Ok, so I can be a little critical of everything in this blog, but hey that's my job. I am after all a New Influencer right? Well as I will milling about the internet I checked my RSS to Tech Crunch's blog. And the story that caught my eye first, turned out to be the dumbest thing I believe I have ever seen.
Apparently, in this world there is a website called Juicy Campus. If you are wondering what this website is, well look no further than the title. In essence it is a blog for individual universities. But instead of a blog that talks about say... interesting classes or opportunities it is a place to post gossip and rumors. That's right. A virtual water cooler. Most of the posts range from who is the biggest "whore" on campus, or who is the hottest professor. It is truly one of the lamest things I have ever seen, and trust me I've seen a lot of lame things. I'm all for the idea of social medias that bring people together and help us connect in ways that have never existed before, but do we really need this?
It seems the creator of the website is starting to feel some heat about the whole issue. People who feel that have been slandered or defamed on the website are threatening legal action against him and the site. The interesting part is the whole concept of transparency. The site is very insistent on maintaining 100% anonymity for anyone who posts or replies. It is part of the whole appeal of the site that you literally can say anything about everything and never have to be responsible for it.
In a recent blog post the creator of the site posted this statement: "Some of the things that have been posted have been mean-spirited, and we have received emails from people claiming to have been defamed on the site,” and adds “We want you to make JuicyCampus juicy, not hateful.” Yes, indeed, to be juicy is always a much better alternative to being mean-spirited.
As social media ingrains itself deeper and deeper into our daily lives it is more and more often that we are losing a lot of our anonymity and transparency. A site like Juicy Campus has an interesting concept by offering and securing these attributes, but at what expense, defamation of other individuals? I think I'm going to monitor how long this site sticks around, because I don't think that will be very long. Oh and it's probably time for that creator to get a lawyer.
5 comments:
is this site owned or related to google? Please find out and let us know. If so it is google goodbye and Yahoo hello for me.
hey heather, as far as I know there are no links to google from Juicy Campus. I could be wrong, but everything I found it seems that it is just a guy named Matt Ivester founded it on his own. so no reason to jump the google ship yet, but if things keep going the way they are, yahoo might not even exist for you to jump to. and im sure you don't want to mess with microsoft anytime soon.
I'll admit it, I searched for St. Edward's University, and fortunately we don't have anything on there. As I was looking a the different universities that are on there, I realized that some of those schools are Ivy League schools where the juiciest gossip festers. There are ridiculous posts on there and most of them are incredibly obscene. This sounds a little too much like the show, "Gossip Girl." Where little rich kids decide to bash other rich kids in hopes to remain popular. This is just another ploy to defame people, sounds a lot like perezhilton.com.
This comment is not relevant to your post... but you don't provide an email address on your blog.
Anywhoo.... I am looking for smart, savvy social media maven's to help me with some social outreach work for some really big consumer brands.
If you have the time and interest email me: julia at undercurrent dot com
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