Unsigned Carrier Editorial

You’ve probably heard of the Berry College Confessions (BCC) page on Facebook. Berry students can anonymously message the administrator of the page with “confessions” and the administrator picks some to post. As of Tuesday evening the page featured almost 690 posts.

Many of the posts consist of students admitting to some activity that does not easily conform to the values typically assigned to the majority of Berry students.

Posts involve having sex, often in unorthodox places, smoking marijuana and drinking on campus and/or underage. Others lambaste Berry as an establishment, and some defend it from the naysayers.

Some posts, however, were significantly more sinister. One of the early posts, within the first 100, specifically and ruthlessly targeted one student specifically. The administrator removed that post eventually.

The problem with BCC is not that it is conceptually flawed. Many of the posts are very interesting.

However, the page— initially captivating and a convenient new way to procrastinate homework, —quickly became stale and boring. The confessions seemed more and more repetitive, and the only ones easily remembered were not actual confessions. They were reposts from other places online.

The page has been used to post confessions with less and less frequency. Instead they are general complaints, gripes about Berry as a college or its students. And the contrary confessions saying something like, “Hey, I like Berry! If you don’t, you can leave,” became equally predictable and boring.

The page is filled with things that look like confessions, but are more accurately the efforts of “confessors” to let every boring Berry student know just how interesting they are and how irritated they are with Berry boredom.

The administrator for BCC, in order to contribute to the quality of the page ought to be far more selective about what ends up on the page. This may seem like a form of censorship, but it is not an effort to obscure any certain perspectives. Rather, it is an effort to actually post confessions, not complaints or personal attacks, on a page meant for confessions.

The administrator for the page has mentioned on the page that there is difficulty representing every perspective submitted. There are enough submissions to syphon through them for the good, enlightening, entertaining ones, and leave unseen the needlessly offensive, banal posts.