• by travis , October 3, 2008

Have you ever been hit by the feeling that the world around you has just gone crazy? Personally, it happens to me all the time (perhaps a reflection of the fact that I am crazy? But that’s not what this blog is about…).

Yesterday morning I woke up to discover that what I consider to be the single worst website ever created was being publicized all over campus by our school’s newspaper. Now I’m not going to mention the website here, but basically if you’ve seen the move “Mean Girls” it’s essentially a digital replication of the coveted Burn Book – a place where anyone can ANONYMOUSLY post their deepest, truest feelings about anyone/anything at anytime. This website was recently introduced to our university and since then, it has exploded with the most vile information you could ever possibly imagine

This got me thinking about the publishers of the newspaper and why on earth they would publish something like this. I want to believe that they had good intentions (to draw attention to a problem our school is facing) but the problem is that by doing it in the way they did, they drew in literally hundreds of new visitors to the site, which only added to the fuel.

I saw countless people saying, “I’ve never heard of this site!” as they popped open their laptop to jaunt over to the site. Problem solved? Hardly… Problem intensified!

This also brings up the question: Why do websites like this even exist?

Do we really hate each other that much that we need to anonymously post slander against one another? What happened to the good ole days where you could verbally slap someone in person or by sending them a Facebook message? Bring back those days!

I know this isn’t a unique problem (many other universities are having the same problem with this site) but I don’t know if they are handling it by publishing it on the FRONT PAGE of their school’s newspaper, complete with fun cartoons that add to the appeal of the site.

Should student media publish things like this? Does it do more good or more bad? I see both sides of the coin, but in my opinion I think the bad outweighs the good.