The unknown within the known is like the graffiti inside a bathroom stall. It might be at the local bar or it might be at your university: context mediates content.

The option for anonymity can inspire graffiti big and small; the graffiti can express all amounts of rage, satire and even admiration.

I heard about the app Gas¹, which allow(ed) users (high schoolers) to send anonymous compliments to each other and it reminded me much of the user-proliferated Truth Box trend on MySpace and the later Confessions Pages that roamed universities. This expression of technology is important and I commend Gas as a well-executed idea. People within a shared peer group want to express things to each other, and an option for anonymous send and receive protects both parties: If high schoolers weren’t allowed to communicate anonymously about each other on the internet, they’d revert to notes, rumors, and possibly be more subject to the sort of ritualized hierarchal bullying that we see in the Burn Book in Mean Girls.

Giving people the chance to anonymously spread their own rumors in an equally-shared space might even decentralize bullying to an extent: It doesn’t matter how many friends you have to back and proliferate your gossip, what matters is the veracity of your claim within the shared “bathroom stall” of your peer group.

Social media websites seem to trend toward “exposing” users as much as possible. Reddit now requires an email address to sign up. I understand verifying that there is a person behind the sign-up helps protect the website, but I think the internet generally is better the more we encourage spaces for anonymity. Better yet, however, is the box within the social space: the shared “anon” room for the people of a shared community. I felt so alone sometimes in high school, and the Truth Box showed me I wasn’t, and that I had a lot of friends who maybe felt odd trying to be closer friends in person. I was encouraged to share the same sentiments and I remember my graduating class had a sense of camaraderie that transcended some of the more typical social lines that you see in the movies. Did MySpace help with this, or was it just an example of how reality is different from the movies? I’ll never know.