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Colleges Struggling With the Digital Bathroom Wall
theodp writes "Back in the day, anonymous character assassination was confined to permanent marker scrawl in bathroom stalls. But now, thanks to sites like the student-run CollegeACB.com (ACB=Anonymous Confession Board), which can get hundreds of thousands of hits on a good day, TIME reports that anonymous slander is going viral on campus. Even the most elite universities — normally the land of the politically correct — have been struggling with the problem of anonymous gossip sites and their very un-PC posts, which an Amherst dean likens to 'the worst of junior high.' If he thinks things are bad now, wait until the kids start getting creative with Google Sidewiki."
Welcome to the internet, please enjoy your stay or GTFO promptly.
Soulskill has herpes!
4chan for Harvard?
Really, it's futile in the long term to try and ban "harassment comments" or whatever you want to call it, unless you want to really compromise free speech and become worse than China. Maybe instead stop being so bloody touchy about stupid things stupid people write? What is it we've told our children for ages - "stop caring, don't give it attention"?
Political Correctness is just a new version of Politeness. Those who make sad and angry noises about PC are just upset that their version of PC is out of style. Perhaps they were Emily Post fans.
We now frown on slurs and other degrading language where once that was celebrated. We now allow discussions of topics in public that were once forced by the Olde PC to be kept private to the determent of those who needed the topics aired.
When someone complains about 'PC' they're just complaining that THEIR version of right/wrong in public has been pushed out by the majority.
Blar.
Complaints about PC are generally not about any version of right or wrong. They are complaints about being required to use, or avoid, language, which it is claimed might offend someone.
I don't care what language you use and do not want to restrict your use of any particular words. You might care what language I use and seek to impose restrictions. Those two approaches are not equivalents and PC falls into the latter.
Just because two people disagree, it does not mean that both views are equal in some way.
This is hardly a new problem. Check out the old "Consumers Guide to MIT Men", a 1970's rating book for MIT men in bed designed to mock the rating guides for easy lays published internally by the fraternities of the day. Sadly, the book failed to mention that the authors were sleeping with drunk boys from the "Strat's Rat" bar at MIT, where the high male/female ratio and cheap liquor contributed to their research.
They tried to censor that, too. And make no mistake: the great desire of university publicity departments and administrators is to shut down such documents, not to prevent slander or libel. We need to be very careful about what actually gets blocked: anonymous has a long, proud history in the US dating back to Thomas Paine and the Federalist papers, and the courts are quite aware of how chilling of free speech even mild restraints can be. The anonymity is critical to protect people from repercussion: www.wikileaks.org is critical proof of this, and I highly recommend it for people to see how amazing the information their bosses and newspapers and governments don't publish really is.
I'm so going to whore karma with this obligatory Penny-Arcade reference.
Mod redundant at will.
Freedom of speech wears-out only if you don’t use it.
— Maurice Maréchal, founder of the satirical french weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné“.
What's the real reason for the schools' objection to it? I always thought it was because it destroyed school property. If it's virtual, then as a student you have to seek it out to see it, rather than seeing it in the bathroom stalls whether you like it or not. Sounds like it was really about control. They want control over what students say to each other at all times. Heaven forbid students organize in various ways without permission.
It's a dilemma inherent in our choices of technologies.
If we allow anonymity, people will
(a) Use it for good: whistleblowing on evildoers;
(b) Use it for evil: anonymously libelling the innocent;
If we prohibit anonymity, people will
(a) Use it for good: standing by their assertions;
(b) Use it for evil: track every word you say, stifling whistleblowers and witnesses.
There is no right answer. There are only choices between problems.
-kgj
Have you been encased in a cement bunker for 20 years? "PC" is not just about avoiding overt insults or, say, the fact that we have condom ads on television now with a guy getting his junk buffed in a wind tunnel. When recent polls in the polls in the UK indicate that 80% of the population is tired of political correctness, you have a real problem, not a generation gap.
When people complain about PC, they mean the sort that causes valid or even scientific discussion from even taking place because some hypersensitive miseryshit somewhere might be offended.
It's the sort of PC that chastises a kid in a Halloween pirate costume for wearing an eye patch because it's offensive to the disabled. Oops, I mean differently-abled! Sorry! Don't sue me for causing emotional distress, please! It's curious they never seem to ask an actual other-abled person. No, wait, "other" sounds exclusionary doesn't it? Argh! The low seas of PC be treacherous, me mateys!
Political correctness also seems to be covering hypersensitivity to safety, so you have it applied to cases where trapeze artists are required to wear hard hats or the Army is told to make their training courses safer to the point of, well, pointlessness. That seems odd to me, but the street finds its own uses for words, much like hacker is used in place of cracker by the general population. Language evolves- deal with it.
When I read the title, I envisioned an actual whiteboard on the wall of a bathroom stall that allowed people to write on it. I figured the problems were people using real sharpies on it.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Owner Peter Frank, a sophomore at Wesleyan University... runs ACB out of his dorm room. The 19-year-old English major... "I'm untouchable," he says.
You don't sound untouchable Pete, you just sound stupid. Especially after letting time.com publish your full name, picture, the city you live in, AND the school you attend. I am thinking that the next year is going to be very educational for you once your site slanders a couple of people to the point that they lose control and decide to take a trip to Middletown with your picture in hand.
Did anyone else read the title and think someone put a big electronic wall in the bathroom that can be written on like a tablet pc?
So the supposed big gossip site Juicy Campus folded in February after existing for a whole year and a half. CollegeACB is some site run by an English Major out of his dorm room. If you actually GO to the site, you'll see a lot of old, outdated posts mostly people asking for gossip and very few actually providing gossip. So this is supposed to be the big problem Colleges are worried about?
This is just another lazy journalist creating a story out of nothing.
AccountKiller