridley and more recently the Phi Delt fire. The first is tolerable and occasionally interesting, the second is inconsequential yet unsettling, the third is downright wrong, the fourth is by far my favorite and the fifth is usually pretty entertaining.
At first, I was completely against the site. All I could see were the countless vicious comments on specific members of the Dartmouth community with respect to looks, sexuality or promiscuity. This turned me into a serial "trash-er" automatically tossing anything with a name on it. I couldn't believe that somewhere in Dartmouth cyber-space, there were people who were ruining each other so viciously on a public forum.
Was my experience on B@B, then, a completely negative one? I will admit that it got tiring to see the same people bashed, outed and heaped with hate night after night. What happened to the kindergarten logic, the age-old idea of keeping your mouth shut if you didn't have anything nice to say? It was sickening.
I would never return to B@B if it weren't for the random gems that appear every so often. The true purpose of an anonymous web site should be to allow people to talk about topics that they wouldn't normally be comfortable talking about in real life, about Dartmouth's flaws and its triumphs. B@B could become a respectable running commentary on our lives, a true representation of how different Dartmouth students think and feel about the College, minus the hate.
For instance: "I'm in a frat, but I think the Greek system is a joke." Twenty-five agrees, two disagrees. Or: "I hate how at Dartmouth you are defined by your house, and if you are independent you don't really have an identity, so either way you lose." Eighteen agrees, two disagrees. This could be a way for us to address the concerns that people don't want to state openly a way to try and fix our deepest concerns.
B@B has the potential to bring a lot to this campus, if we know how to use it in the right way. Maybe in the future, we'll see more posts like this one: "I'm liking the person I'm becoming." I agree.
