It seems as though every month the nation is overwhelmed by a new set of internet crazes. This month has been no different, and already we’ve seen these crazes spread like wildfire across our fifty states. To name a few? Gallon smashing, which involves pretending to slip in a grocery store and throwing gallon-sized jugs of (insert preferred liquid here) on the floor; the Harlem Shake, a fun new dance that has stormed the grounds of colleges around the country; and now college confession pages. These pages, run through Facebook, invite students from their respective universities to hash out their raunchiest, dirtiest, or most personal secrets anonymously.
That isn’t to say that these college confessional pages haven’t gone unnoticed by the schools they come from. Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa shut down their confession page after its rising popularity. Loras College Student Union President Daniel Thole said of the page,
“There were enough concerned students besides myself who felt the need to approach administration and enough alumni calling in. It was a pretty quick reaction by a lot of people that it got shut down.”
The pages generally run through an anonymous survey site, as to protect the identities of the students themselves. Students click the link, enter their confession (or complaint, as many pages have taken to doing as well), hit submit, and wait for it to be posted.
So where does all this come from? Who monitors and sifts through these hundreds of submissions? Well, I had the chance to complete a virtual interview with the group that runs the VCU Confessions page, which is now almost 4,000 “likes” strong and growing every hour.
[pagebreak]
The interview was completed anonymously – that is to say that they knew who I was, but I did not know who they were. Frankly, that wasn’t my concern. Perhaps the most shocking revelation? At least in Virginia, these confession pages weren’t started by individuals, but rather by a collective group starting pages for most of the universities in the state.
Upon asking what the reason behind starting the confession page was, they answered that they wanted to bring students together, essentially. They wanted to find a new way for students to interact and build bonds from sharing crazy collegiate stories.
Ultimately they did not think the trend would catch on as quickly as it did, saying,
“We started targeting all the colleges one by one a few weeks ago with slow growth but then it became pretty viral for each school. […] Our plan in the future is to make a separate site, which will be a lot more organized for each school…”
As the interview progressed, I was told that this group owns confession pages for a majority of the schools in Virginia, listing off universities like George Mason University, Old Dominion University, Christopher Newport University, University of Virginia, James Madison University, and – of course – Virginia Commonwealth University. The most popular of these pages, at least the one with the most likes, is George Mason University – currently raking in just over 4,600 “likes” and over 1,400 confessions.
The creators of these pages said that they didn’t feel as though the confessions start “high school-esque” drama, and were adamant that this was one of the best ways for college students to connect with one another – a sentiment that, obviously, was not reflected by other schools in the nation, especially the aforementioned Loras College in Iowa. They also felt as though most of the confessions were true, which is a topic of debate amongst the people that read these pages. Almost too frequently I saw people commenting on different confessions calling out what they thought were lies, to which the confession page creators say “Each confession page receives close to 200+ confessions a day whether it’s via message or survey”, and “We weave through a lot of the [confessions] and choose the appropriate ones to be posted”.
[pagebreak]
Suffice to say, there is very much a method to their madness.
As to whether or not they have had any contact with the creators of other pages in other states, they have discussed opening a separate site with other school pages. According to them there’s a need for an organized system and rather than continuing to do business over Facebook, a move to an individual domain appears to be their best bet. Their timeframe? “We’ll probably start shifting this week, and then adding all the schools onto the site and going from there”, they say before continuing, “Within the next month, we should have ‘DormConfessions’ completed.”
DormConfessions. A Google search yields almost no results for a site of that name, at least nothing updated within the last few years. That said, for a business still in relative infancy, it is possible their name may change over the course of construction.
These pages started out as a way for college students to connect via crazy stories, and they – at least the people that run the pages for schools in Virginia – never expected it to catch on as quickly as it did. It’s reasonable, without a doubt; after all, what do friends do when they get together? They talk about crazy college stuff. By setting up these pages on Facebook, even if some schools see them as a detriment to their own public image, they’re enticing students to submit content anonymously and then discuss it through comments and likes.
Though these pages have been the source of disdain for schools in states like Iowa and Wisconsin, they seem to be doing the opposite for schools in Virginia. So far, apart from the “it’s so immature” comments I’ve heard from people I’ve talked to about the pages, reactions seem fairly positive. Most students laugh about the confessions, others offer sincere help to the more serious confessions, and the parent schools have yet to see a problem with the pages. Otherwise it can be assumed that, like Loras College, they would have been taken down by now.