“Confess your most heartfelt, disgusting, hilarious, filthy, and embarrassing secrets from NCSU on the link below! And it will be posted ANONYMOUSLY on our page!”
The above is the description of the “NCSU Confessions” Facebook page, the N.C. State version of the recent rage of confessions pages.
Confessions pages have gone viral. They serve educational institutions from high schools to universities from the United States, to Singapore, to India and everywhere between.
The confessions pages have risen to resurrect gossip as a ritual.
The confessions are anonymous getaways for people with varying degrees of self-confidence levels.
One finds all kinds of confessions including jocular, crush confessions, mildly sexual to love advice. “I fart in elevators when no one is around…” Most are love advice and some are narrations of sexual encounters. “I recently met a guy who I’m really interested in and he is 28 and I’m 20.”
There is a link in the ‘about’ section of the about page. The user anonymously puts up the confessions on that shared document. The administrator of the page then updates the confessions, possibly filtering some, as the page’s statuses.
There is no uncontested theory as to where the trend first started. Arguably, it started with a popular blog titled “Confessions from Stanford” — a series of blog posts by freshmen at Stanford University, depicting their stories of transforming into freshmen at one of the most prestigious schools in the world. These blog posts, rather than being narrations of encounters between opposite sex, were inspirational stories of applications to the prestigious school and experiences of coping with the pressure of it all. Somewhere down the trail of imitations, the word “confessions” was reinterpreted.
It is strange how the viral nature of the confessions page is similar to what Harvard University students experienced when Mark Zuckerberg first came out with the FaceMash website, a way for students to rate the most appealing face. FaceMash catapulted quickly into Facebook, which is the parent platform for the confessions pages.
FaceMash was also limited to a campus or a university. Such a boundary of social interactions allows for gossip to spread its roots far and deep. It is small enough for people at all levels to be curious about the gossip, yet big enough for anonymity to keep its veil.
“Anonymous” is an interesting form of identity. It contradicts the meaning of identity itself to generate newer forms of expression, expressions that find recurrence in folklores like masked vigilantes and Santa Claus.
It is interesting to note the interactions of various components of the ecosystem of the confessions pages: the anonymous user, the administrator and the diffused audience may be viewed as the prime components of the ecosystem. The administrator keeps his anonymity for several reasons, totally different from why the user holds his.
Administrative authorities of several institutions have expressed concern over the unethical content published on these pages. Yet, these are social crimes that are not held by the law as criminal offenses. Does this expose a chink in the armor of our society?