Our Confessional Community

The Voice’s ‘Harvardfml’ message board is one of the most fascinating projects I’ve seen in my time here, one that serves to express more about the Harvard undergraduate community than Yardfest, The Game or Ec10 combined. Whether or not the intention was to provide a new mechanism by which to examine life here, or just act as a local application of the popular fmylife blog, is irrelevant to me. By this point, Harvardfml has been around long enough that we can begin assessing its effects on Crimson culture. I like to think of my many hours spent sifting through posts as a kind of procrastinatory self-anthropology, and I invite you to join me on this misanthropic safari.

The Harvardfml blog serves a function similar to the desperate and anonymous scribbling found on bathroom walls. It speaks to students’ need to be heard without exposing themselves to the potential embarrassment or shame of doing so publicly; it reflects an undergraduate culture constantly connected to the internet, and at once deeply atomized as a result. The blog serves as an outlet in which students can vent misfortune, hilarity, depression, anger, and intrigue all at once. Often it seems like posts arise from the need to express something desperately, or even just to admit to the world that a sentiment or event exists.

Posts about Annenberg, CS50, Wig-A girl, and the k-pop loving Turk are all relevant, and a testament to the community Harvardfml has slowly been shaped by, but the necessity of anonymity characterizes our campus tremendously. This is not to say Harvardfml is a precise methodological tool by which to evaluate campus life, but its explosive popularity cannot be ignored. The blog is confessional. “I only got in because my dad’s a donor. FML.” “I lost my virginity in the Delphic basement. FML.” “The Adderall is not working. FML.”

These are sentiments that cannot be publicly expressed, but find a way to make themselves known to other people despite it. “Due to the fact that I must now share a bathroom with 5 other people, I am no longer bulimic. Instead of throwing up, I no longer eat. Hello anorexia. FML.” Harvard, apparently not unlike Yale, BU, MIT, Wellesley and other schools which have also started local fmylife blogs, are social bodies in which there is a growing community around the fact that a lot goes unsaid. But it is being said anyway—if in an untraditional way that corresponds to how our social networking occurs on Facebook, our music is shared over LastFM, and our collaborative efforts happen in real-time on the Google-docs we manipulate in private.

Indeed, though much of the press about Harvardfml has been negative, pointing to its posts as evidence of privileged Harvard students’ self-centered or isolationist tendencies, the blog offers evidence of a shared experience students go through together. The fact that there are reoccurring characters in the posts, that there are statements made that go unchallenged, and that the blog itself reflects what is being talked about on campus are all evidence of cohesion. Anyone who has visited the site more than once will have learned that CS50 is hard, but that there is an attractive TF. In the days after Halloween, there was a storm of posts about Heaven and Hell. This cohesion extends to the language blog-writers use— each university blog has its own common points of reference. Our ‘Yard’ is Yale’s ‘Commons,’ our ‘Ec10’ is MIT’s ‘HASS.’ The existence of these clusters of meaning is curious in a forum that is at first glance made up of sad or lonely atoms.

This is why the body of distress and anxiety that is HarvardFML cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant—every community has its own normal state, around which good and bad become dependent on the shared conditions, and websites like HarvardFML reveal the status quo. “I am a closeted gay man in a final club. FML,” reads one post, expressing a sentiment that betrays the particular heteronormativity and final club atmosphere at Harvard that those outside our community might not have have experienced. The distress expressed is not negated simply because the writer is part of a disproportionately privileged organization. Instead, problems like these brought anonymously before the Harvard community, deserve that we confront them as a community.

Zachariah P. Hughes ’12, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House.