Anonymity on Collegehumor.com's Roommate Confessions

In my group’s paper about Formspring, we investigated how anonymity affects the user’s openness and ability to break social norms when “real world” identity cannot be established. Similar behavior can be seen on collegehumor.com in the roommate confessions. In this section, people vent about their roommates (usually former roommates), casting the roommate in a negative light, thereby justifying the poster’s extreme actions. Some stories of vengeance are simple—petty thievery, practical jokes, etc—but oftentimes the line between acceptable human behavior and the reality of their actions is crossed. Over the course of the segment, several posters have laid claim to freeing their own sh*t, slicing it into chips, and hiding it in their roommates clothes, shoes, bed, or anything else that could potentially ruin his day.

Users don’t have to provide a name or location, and most users post anonymously or write clearly fake information. Anonymity allows the user to lay claim to malicious actions, with them being attributable to him to the outside eye. Sometimes the victim of a roommate confession reads the post, knows what happened to him, and posts a reply after inferring the identity with context clues.
-Peter Damon
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