A blogger’s manifesto

In fall 2008, the notorious juicycampus.com debuted at Gonzaga. For those of you who were not around or were otherwise under a rock during Juicy Campus's reign of terror, it was a blog that allowed anonymous users to voice their opinions of others and usually boiled down to feeds ranking everything from the biggest sluts on campus to who does the most drugs, and any and all variations of the "juiciest" gossip conceivable.

      "Juicy" was code for the nastiest rumor and libel that traditionally would have been spread by word of mouth, and, in the words of Timothy Chester from Pepperdine U., became a "‘virtual bathroom wall' for abusive, degrading and hateful speech"; an online, universally accessible, "burn book."  Frequent readers and contributors to Juicy Campus were afforded moments of nothing but the slimiest entertainment, but those unfortunate individuals, and there were many, who were mentioned by name in blog posts paid massive and not easily forgotten consequences for their often shattered reputations. By some sort of divine intervention, the site was shut down in February 2009 due to a lack of revenue.

The extreme example and aftermath of Juicy Campus highlights a need for a blogger's manifesto. If blogs are the future of journalism and discourse, as I believe they are, then an effort must be made to make them into constructive forums for discussion and progress. If there is one thing that makes a blog appealing and at the same time ineffective, it is its anonymity.

You can't view a blog for a video on Youtube with more than 10,000 hits that is missing some inflammatory discussion about race, politics, religion or philosophy. It doesn't matter if the video is a clip from "Sesame Street," or a video of President Obama's State of the Union Address, the madness of anonymous commentators is ever-present. We all know how it goes down. There is the initial comment, say, my anonymous self "Warlock" calls "AlbinoSnowflake" a flip-flopping liberal because she "liked" a video about saving the rainforest. OH, it's on now. Then apologist "seaweed810" chimes in, "YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH WHEN YOU'RE TALKING TO HER!" And finally, there is the anonymous diplomat "pikachu4887" saying, "Well, you guys, I don't agree with you Warlock, but, well I don't know what I think. We should all just get along!"

Some anonymous individuals will even drop stock controversial comments, like "George Bush hates black people," into random videos only to watch the slow train wreck that will inevitably take place.

What this phenomenon points out is very profound. H.L. Mencken once said, "No one ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the American public." In this spirit, we are a society accused of being spellbound by Snooki, defined by institutions like ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart, Nordstrom, the GAP. We're told not to bring up religion and politics. We are the home of the therapeutic shopper, a land largely devoid of morality outside of how much debt you can rack up on your credit card. It seems on the face of it that our culture is a morally sterile and unquestioning environment.

But the miracle of our humanity prevails, and contrary to what a viewing of MTV's "Jersey Shore" would have us believe, the big questions haven't died for us. The conversation is alive, but not well. It has moved to the nebulous realm of the Internet blog. Our most important conversations are taking place on anonymous blogs! Our most significant beliefs are in a condition of perpetual fixedness and stuck in a virtual gridlock.

If blogging is here to stay, how can we change it into a forum of constructive discourse? In my mind, the single biggest hurdle that faces constructive blogging is the condition of anonymity. So, I propose the first tenet of said "Blogger's Manifesto" be: Thou shalt not drop comments on blogs that they wouldn't say if their real name were attached. This means you, "Anonymous," who called Bulletin Sports Columnist Scott Krieger a bigot in your gonzagabulletin.com comment to his "Like, speak up, ya know?" article. And while we had an Op-ed last week that attacked the athletic ability of Mr. Krieger based on his stock photo, at least she dished out an ad hominem blow with her name attached.

For sheer entertainment value, anonymous blog feeds are hard to beat. But it is a tortured laughter that results from our readership. The hilarity of reading cat and mouse conversations about our most human questions streaming endlessly from blog to blog is one of the most cynical, feeble and disheartening attempts at comedic relief that our society affords us.