I posted this piece on Facebook recently. Needless to say, the response its gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. I have submitted it to people at NBN, and hope that it gets in there at some point.
The speaker was my friend Diana Morales (name changed), on the afternoon of April Fools day this quarter. I was having dinner with her in Norris and she was telling me about this college gossip site that I had never heard of. Well, why should I have? I really try to stay out of gossip, because one has to find ways of keeping sanity at this age.
I went onto the website and typed in my name, knowing that due to keeping a fairly low status on the party scene, I probably wouldn’t come up. But lo and behold, I found a thread written about me. It was started on April 30th of last year, and it said, “Jeremy Fassler—sooooooo cute! Does anyone know if he’s single?” I was a bit flattered to read this. I was even more flattered to read, “Oh girl, if he is, I’m about to snatch that upppppp!”
And then came the part I probably shouldn’t have read, which simply said, “Are you kidding me? If anyone is in RTVF 230 you know how fucking annoying this kid is.” Another poster agreed. And that’s when I was introduced to the meanness of this website.
In the last couple of weeks, I have been surfing College ACB, not only to find stuff written about myself, but about other people as well, and I dislike the fact that I do so. I have become no better than the people who actually post on the website (although I still have yet to post anything). I only care about reading dirty details of people’s sex lives, and laughing at ridiculous rumors. But how would you feel if someone on a message board wrote, “Kale Clauson is totally gay, I just ate a warm hot load of his shit two weeks ago”?
I’m going to be honest. There are some people at Northwestern who I don’t like. But I would never go to such extremes by posting about how much I hate them on College ACB. There are some people who have taken it upon themselves to make this one sorority senior’s life a living hell by posting her name first on all the “Most annoying” and “Girl I’d least like to fuck” threads. I would really hate to be this girl. I haven’t met her, probably won’t, but the things written about her are enough to make any decent human being cringe. They’ve called this girl “smelly little troll,” “girl who chases dick hardcore,” and other things that I can assure you are much, much worse.
And in the last couple of weeks, I’ve started feeling bad about myself because of the things written about me. Something else was written about me, although they didn’t reference me by name. It was someone who was mad at me for correcting Professor Sconce in my History of Hollywood Cinema class, who called me a “dweeb” and said I should shut up because I suck. I really do resent this anonymous form of internet bullying, and I only wish I knew who this person was so I could tell him to his face.
But there’s an even better solution, which is to stay off the website and ignore it. The truth of the matter is that the internet makes everybody meaner. I’ve known this ever since 8th grade. I got involved in an IMDB message board war between an uber-conservative user with five or six different accounts, all variants on the words “Titanic Sucks.” Whether or not he was actually the uber-conservative homophobe that he touted himself to be I will never know (for all I know, he may have been a she). But I would engage in daily battles with this man, and leave only feeling awful about myself and about the state of the world. Since then I have not posted anything on IMDB, and refuse to get involved in message boards. And I don’t want to get involved on College ACB.
To spend time on College ACB is the most counter-productive bullshit I can think of doing, and I’m sorry that I know this website exists. I’d be a much happier person if I didn’t, and I urge all of you not to get involved with this site ever. Not only will it suck up hours of your life, it will make you think of your student body with less respect. I pity the people who post on there, for there must be something very sad about them to engage in such a mean activity.
Oh, and to all the people I’ve taken film class with who dislike me, I am proud that I know as much about film as I do, and no, I will not stop talking in class just to pacify you. You may have won the battle, but you’ll never win the war.
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