A typical day at Bored at Baker. Screenshot taken directly from http://boredatbaker.com
Dartmouth has once again fallen under the spell of Bored at Baker. I’m not going to dwell on the obvious—this anonymous message board is plagued by outrageously offensive comments that not even the staunchest racist would condone. The amount of seemingly random, blindly hateful comments against women, Blacks, Asians, gay people, and every other group under the sun is overwhelming the trashcan, broken up only by pathetically uncreative insults aimed at every Greek house on campus and spam about corporate recruiting.
What fascinates me, however, and keeps me coming back, is the deep-seated voyeurism implicit in this kind of anonymous design. The posts that make me care the most about the toxic appeal of Bored at Baker are those that target specific students on this campus, everyday people who for some reason or another (or perhaps for no reason at all) have drawn an inordinate amount of attention to themselves and to their private lives. The guise of anonymity lends people a power they have never had before—to spew every opinion (hateful or otherwise) that they’ve ever had in a public domain. On Bored at Baker, they feel their voices can be heard without the consequences of culpability. What is it about our culture that fosters this sense of privilege to speak about people we hardly know, or literally had never heard of until we just Facebook-stalked them?
Our generation, unlike any other, is bombarded by celebrity gossip, reality television, and networking websites like Twitter and Facebook, which all further this trend of voyeurism; they quickly made it normal to feel as if we know people we have never met and who will never know that we are observing them. We idolize watchability above all else and especially those who seem the most unaware of being watched, the least self-conscious. We feel the need to comment on other people’s lives, to voice opinions and then gobble them up so that we can feel we’ve learned something about them—gained some access to them that they do not want us to have.
Now, I’d venture to guess that most Dartmouth students are all familiar with the concept of “campus celebs.” The term is basically a catch-all for anyone who makes themselves known in a public way, usually through some student organization or another, yet is completely unaware (or at least pretending to be unaware) that most people know who they are. Yet because Dartmouth is so small, everyone is bound to have multiple friends in common with these people, to have picked up certain tidbits of gossip about their lives and feel some secret access to their most intimate experiences. We even apply this celebrity image to ourselves, carefully crafting Facebook profiles to create these ultra-publicized personae that are all image and no substance. We become selfless, public figures that interact in a public and digital realm;we move from obsessing about being watched by others to watching ourselves and keeping track of all our friendships by such arbitrary measures as wallposts and mutual friends. We feel that our own personal thoughts are but distant third-party commentary on the goings-on of our superficial social connections, that there is some anonymous critical voice that transcends even ourselves in this hamster cage of staged social interactions.
Our lives are a TV show and B@B is the anonymous narrator. We feel we know the people in our little world, because we have some sense of their characters. They are our Barbie dolls, our celebrities. We can weave whatever scandalous stories we want out of their lives because all they are to us is a collection of Facebook drunk-at-a-party pictures—figureheads whose private selves are irrelevant to how we know them. We in turn give up our own private selves and join the TV show; we forget who we’d be if no one (including us) were watching. It’s only to be expected if you take into account the evolution of popular media itself, which went from scripted sitcoms with cookie-cutter characters perfectly fulfilling structured social norms (fantasy worlds we could imagine ourselves into); to reality television (“mirrors” of the real world we do live in, distorted and glamorized though it may be); to Facebook (a public display of our actual selves). We have become the celebrity, the fantasy, the show. The transition is complete.
Whatever form this transformation from human to celebrity takes—Bored at Baker, JuicyCampus—the implications are the same. We feel we have some right to the lives of others, some ownership of their images because they are so publicly known. Yet it is essential to remember that we are all human beings with similar insecurities and weaknesses, as obvious and repetitive as the idea may seem, and these sites are, in essence, pure garbage and nonsense. The hookups revealed on these sites themselves were probably just as shallow and impersonal as their crude public discussion, if they even happened at all. This kind of rampant anonymous hatred can be poisonous. It can make people feel unsafe in their own school, a supposed home away from home. But more disturbing is the underlying reason for this phenomenon of public commentary on the private lives of regular people. It is part of a larger trend that is ultimately more terrifying than any one violent or racist post could ever be.
