With the allure of anonymity that is increasingly available on the Internet, handwritten journals and dining hall conversations no longer suffice as the primary outlets for Tufts gossip.
A steadily rising number of students have started turning to anonymous online blogs like the Tufts section of CollegeOTR.com (TuftsOTR.com), Boredattufts.net, and the new Anonymous Confession Board on LiveJournal.com to divulge confessions, noteworthy campus happenings and scandalous gossip.
Samuel Sommers, an assistant professor of psychology currently teaching social psychology, has found that anonymity can have a profound effect on people's actions.
"When people are highly self-aware, they are really focused on the ways in which they fall short of their goals," Sommers said. "The opposite of self-awareness is anonymity, where there is freedom associated, the focus is off of yourself and whatever disappointments you see in yourself are off the table."
According to Sommers, this absence of self-awareness can cause individuals to take actions normally outside of their typical comfort zone.
"Blogging and anonymous posts have some of the spirit of anonymity in a 21st-century way," he said. "People think, 'No one knows who I am; I can say and do whatever I want,' and I think that can be very liberating."
TuftsOTR is one campus blog that rests on the shoulders of a handful of mostly anonymous students paid by the site to post noteworthy gossip seen and heard on the Tufts campus.
The majority of the site's writers submit posts under pseudonyms in order to protect their identity and maintain the tradition of OTR, according to a sophomore TuftsOTR blogger who posts under the handle"The Peasant."
"Money aside, the anonymity factor was something that, from the time we signed up, the writers and the blog itself wanted to maintain," he said. "Part of the fun of OTR is that you don't know our identity, and you wonder, 'Who are these mysteriously titled people writing about things that are relevant to my life? I either agree with them or I disagree with them.' Either way, it has the behind-the-curtain effects, like in 'The Wizard of Oz.'"
While "The Peasant" remains anonymous, junior Meredith Turits, another TuftsOTR contributor, revealed last month that she posts as "The Philosopher" and plans to assume the position of TuftsOTR editor-in-chief next semester.
As one of the first students from any college to be asked about writing for CollegeOTR, Turits said anonymous blogging both as a writer and reader has its advantages; it provides a comic outlet for on-campus happenings, stories and gossip.
"At first, being anonymous was an extreme incentive because you didn't have to worry about offending anyone and you felt like you could write what you wanted, when you wanted," Turits said in an e-mail. "In a college environment - especially at a top university like Tufts - where our outward media image is so policed for PR reasons, something like an alternative OTR outlet is extremely refreshing."
Aside from TuftsOTR, another series of anonymous blogs has sprouted up, including Boredattufts.net, an arm of the original site Boredatbutler.com. In February 2006, then-senior at Columbia University Jonathan Pappas began the anonymous confession board while unoccupied at the university's Butler Library.
Pappas created the site because "he wanted to see what would happen if people were allowed to post whatever they wanted, anonymously," according to Boredat.net, the mother site to Boredattufts.net. All students are allowed to post on the site, and unlike on TuftsOTR, the student-written content is not edited.
Another site, the Anonymous Confession Board on LiveJournal.com, has become a hub to discuss anything from the third band Concert Board is enlisting to play at Spring Fling to complaints about friends and roommates.
However, both The Peasant and Turits claim that the posts at sites like Bored at Tufts are a far cry from those written at TuftsOTR.
"The rise of certain sites brings up the darker side of anonymous blogs," The Peasant said. "OTR is a paragon for what anonymous responsible blogging can be, but other sites like Boredattufts are not journalism, but really just posting what you talk about with your friends behind your other friends' backs."
Turits also takes offense to the comparison of TuftsOTR with other blogs that have notably contained malicious content.
"I think putting OTR and slander blogs on the same tier is both incorrect and completely insulting," Turits said. "A slander blog is not a source of funny news, silly gossip, or stories that kids are looking to share with other people on campus happenings - it's strictly for the purpose of being mean. That's not what we are about, and if we were, none of us would have ever started blogging in the first place."
But some students have noticed an increase in malicious content posted on TuftsOTR. Sophomore Courtney Hsieh, once a frequenter of the site, now finds the content similar to that of other anonymous sites.
"Last semester, I thought OTR was really funny because they talked about things that went on around campus and funny little things that don't get into the mainstream news, but still insignificant things that are very reflective of Tufts," Hsieh said. "Since winter break, I realized that it had gotten a lot more personal, and the comments bloggers would write were really catty."
Having visited Boredattufts, Hsieh says that she doesn't plan on contributing to the site.
"Even though it's mildly entertaining, I don't see the point of complaining about something you can change," Hsieh said. "If you're bored here, you can change that."
Another student, freshman Julia Stimeck, admits to occasionally indulging in the blogs.
"I do kind of like them," she said. "I think it's a guilty pleasure to look at what people want to say when it's not attached to any other part of them, with no repercussions or background information."
Stimeck similarly is turned off by the occasional rudeness, but also finds entertainment value in some of the posts.
"I hate to see the ones that say, 'Oh, that girl is so skanky,'" Stimeck said. "I can't help but think that every time there is one that says, 'Oh, that person is so hot,' it was written by that person."
Sommers, who likened blogging to graffiti, said he feels that the growing appeal of anonymity both on and off the Internet is related to the current status of human relationships.
"We live in a society now where we are able to communicate with each other several levels removed from face-to-face interaction," Sommers said. "It's easy to be the big man who talks a lot of trash, even in print in newspapers, as opposed to somebody's face. The further removed we are from someone, the easier it is to say certain things and adopt certain personas."
