Last week, one of the campus newspapers had a story the website JuicyCampus.com, which advertises itself as “the place to spill the juice about all the crazy stuff going on at your campus. It’s totally anonymous – no registration, login, or email verification required.” Some people didn’t like it, but I could see the allure… until I accessed the site. I was expecting lurid stories of drunken behavior, but it’s all one-sentence throw-aways that provide less information than a Badger Herald shout-out (which are, btw, actually entertaining.) Here’s a perfectly typical thread, which pick because I know the guy, but was nevertheless unable to find interesting:

DOES ANYBODY REMEMBER DAVID
ALEXANDER OSMAN?
Replies: 4 | 0% agree | 2 votes | Views: 396
who remembers OZ?

Replied on: 10-09-2008
what a tool

Replied on: 10-09-2008
Yeahhhhh, OZZMAN!

Replied on: 10-08-2008
hes cool

Replied on: 10-08-2008
I do what about him??

I can think of interesting things to say about Oz (among other things, by sophomore year he had already started up his own production company for concerts and such), but these two- and three-word comments are so utterly uninformative as to kill off any interest I might have had in doing so at Juicy.

Now here’s the weird thing: people are actually worrying that gossip on JuicyCampus might hurt them, personally or with employers or whatever. Now, I can see how a detailed, lurid story of drunken behavior behavior might hurt someone, but one-line “hes cool”/”what a tool” comments? If you’d be influenced by that crap, I don’t want to be your friend and I don’t want to work for you. Get a clue.

I’d brush this off, if not for the fact that the Juicy Campus kerfuffle is part of a pattern: people not having remotely reasonable ideas about how to respond to personal information discovered online. At Madison, students are constantly warned to be careful what they put on Facebook, especially re: drinking and so on, because future employers might see it! To which I reply: come on, employers have to know most of their employees drank in college, mostly from before they were of legal age. Or: awhile back Slashdot had a story on people getting harsher sentences because they didn’t seem sufficiently repentant in online postings. Again: judges have to be aware that the defendants they encounter get on with their lives, eventually. Or: people worry about opinions expressed online could be read by someone who doesn’t like them–this is something Greta Christina’s written about. But many of these opinions wouldn’t be extraordinary around the right water cooler, people shouldn’t be surprised about them being expressed online.

In sum, our collective attitudes to what goes on online don’t make sense. Something’s got to give. When that thing does give, what will be the end result? I find Dan Savage’s scenario oh-so-tempting:

Here’s hoping that we soon reach a web-exposure tipping point, a time when everyone has something out there online that’s sexually explicit or deeply embarrassing or both. When that blessed day arrives, we’ll think twice about firing someone or cutting someone from the team for the crime of letting it all hang out online because, hey, we’ve got it all hanging out online, too.

The idealist in me wants to be able to add that at this point, all bullshitting about personal lives will disappear. More likely, though, is Savage’s suggestion that what happens on the internet will stay on the internet: maybe we’ll all Google each other, but we’ll pretend to be completely ignorant of what there is to know about each other online. I’m already seeing signs of this: last weekend, some friends were joking around, and discussed the possibility that Googling people is like masturbation: everyone does it, but it’s not acknowledged in polite company.

Much worse could happen, though. I was talking about this issue with a classmate the other day, and he made an off-hand reference to small towns, immediately making me go, “shit, what if the internet turns the entire world into a repressive small town.” People can try to fight this effect for themselves personally, but as soon people start learning to gossip online more competently than the folks currently dominating JuicyCampus, the internet could be a real force for conformity.

It’s a nasty thought, but I’m not worried. It would be likely to happen if people were rational, but we aren’t. We can’t naturally get our minds around the idea that what we say online will be seen not just by those who check our online postings most often, but also suspicious employers and acquaintances who want to look us up. No matter how hard we try to keep our secrets in the age of the internet, we won’t succeed, because the situation is far too different than those we evolved to deal with it. And I’m OK with that.