Childish Adults

With ever-evolving technology, quiet whispers and passed notes about a peer’s wild weekend are becoming a thing of the past. Students aren’t giving up their desire to hear about others’ indiscretions.
They are just getting their gossip in a different way.

For those whose thirst for dirty little secrets is insatiable, they can turn to JuicyCampus.com. With more than 60,000 posts about nearly 500 campuses, the college gossip Web site gives students an outlet for their childish anger and dark streaks of their personalities.

With a few strokes on the keyboard, someone can write anything about anyone. The freedom to make up things about your peers is very dangerous. What’s more, it’s beneath college students.

The idea of cyber bullying has been seen at the middle and high school level for some time and has been difficult to combat, but schools are trying. At the university level, it is much harder to monitor the pain students are inflicting on one another on the Internet. As adults, college students need to monitor themselves.

Catty gossip and immature backstabbing should be behind students when they get to college. As The Temple News reports this week, Sean Brondi, a junior risk management and insurance major, said the site is an outlet for students to try to embarrass and hurt others [“Gossip on campus gets juicy,” Michelle Provencher, Oct. 7, 2008].

What good does it do for a person to post horrible things about someone else on the Internet? It may give the person a temporary feeling of satisfaction to seek revenge on a peer who has crossed them, but whatever is posted on the Internet is permanent.

An apology, if you do try to redeem yourself, is nice, but the person’s hurt isn’t going to go away. Anybody who peruses the gossip site will read the possibly untrue things about a person and maybe think they’re true. Potential employers could find, through a quick Google search, the salacious lies posted about someone during his or her college years.

There is no reason Temple students should waste time on sites like Juicy Campus. The site promotes the idea that you can write anything you want and be completely anonymous. If you do want to say horrible things about other people, posters should be forced to be responsible for what they’re saying.
If someone was saying untrue things about you, you would want to know who it was. So if you’re going to be immature and childish, put your name on it and be prepared for the consequences. Don’t hide behind Juicy Campus.