Launched in June 2007, the Honesty Box was a Facebook application that allows people
to write anonymously to a Facebook profile. The Honesty Box was a fad,
popular among some groups at the time of my research in 2007–2008, but
which is no longer available. At the time that some IU students were adopting
the Honesty Box with a degree of enthusiasm, there was a clear ethnic divide
between who was willing to put the Honesty Box on their Facebook
profile and who would react with disquiet and even horror when I brought
up the possibility of having one. Yet, few people I interviewed saw the
Honesty Box as a Black-inflected technology, or an application adopted primarily
by those affiliated with African American communities on campus.
And conversely, no one during my research mentioned avoiding the
Honesty Box as a specifically white thing to do. In this chapter, I discuss
why using this Facebook application in particular seemed to fall along ethnic
lines, yet it was not openly invoked as a marker of ethnic identity. I explore
how different ethnic communities’ shared semiotic ideologies about anonymity,
gossip, and insults shape undergraduates’ decisions to adopt and
use new media.