Down With Juicy Campus

Attacking the worst web site ever

By: Hunter Patterson

Posted: 3/4/09

I remember in Middle School there used to be these worn out yet brightly colored notebooks passed from student to student called Slam Books. Slam books were designed to act as anonymous ways to gossip and spread false and sometimes humorous rumors in a semi-public manner. The truth about these slam books was that they were really created and circulated by small groups of people who considered them selves the "cool" kids. The names that would occupy the lists (" Hottest/Ugliest Girl" "Hottest/Ugliest Guy") in the Slam Book were usually the same group of "cool" kids. Sometimes, these lists would get out of hand; someone would read that their best friend thinks they kiss boys in the bathroom during classes, and all sorts of middle-school hell would break loose.

They would cry, get upset and go to the main office to complain that someone was being mean about them via a Slam Book. When asked who was responsible for the Slam book, an "I saw (insert name) with the Devil" act worthy of a Broadway production of the Crucible would take place. Parents would be called to meet with the Teachers, Principals and counselor. There would be a sit down where everyone would deny involvement, only to eventually cave in the face of detention, coughing up the Slam Books.

As all things kids do for fun and a sense of purpose in their little pre-existential crisis lives, the Slam book fad faded into obscurity, only to come up in brief "Hey, remember when…?" conversations a few days before graduating from high school. I would like to think that we as a generation grew out of that style of gossip around the same time N'SYNC broke up and Harry Potter was only in his fourth year. How wrong I was.

When the piece of Internet trash that is Juicy Campus brought itself to GW as a Slam Book 2.0 my first reaction was to psshaww at the very notion of a website entirely devoted to the libel and gossipy put-down of others. However what I saw was something far more dangerous than a simple notebook. What was created in Juicy Campus was a website with the ability to destroy lives.

While some have dismissed JuicyCampus as harmless fun and something not to be taken seriously, the majority of those who use it fail to see it in such away and in fact seem to be using the website as an assault weapon against those they do not like.

Tragedy

Observing the website one got the feeling that this school was filled solely with people with contempt and hatred for their fellow students. Almost even more disappointing is that all of them lacked the backbone to show their faces from behind JC's shield of anonymity as they committed their acts of character assassination. I was not surprised then to learn that those who had begun to "spill the juice" on JC were the small yet ever loud and annoying cadre of spoiled and shallow sorority girls and idiotic drunken frat boys, you know the "cool" kids. Turning a harmless game of gossip into a grand exercise in libel, the "cool" kids began to engage in a type of vile name-calling and bashing that one would hear and attribute to an after-school special on the dangers of Bullying.

From more broader questions like "Who has the loosest P*ssy on campus" (with a sub-heading reference to "roast beef curtains") to more specific subjects on why " * insert name * is a huge slut", each random piece of gossip seemed to be worse than the one before. I began to ask myself, "Is this really my school? Are people actually proud of what they are writing?". Almost immediately, I answered the later question with a resounding of course not. These comments were made by people hiding behind the safety of their computer screens, giving them the most disturbing form of freedom with which to libel their fellow classmates and perhaps even best friends, reducing each other to "sluts" "skanks" "B*tches" "C*nts", etc. As appalling as it was, it seemed hopeless to resist Juicy Campus. From classrooms to dorm rooms, everyone (including, I will admit, myself) was constantly checking JC to see if their friend's name or even better, their own, had received a mention. GW had became paralyzed with the polio of gossip and trash, with no hope of an end in sight.

Hope

About a week into the libeling flow of the "Juice", Bill Flanigen, our finest writer here at the Patriot, wrote his JC manifesto called "Engaging Juicy Campus". While acknowledging that Juicy Campus was never going away, Bill realized that those of us who despised it must use its popularity against it. So began the revolt against JuicyCampus. With the help of our blogosphere partners at The Colonialist as well as many friends across GW who shared our disdain and concern, we began spamming the reply sections of the site. Submitting everything from poetry and Wikipedia excerpts to updates on the on-campus whereabouts of the most feared Pokémon, Mewtwo. Just a few hours after the call was sent out, JuicyCampus was rendered gossip-less as the reply sections began to fill with nonsense. We were successful in spamming the hatesite into submission. Weeks later, our efforts still seem to be working as the reply sections for the most popular topics are still clogged with the most absurd and whimsical. I believe the latest sighting of Mewtwo was in the library, torturing librarians.

Will it Fade?

Much of what I just wrote was hyperbolic and melodramatic, much like what was written in Juicy Campus, but the questions its existence bring up are serious. Should sites like Juicy Campus concern us and should we try to stop them? Yes to first part, and no to the second. Gossip sites that run on the worst forms of scuttlebutt and defamation should cause us to be concerned; they are mild yet true representations of the human mind at its worse. While gossip is of course nothing as horrid as thoughts of murder and genocide, acts of vitriolic prattle too should not go tolerated. Intolerance does not equal an abolition of the site however. Free Speech, however abused and misrepresented it is on JC, is still the law of the land and just because unpleasant things are being posted there doesn't mean there in-lies merit banning it.

Also, I ask; is this type of gossip something entirely new or is it just part of the human condition, something that now has a more public forum ,via the internet, to manifest itself?

I fear it is the later. It seems that humans have always been ones to gossip, slander and libel one another, even when those people whose reputations they are tarnishing are supposedly friends and classmates. I don't believe Juicy Campus to be the end of civilization, just a blemish on the body of humanity, one that we will always have upon us.

However this does not mean surrender. When a blemish is seen on an apple there are options. Either try to rub it away, constantly striking the fruit against your shirt in vain or the blemish can be accepted as apart of the apple. Accepting the blemish renders it easy to remove. Just take a big bite out of it, removing the blemish. This too is how we must and- fortunately -have begun to deal with Juicy Campus. Biting away at it, blemish by blemish

As with most pop culture phenomena, Juicy Campus is on a timer, hopefully a very short one. I hope, like the Slam books, that Juicy Campus will fade away, only coming up years later in one of those "Hey remember when…?" conversations.

Post Script:

When Juicy Campus started five months ago, its clock begin to run. Little did I know that it wouldn't just be spamming or peoples' own moral decency that would shut down the site, but the economy as well. As companies begin to slash and burn any form of their budget that can be viewed as wasteful (internet advertising) many small-time, ad-based websites like JC will begin to shut down. As the news that its shutting down begins to spread, you aren't hearing many moans, instead you are hearing "Good" and "About time" and ( a personal favorite) "We killed it! We totally spammed the sh*t out of it!". But did we? Was our spamming and general hatred of the hate-site really its downfall? I say yes, I say no. Yes in the sense that it dissolved any sort of "Brand loyalty" that devotees had in the site, ticking down the hit counts and unique hits (the lifeblood of all websites) as it just became a website of wiki-articles and nonsense (even more so than the gossip the site was created to facilitate). No, in that many will, foolishly, see this as the lone factor and as good as that would make this writer feel, I know that it simply isn't true. The truth is Juicy Campus simply killed itself, in a slow-motion suicide created by its own vileness and filth with the down-turn in the economy as a much welcomed silver bullet, hopefully killing this Juicy Monster for all time.