Post-420 woes at Columbia

Maybe you’ve seen the enigmatic flyers around campus urging you to text some number to “find out what Columbia is really talking about.”  Bwog did and was intrigued by the app behind the posters, Matter, which offers its users an anonymous environment to share their thoughts and to read the thoughts of others.  We set up a long-distance interview with one of its founders, Ben Sigelman, who gave us his insights on Matter, Internet anonymity, social media, and human relationships.

Bwog: What, in your own words, is Matter?

Sigelman: It’s a place where people can feel completely comfortable being completely candid.  There’s a lot of places online right now where you can be anonymous, and that’s definitely important I think, but it’s sort of necessary but not sufficient to be comfortable being candid.  I think oftentimes anonymous places are also not very safe places.  Even if your identity isn’t associated with what you post, you’re still kind of vulnerable to people being abusive, and I think with Matter what we’re trying to do is take all of the ingredients that are necessary to make people, you know, comfortable sharing something, which certainly includes, but is not limited to, being anonymous… So the goal with Matter is to allow people to totally find an antidote to what I think is presently happening in most of social media—which is fine—but it’s a very different experience where it’s more focused on creating a personal brand for yourself, which is the opposite of being candid I think.  I have no problem with it, but it’s not real.  I think the pressure of maintaining an identity online is starting to wear on people and I think Matter is a reaction to that, or at least for me it is.

B: What role do you see Matter playing, or what do you think the benefits are of having it on a college campus or in a setting like Columbia?

S: One of the things about colleges that I think is so important is that, to me, if I know someone went to my college, I immediately feel like I can identify with them.  [Matter is] partly about sharing your experiences, for sure, but it’s also partly about reading the experiences of people that you can identify with.  And if someone’s having boyfriend or girlfriend troubles or something like that, and you don’t know who they are: that’s one thing.  But if they’re at your school and you might be passing them on the street, I feel like that becomes a lot more compelling.  So [Matter] becomes a place where you can potentially, you know, raise things that are of interest to your immediate community, instead of just to humanity in general, which is a very broad target.

B: I think in our original correspondence, you wrote something about how Matter is a “means to an end.”  What is that “end” or what do you foresee the “end” being?

S: The vision for what we’re trying to do, like long-term… Basically, I think that technology has been really helpful for people in that it helps us get around cities easily, it helps us communicate more efficiently and things, but when it comes to people, like actual human beings as these sort of psychosocial entities existing in tandem with technology, I think it’s been kind of a net loss. That’s my personal opinion.  My goal with this, if we’re talking about end goals and not the next year but like ten years out, what I want to see happen is, I want to see technology, which is an incredibly powerful force, help us be more human.

OK so some of them are depressing…

B: What do you think the effects of anonymity are on your persona?

S: When I’m using the app store version [of Matter], I actually find myself posting a lot of positive stuff that might be sort of cheesy that I would never put it on Facebook…because if it were on Facebook with my name, it’s like, what’s my motivation for posting this?  Is it that I need someone’s affirmation?  And it’s not… [Matter] gives me the feeling of just being unbridled in general, so that’s really nice.  The negative side of anonymity… if you look at anonymity in the history of the Internet, it’s very checkered.  There was FormSpring, a website that came out around 2007.  When it first came out, it was really popular with middle school students… and it’s been the only super successful, virally, exponentially growing product in the technology world I’ve ever heard of that got turned off by investors.  Investors demanded that the founders shut it down because there had been multiple teenagers who had committed suicide and cited FormSpring in their suicide notes.  And it’s anonymous but it was an ideal platform for just bullying or abuse.  So I think anonymity, if we’re going to talk about the negative side, if it’s not done right and it’s not done carefully I think you could end up in that sort of situation.  I think that anonymity really only works if you have some mechanism to deal with those sorts of behaviors.  And that’s a thing we’ve thought about pretty hard from day one, I guess, as a big part of what we’re trying to do: is to make it safe in addition to being anonymous.

B: What specifically about Matter do you think helps it avoid all these issues with anonymity that have plagued other sites?

S: Well, for Matter, it’s kind of naturally about giving, which is something that psychologically has been shown to produce small amounts of oxytocin and that sort of thing.  So I think to a certain extent we’re trying to capitalize on that on a hormonal level, like we want people to sort of feel that connection with other people and that is a calming sort of thing to do.

B: What are some of the more memorable things you’ve seen posted?

S: I had a really nice exchange with a woman who lived in Cairo, and this was a month ago or something, and I thought this was really cool that she lived in Cairo.  And I remember she was posting about it and I said something like, “What do you think, what’s the deal on the ground”—at the time that’s when they were doing that insane thing where they sentenced like 500 people to death—I was like, “What do people think about that, that seems crazy?”  And she was so happy that an American knew about this or cared about it, and we had a nice little exchange about that. Moments like that, I sort of like the most—just everyday connections between people for me are the most satisfying things.