Walking to the Street a few weekends ago, you may have noticed a gigantic screen listing the names of people who are committed to owning what they think. A crusade against "character assassination" and "acts of ethical and intellectual cowardice," ownwhatyouthink.com is a petition created in response to the gossip site juicycampus.com. Since its launch on March 31, more than a thousand people have signed. But besides allowing people to feel better, it's unclear what the effect of the petition on actual gossip will be. This is because OwnWhatYouThink, like JuicyCampus, is a fad that will not alter the state of gossip. Instead, it serves as an electronic mirror for the state of the most vocal students' stances on gossip.
I remember ignoring hundreds of JuicyCampus ads on facebook.com until I was finally compelled to visit after overhearing one too many conversations about it. When I finally logged on, I was disappointed I had wasted my time. The comments were vicious, for sure, but they were vicious to the point they that they became puerile.
Luckily, the end was already near. Princeton students decided to take action independent of the State of New Jersey's subpoena of JuicyCampus' records. The "Boycott Juicycampus.com" Facebook group says that the gossip site "gives students an enormous amount of power to hurt others and to actively shape the way in which people on this campus are perceived." There are currently 936 people, a small number of them from Princeton, in the group.
Class of 2010 president Connor Diemand-Yauman '10 led the way with the launch of OwnWhatYouThink. "Anonymity = cowardice" greets the visitor on the homepage. The smaller font below states a less damning message of taking personal responsibility for what one says in a public forum. While clearly well intentioned - especially compared with JuicyCampus - the Own What You Think campaign also banks on the student body's tendency to bandwagon and act on the basis of peer pressure.
I was initially skeptical of the petition. No way was a student body that had generated so much traffic on JuicyCampus going to denounce the site. I was soon proved wrong when dozens of my friends pledged to take a stand against character assassination. It was ironic that the same people who had once frequented JuicyCampus - how else could they recite all the vicious posts verbatim? - now publicly displayed their denouncements of the site. I was even tempted to sign at some point because I had received so many e-mails from friends asking me to. Instead, I decided to see if I could sign up as someone else - so I did (sorry, Grant.) It turns out that OwnWhatYouThink's lack of verification has led to interesting new forms of not standing up for your beliefs by hiding behind pseudonyms. After all, I doubt that "F*** This" (signer number 1033) is a real person. But real or not, the viral spread of the petition did indeed get many signatures. By two weeks after the site's March 31 launch, it had amassed more than 930 signatures, 250 T-shirts and its own screen on Frist North Lawn that projected positive comments. But in the three weeks since then, the site has only generated 110 more signatures, including the made-up ones above.
Meanwhile, the homophobic, racist, sexist posts on Princeton's juicycampus.com site have all mysteriously disappeared. The State of New Jersey probably deserves more credit for this than OwnWhatYouThink does. More importantly, self-policing had already slowed the traffic to the website many weeks ago. Postings of the Constitution, the Book of Revelations and antagonistic comments toward the posters and creators of the site already made it a dangerous place for the gossipers who lurk among us. Sure, the name calling on JuicyCampus was harsh and gratuitous, but since when could a website take credit for actively spawning gossip and malicious opinion? People create gossip and opinions and websites are vehicles for those opinions to be passed around, not the other way around.
If you truly believe that "a culture of gossip" and "acts of ethical and intellectual cowardice" are endemic on this campus, then a petition is not the way to fix the problem. Nowadays, I see that critics of JuicyCampus have turned their attention to the comment section of The Daily Princetonian's website. Many off-color remarks directed at student government candidates, administrators and ‘Prince' writers have appended online articles.
But the comments section of the ‘Prince' website is to be embraced, not discouraged. People seem to be monitoring their words and ensuring civility despite anonymity. Constructive use of the space is the best way to combat character assassination. The best way to eliminate cowardly, anonymous, harmful statements is for people to own what they say through their actions, not in word only.
Cindy Hong is a Wilson School major from Princeton, N.J. She can be reached at cindyh@princeton.edu.
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