Well … in not so many words, of course.

Matt Ivester, founder of JuicyCampus.com, the “gossip” site for College kids notoriously known for being an unrestrained melting pot of libelous and defamatory remarks, has made a plea for decorum and decency on the JuicyCampus blog (hosted curiously at Blogspot — surely setting up a Wordpress installation at a sub-domain of JuicyCampus isn’t all that onerous?)

While JuicyCampus’s origins may have started out as an anonymous means to discuss all manner of things, whether they be fun, breezy, erudite, or cheezy, it has quickly, and obviously (anonymized identities + college demographic), devolved into a giant bulletin board uniting colleges and Universities coast to coast in gossip and innuendo.

Furthermore, its gotten some national attention as you may probably be aware, with stories being picked up by a bunch of papers, and now, most recently through the Washington Post, as students (and families) are up in arms with the kind of inflammatory and defamatory remarks therein.

Which is why I find Mr. Ivestor’s plea’s so quaint.

In some ways, JuicyCampus is a grand experiment in “crowd-sourcing’s” worst excesses, as it allows people to contribute content — in this case gossip — without any controls or accountability.

One need only saunter over to the most discussed, or most viewed, topics of discussion, and you can find that the vast majority are around observations of who is Hot, who is Not, and ranking which girls of potentially loose moral character (a polite way of saying, as the title of one of these posts are “Who is the sluttiest girl??????“). And lest you think that the targets of such thought provoking discussions are exclusively women, you would be wrong.In a post titled “ALL URBANA BOYS RANKED”, guys *are* ranked, but not, say, numerically from #1 to #50. No, instead, they are grouped according to their different levels of hotness (because clearly there isn’t a linear relationship in this ranking), with pithy descriptions like “Top Tier” and “Party Boys”.

What’s also troubling is the second to last ranking (incredibly, not *THE* last ranking) which describes a few unfortunate gentlemen as “Child Molesters”. [I would happily link to this post, but it seems like its literally impossible as the magic of Ajax makes direct links a hard thing to find].The last ranking, which, is some how worse than being a Child Molester, is merely “Totally Useless”.

No, the only saving grace about JuicyCampus is that they’ve thankfully turned on the “no follow” portion in their Robots.txt file, so that Google won’t be able to index JuicyCampus. So those unfortunate guys who were listed as “Child Molesters” thankfully do *NOT* show up when you google their name, even when you throw the switch “site:http://www.juicycampus.com”.

I think the bottom line is that JuicyCampus will continue to thrive precisely because it is an anonymized means of being … well, mean. And I think its human nature that a small part of us loves their drama, and the cheap, if guilty pleasure, of watching human train wrecks, particularly if there is no emotional cost to you (i.e. being anonymous). To be fair, some commenters do try and argue against the bottom-denominator quality of the content on JuicyCampus, but its far from the majority.

The only way for JuicyCampus to cross the bridge from being a harbor of defamatory remarks to an island of decorum — or at least, having the thinnest, sheerest veneer of it — is if Mr. Iverson decides to radically change the site (say, via the Terms of Service), and have more moderators enforcing it (because, believe it or not, there is a clause in their, under section 7 which states that users are not “is unlawful, threatening, abusive, tortious, defamatory, obscene, libelous, or invasive of another’s privacy”).

But I suspect he won’t, and as such, it will continue being an example of what “crowdsourcing” can do when all the controls and accountability is thrown out the window.

And all the hand-wringing in the world can’t prevent that.

(As an aside, for the love of Pete, can someone make sure that Andrew Keen never hears of JuicyCampus?)

I was recently catching up on a whole bunch of episodes of the Colbert Report the other day not knowing — to my great surprise — that he recently interviewed social media troll Andrew Keen. For those who are not social media nerds (such as myself), Andrew “Blogging Is Destroying Life As We Know It, And if I Have To Tell You You’re Clearly Too Stupid To Realize It” Keen recently published a book called “Cult of the Amateur”, where he asserts the social media — such as blogs — are destroying Culture.

Cleverer minds than mine have deconstructed this towering ode to idiocy, but suffice it to say one of the central arguments is that professional “gatekeepers” of educated opinion, whether they be professional critics or journalists, is being eroded by the “democratizing” effects of the Internet.

I suppose that if it was merely his *opinion*, that would be one thing; to come off as a complete and royal Douchebag is quite another. I invite you to have a look — and laugh — at his interview with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report, where his attempt at deadpanning his right to be elitest are neither clever nor witty, and his attempts at deflecting his own observations taken to an absurd extreme (something to be expected on the Colbert Report) appear, for a lack of a better word, *lame*, although he’s trying to appear patronizing.

Andrew Keen is a magnificent troll, but on live TV anyway, he’s an even better douchebag.

The best quote I’ve read all day? With respect to Andrew Keen’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur”:

It is a whining, outrageous and defensive fantasy based on sweeping generalizations, falsehoods, paranoia and a form of condescension so pissy that it blinds the author to anything resembling reality.

I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading Mr. Keen’s book, but I think that Terry Heaton’s opinions are, by proxy, “somewhat” congruent to mine. Furthermore, he nails these sentiments right on the head:

My biggest complaint with the book, however, is its black/white, win/lose, right/wrong, all-or-nothing perspective. In this he fails his argument and belies his own ignorance. His is the extreme view, not the views of those he labels utopians. I know many of the people he attacks in the book, and not one of them has ever expressed the cultural significance of the digital age from such an extremist stage.

I won’t contribute any more to that magnificent Troll, but as I said before — if you’re going to Troll, do it to raise some hype about your book. Which is what he did. So congratulations to him.

But otherwise, I suggest you do what you should do to all Trolls — ignore them and politely move on.

Andrew Keen, widely regarded as the curmudgeon of the social media set, sat down earlier today to take a few questions and answers from a few lowly plebs about his thoughts on social media. For those not quite familiar with his work, I’ll paraphrase it up for you: Mr. Keen believes that user generated media is a pox on society and culture at large, and likens it to a digital kind of Marxism. Believers are fooling themselves into believing that the masses can — or should — create different works and this threatens to supplant the wizened and wiser knowledge of a few professional or cultural elites.

I’ll let you read the article for yourself, or perhaps a few snippits, courtesy of Mat Ingram.

Nevertheless, I have to applaud Mr. Keen on one thing: if you’re going to be a troll, why not be the most magnificently flame-baiting troll you can be? Furthermore, if you’re going to troll it out, why not write a book about it so you can take advantage of your flame-baiting habits?

I don’t think its worthwhile debating any of Mr. Keen’s points in any depth, for the reason that his premise is based on a foundation of sand. And that is that the future that he is so worried about, what with all the unwashed mouth-breathing masses creating Stuff, can still be changed.

The sad fact is that it can’t — because its here already, and — if you’re Andrew Keen? — its only going to get worse. We already live an environment that is changing, and with the incredibly fast changing trends amongst today’s youth (never mind those in other parts of the world), it is only going to change more. Something like an astounding 30% of them actually create media to share with their friends, for example. I can barely imagine this world when they’re adults.

You know, I view Andrew Keen’s position as one of a crusty curmudgeon not because he doesn’t have any experience with technology; he does, and he’s benefited quite handsomely from it at some point or another. Rather, he posits forth an assertion that’s has the air of prescience, but is in fact nothing more than a crusty attitude.

How else to describe a position that looks ludicrous in the face of overwhelming reality? We will no more go back to his idealized world of professors and professionals exclusively arbiting opinion and taste than … well, than we can expect Google to suddenly lose its share of the Search Engine wars to Ask.com. Its just not going to happen no matter how hard you wish it so — even if you have a $100 million dollar marketing budget (sorry, Ask.com).

And in that way, I applaud Andrew Keen.

If you’re going to take a controversial opinion that will act as an obvious lightning rod, I agree — why not be the crustiest, flame-baitingest, most magnificent troll you can be?

As Mike Arrington said it best at Mesh: “If I say things that are outrageous things? I make more money … Its good for my business to say things like that”.

And it seems like Andrew Keen is taking a page out of that playbook. And good for him if it sells him more books, I say.