Breffney Cogan
Staff Writer
A couple of years ago at a Leaving Cert revision course a friend of mine returned to his seat looking defeated. But it wasn’t the comparative text question or ecology that had pushed him over the edge – “if I don’t understand the stuff written on the bathroom walls then there’s no way I’ll ever get in to university’ – Jane Doe is easy as 3.14. – He didn’t.
Not to put too fine a point on it but in a recent study I have found that cubicle doors are no longer the forums for honest expression that they once appeared to be. Of course, my findings are naturally limited to fifty-percent of the facilities on campus, a cruel measure of commitment to investigative journalism positioning me somewhat to the left of Anderson Cooper. However, let it be clarified now that I am in no way condoning the defacement of college property, the clean walls are a fantastic reflection – of our evolution, our commitment to the community, our respect for authority. There is also a possibility that the UV drug lighting has made it too difficult to read in there.
So where have all of the anonymous, oftentimes cruel, most times hilarious tidbits gone, I hear you cry? The comment boxes of the Internet – the toilet walls and cubicle doors of the modern age.
When asked recently how she feels about reading her own press, ‘Location, Location, Location’ vamp Kirstie Allsopp replied ‘I don’t think everyone who reads the Daily Mail is a nutter, but the people who leave comments underneath definitely are’ – A thought that has obviously crossed the minds of the DM legal team, considering the banner at the bottom of the hugely popular webpage branded in bold with the words ‘the views expressed in the content above are those of our readers and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.’ Nice save.
Scanning through a few examples, in various publications, helps to illustrate the true extent to which the college bubble is a microcosm of ‘real life’. Grown up versions of every faculty have found their new loo. To begin with the above-mentioned journal we find the arts block. A mass audience, dealing with information, which is not particularly life changing or even relatively transferable, but definitely the most amusing. For example, in response to the story Rumours that the Duchess of Cambridge is pregnant after she refuses to eat peanut paste during royal event one commentator exclaims ‘Oh my god! I refused to eat peanut butter the other day, does that mean I’m pregnant too?’
The next rung on the ladder, although in reality, quite a large jump – The New York Times. Addressing topics of somewhat greater urgency such as war, famine and human rights violations gives rise to the striking difference that comments are paragraphed. An article detailing the Italian government’s recent agreement to IMF monitoring in order to avoid falling even further into economic crisis resulted in the prescription
‘Just close the border east of Nice and let Italy fall away festering at itself. They’ll probably still have the money to field a soccer team so for the rest of it who cares?’ Gary, Virginia.
Wow, probably a little bit of an overly aggressive response Gary, Virginia. Would I be completely off the mark in guessing you are a lawyer by profession?
The Economist boasts much the same variety of rebuttal. However, instead of rooneyfan or chunkylover365 our BESS friends are operating under the alter ego hedgefundguy, a screen name which puts paid to the claim that investment banks are looking to recruit graduates with a broad variety of interests.
To sum up with a catch-all sentence for everyone else: doctors are too busy, engineering is a numbers game and anybody with a computer science degree knows where to find better stuff than newspapers on the internet. In a world of political correctness and Facebook status anxiety, anonymous comments mean that to some extent free speech lives on, mostly to the advantage of cyber-bullies and the criminally insane, but it does on the rare occasion make for a good read through an arguably less intrusive medium than times gone by.
