Juicy Anti-Social Social Media

This JuicyCampus.com site just keeps getting bad press, and just keeps getting more popular. Though, if you click on the most popular links ("Juiciest") the second post says "this site is stupid." A nascent backlash, perhaps. For the unjuicy: the site breaks down by college campus, and is a place for students to post completely anonymous information/gossip/rumor for all the world to see. So far, the topics cover things like who sleeps around the most, and
who's starred in porn films. It's like passing notes in high school, taken to the extreme. Now, there's a report that the site is being investigated by New Jersey prosecutors.

It's not the first seemingly anti-social social media site, but it's the most widely covered at the moment. And in a world of Facebooks and MySpaces, it is one of the diminishing number of sites that offer total anonymity to its users. Being unidentifiable was one of the promises of the web, and was supposed to lead to wider and more open discussion. For any number of reasons, mostly human nature, web 2.0 took things in the opposite direction. Now, everyone wants the world to know who they are... through blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

I realize I'm not the target audience for most social media sites, and certainly not JuicyCampus, but whether or not you put it all out there for the world to see online, do you think there's still a place for anonymity on the web? Or do you think the only way to real credibility is to identify yourself?

Scott Cameron

Tags: JuicyCampus | anonymity | social media