Bowdoin students may want to think twice about what they say out loud this semester, because if they're not careful, it might end up on the Internet.
Liberal Media, an unincorporated production company founded and operated by juniors Will Donahoe and Clark Gascogine and seniors Frank Chi and Dotan Johnson, has launched a Web site where members of the Bowdoin community can post amusing snippets of conversation that they overhear on campus.
Overheardatbowdoin.com went live on January 16 and has received a dozen posts and hundreds of visitors since.
One post documents this alleged exchange between two female students reading a newspaper:
"Who's that?is that Nancy Pelosi?"
"I think that's Condoleeza Rice."
"My mom made me watch the news over break. It sucked! She says I need to be more informed..."
Another user reports hearing a student in Sills Hall declare, "I would never go to the South because all Southerners are prejudiced."
Though many of the posts appear to expose ignorance within the student body, the Liberal Media founders insist that doing so was not their intent.
"This is a community-building site," Chi said. "It's not out there to incite gossip or rumors."
"It'll bring a dialogue to the campus that wasn't necessarily there," added Donahoe. "If anything positive can come out of this, then it's that."
Inspiration for Overheard at Bowdoin came from the popular "Overheard in New York" Web site. Donahoe began reading the original site while working in New York last summer.
"I was like, I could make this Web site, no problem," he said.
Liberal Media is not the only group of college students to borrow the "Overheard" idea. Students at a number of schools have similar sites, including Brown University, Cornell University, Stanford University, University of Chicago, Loyola College, McGill University, University of Calgary, and University of Western Ontario.
So far, Liberal Media has not actively advertised the site except by word of mouth and by sharing it with friends on Facebook. Overheard at Bowdoin had seen impressive traffic numbers as of Thursday afternoon, with 565 total visitors, 478 since Sunday, according to Sitemeter.com, a site that records Web traffic.
These figures will likely go down in coming weeks, as Donahoe plans to restrict access to the site to anyone outside the Bowdoin network. He decided to take this measure based on the fact that the site's content is unverifiable, and he did not want outside visitors?especially prospective students?to develop misperceptions of Bowdoin based on embellished or selectively reproduced conversations that are posted.
The site's founders acknowledge that it is impossible to safeguard Overheard at Bowdoin from false information. They moderate the site as a team, and Donahoe reports that he has deleted a number of posts. The moderators are especially wary of inside jokes, personal attacks, and posts that reveal the identity of the speakers.
Donahoe said that he is aware of the pitfalls of the project, and that "if things get out of hand," he will shut the site down.
Still, the Liberal Media staff hopes that members of the Bowdoin community will stick to the spirit of the site and limit their posts to quotations that they actually overheard.
"Sometimes you're around on the Quad and you'll hear something and be like, whoa, where did that come from?" said Johnson. "This is a way that you can not only tell your roommate, but put it out there for the whole school."