Blocking the gossip
July 13th, 2011
Individual sorority chapters have recently decided to block a Gossip Girl-like website from their wireless Internet as a result of negative postings referring to the Greek community.
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Collegeacb.com, a website that allows people on college campuses to post anonymous messages, is now banned in numerous sororities.
Collegeacb.com, an online community board dedicated to providing college students with an open forum on which to post anonymous messages, has forums for more than 500 college campuses. According to the website, its purpose is to provoke “controversial and upsetting ideas in an open and reflective way.”
The forums are open to be viewed and used by anyone, but a majority of the posts on the one dedicated to the University of Washington are in reference to people in the Greek community. Past postings have singled out individual sorority and fraternity members, as well as whole houses.
Mattie Stager, vice president of public relations for the Panhellenic Association, said that Panhellenic does not support the use of the website.
“We just really don’t feel that it’s a good representation of who we are at all,” Stager said of postings in reference to the Greek community. “We don’t want to be a Big Brother in monitoring what Internet sites someone’s using — it’s really more encouraging people to really consider what it is about and what it’s representing and that we don’t want people to be hurt by [the site].”
No fraternities have decided to block the site because presidents don’t see it as an issue within their houses and don’t want to draw attention to it, said Matthew Skurnik, the vice president of public relations for the UW Interfraternity Council (IFC).
According to the CollegeACB homepage, representatives are trying to revamp it to be “a more positive and productive place to have anonymous conversations.”
Users are able to report inappropriate posts to have them deleted. Though more than 30,000 posts have been deleted since the beginning of the site in 2008, numerous postings continue to reference individuals.
Stager said that it is up to independent chapters to decide whether to block the site within their respective houses, and junior Alicia Arnold’s sorority was among those that decided not to block the website.
“[Our executives] decided not to block it because it already has such a negative connotation with it that making it a bigger deal than it is — it’s just giving more attention to it that way,” she said.
Arnold said the website is a sort of guilty pleasure for people to participate in without repercussions because of the anonymity, and compared it to watching reality television and said she thinks it’s negative because the site promotes bad values.
“People don’t like to admit that they watch things like ‘Jersey Shore,’” she said. “It’s juicy gossip that you want to know about but don’t want people to know you’re participating in because it’s not beneficial to anyone.”
The website has separate sections for each college campus, but it may be viewed by any person who visits the site. Arnold said that it may also distort college life in the eyes of people in high school who look at the postings.
“Not only do college students go on there, but you’re getting high-schoolers going on there and seeing everything,” she said. “They’re already seeing all of these negative connotations, [that] this is how college life is, this is how the Greek community is, this is how things work. That’s just completely slander — it’s a negative connotation of these houses that could be said of anyone, it’s not necessarily true.”
David Bretl, UW IFC president, said that “right now, the negatives far outweigh the positives,” and that inaccurate preconceptions can be formed from visiting the site.
“The negative consequences of people who don’t know what it is, then suddenly are going online and reading all this stuff,” he said. “Maybe there were people who were thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I think I might join the Greek community,’ and suddenly they go online and read [the posts].”
Another side effect of the anonymity the website provides is that it makes it impossible to know how many people are posting.
“I think it’s very likely that it’s the same tiny percentage of people who are living their life on that website, I really do think that,” Bretl said. “And that’s too bad because it’s anonymous, and not only is it anonymous, but anyone who posts, it says, ‘post by anonymous,’ so any number of people who posts suddenly becomes the same person.”
Although the website aims for “more positive and productive content to be published,” Bretl and Arnold both said they feel the best solution would be for the site to be completely shut down.
“Ideally the website just doesn’t exist,” Bretl said. “There isn’t an anonymous forum for anybody to post whatever they want about whoever they want. That concept in itself doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t do anything for our community.”
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Tags: Gossip
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