Juicy Campus
By Kristyn, age 20, Massachusetts
Sweet Designs Staff Intern
Juicy Campus was the first negative social network to ever exist, at least to my knowledge. Over 500 colleges and universities were featured on this website, which was one of the cruelest blogging sites I have ever seen.
Basically the idea of Juicy Campus was to get the dirt (aka juice) about your campus. It was an anonymous blogging site where you could write whatever you wanted about whomever you wanted. The creator of the site was not trying to create good, but rather create a blog war among students around campus. You could log on to Juicy Campus, type in your college/university, and see yourself and what people were posting about you.
The fact that someone's personal life was being posted for all of these 500 universities to see is simply defamation of character. For people to be this immature at the college level is ludicrous. I cannot imagine how future generations like my children will deal with these kinds of problems.
Luckily, the site was shut down as of February 2009, due to overwhelming complaints and financial problems. However, traffic is being redirected to another site. Even though some of you may not be in college, this kind of thing could eventually evolve down to the high school level. So girls, think before you post something on such a site: how would you feel if bad things were being said about you for everyone in your school to see? Probably not too happy!
If you're just going into college and you are aware of this site or others like it, you should just ignore it. It's a dangerous kind of website, and could get you in trouble in more ways than one. If you see your name there, you could want to fire back with something. The best thing really to do is to just to ignore it. If your name appears on this kind of site there's a good chance it's because of jealousy or something ridiculous.
It's scary to think that Juicy Campus was only the first of many cruel blogging websites. If we don't think about what we say or write such sites may be there to haunt us until further notice.
