saundra busieka obote: CONFESSIONS , THIS ARE MY CONFESSIONS

There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said. These words were famously said by Joni Mitchell .

In the recent months, many university and high school orientated confession pages have pop up left right and centre, all over many of the social networking sites out there, mainly facebook. The aim of these confessions pages are for people to confess to their inner most thoughts about certain things happening mostly around , or within their schools, yet remain anonymous with very little chances of the confessions being traced back to them

Although the concept of confession pages has gone viral due to its popularity within the teen and young adult as they can send anonymous messages to a certain Link and have this messages posted up, interestingly enough confession pages were initially started as a platform for working people or people out of school from a particular institution to reminisce on the good old days and all the adventures they went through or the experiences they had and also confess on some of the things that they had always wanted to share but were unable to, back then for various reasons

Bringing this matter close to home , current figures show that TUT confession pages is the most liked viewed and most updated of all the university pages. On the link http://www.news24.com/Technology/News/Student-confession-sites-go-viral-20130531 news 24 states that the craze over the confession pages started at the University of Cape Town and swiftly spread across the country.

TUT’S confession pages has about 24,116 likes with 13,045 talking about this , it is closely followed by Tuks(University Of Pretoria ) with approximately 21,974 likes , with 156 talking about this . The University of Cape Town has about 21,693 likes and 324 talking about this. the confession page of the university of Johannesburg has approximately 19,111 likes with 165 talking about this while Rhodes university has about 12 359 likes with 4586 people talking about the page

As a keener follower of the various confessions pages I have come to realize that while Some students live vicariously through this pages, confessing as often as possible, commenting on the various post put up, others find this pages a complete waste of time and as a way of degrading the school name, and other people through the commends posted up

In many ways this pages have positive attributes as they at times allow people to confess a about a dilemma or problem they could be facing and ask for help without fear of being judged, and in return, he or she at times gets positive feedback, while this is a positive impact, I worry about the constant sexual confessions posted up with very vivid details that would have many parents out there, worried as to whether they send their students to school to learn or carry out sexual activities and also the sense of tribalism and racism that some comments do bring up .

Trinity Molobi a current student at TUT says “I think all the things that pop up on this pages especially TUT’s is scripted, and the grammar is poor and it’s an insult to tut students as a whole “

Tinah Masonga also a student at TUT said “ I think it’s sad if you read the confessions and the comment s , because it shows there is no peace at TUT , cause the students don’t get along , as they fail to help on another “

At the moment the jury is out on whether the confession pages are good or bad, but like all other social networking fever, the hype over confession pages may soon come to pass as technology will allow for another form of innovation to come up and grab everyone’s attention.