There has been a new trend emerging on campus as of late. It is impossible to stand in line at Starbucks with someone flipping to UBC confessions. UBC confessions is a facebook project in which students email the creators anything from witty blips to deep personal confessions and then the creators repost it, posting it so all of  UBC  can see in complete anonymity. Though UBC confessions is not the only form of this phenomenon of “online diaries” which have appeared on campus. Whisper is an application explicitly designed for the exchange of secrets, UBC crushes is another face book project which acts as a bathroom wall did in grade school in which users write about someone they have been admiring from a far. The list continues with Yik, Yak, UBC admires and so on.  In my blog I will primarily be discussing UBC confessions, but it is important the note the plethora of sources to act as an online confessionals which have become an important part of campus life. But what is fueling this desire to share our secrets to the “cyber community”? Though no research has been done explicitly on UBC confessions, the study of the web blog by Miller and Sheppard shows that the innate desires which fueled in surge of the web blog are applicable to the very modern social networking confessionals. This principle of secrecy breeding realism is a major factor of UBC confessions. There is no possible way to gage the authenticity of the confessions, but consumes of these sites may be more will to believe the audacious claims due to the veil of secrecy from which it was written. Another factor to the popularity surge of the social media confessional may be the format. In an increasingly connected word, the karios of the social media confessions fit perfectly university campus with more wifi hotspots than libraries. This format fit with the highly connected, immediate gratification seeking student population from which it is thriving. UBC confessions seems to be thriving because it is satisfying a desire to be share and to listen, all while hidden behind an Iphone screen.

Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd. “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog” Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs (2004).