Duke F*** List

The Duke F*** List is a 42-page Powerpoint presentation created in 2010 by a Duke University just-graduated senior, Karen Owen. The document shared details of sexual encounters with Duke male athletes during her time at the University. Presented jokingly as a 'senior thesis' to her friends, her "faux senior thesis" was accidentally revealed to the public. As a result, legal action was taken against her by several of the male athletes mentioned in her list.

Karen Owen with the first title of her slideshow.

Karen Owen

Karen F. Owen grew up in Branford, Connecticut and graduated from high school in 2006. As a college student at Duke, Owen studied History and had a strong interest in sports. In 2010, Owen released her "faux sex thesis" in the form of a comically thorough PowerPoint shortly after her graduation. She faced significant backlash from members of the Duke community. Because of this, Owen promptly deleted all of her social media accounts. She was contacted by producers and writers about creating documentaries and books about her, but she declined these opportunities. Owen made a point to avoid the public light. Owen didn't face any criminal charges, and the incident eventually faded away.

Victims

Ratings given by Owen

Many of the men named by Owen are successful today, including Will McKee who is a Vice President and Financial Advisor at Morgan Stanley. To protect their privacy, their connections to the Duke F*** List have been largely redacted.

The List

Creation and Spread

The F*** List supposedly came about when one of Owen's many partners asked her where he ranked among her other sexual counterparts. Prior to this, Owens did not have this detailed list, but she innocently created one following the question. The "thesis" was titled ‘An education beyond the classroom: excelling in the realm of horizontal education’, it was originally emailed to three of her friends.Evidently, one of them leaked the list and it quickly spread across campus. This created the domino effect that eventually resulted in the list being easily accessible to anyone as it appeared on sites such as Jezebel and Deadspin. These sites released the full version of the document without hiding any of the names of those involved. Most of the men were lacrosse players, which intensified the seriousness of the "study" via news and media coverage, as Duke Lacrosse Case it occurred only 4 years prior.

Methodology

Each athlete described by Owen was assigned a subject number, followed by explicit details about their sexual encounters. These details included memorable moments, pros, and cons. Ratings were assigned on a 10 point scale using physical attractiveness, size, talent, creativity, aggressiveness, entertainment, athletic ability, and bonus. Tiebreakers were decided based on physical attractiveness.

Owen's self-reported methodology for comparing her "subjects"

The Aftermath

Following the release of her powerpoint presentation, Karen Owen received a significant amount of backlash from peers and faculty within the Duke community. When Owen wrote the document, she intended to only share with her group of friends as it was supposed to be a private joke. Unfortunately, through multiple postings across social media sites, the document spread faster than unexpected.

Owen quickly made it clear that she had no intention of sharing the project outside of her friend group or releasing personal information of the 13 men. What she failed to understand was that sharing her document online would result in public attention. Within days of the list going viral, she responded by completely erasing her presence on social media with the exception of one private Facebook profile.

Interestingly, most of the men she exposed lacked a public online presence. Owen spoke to Jezebel, stating, “I regret it with all my heart. I would never intentionally hurt the people that are mentioned on that.” Many saw her as a potential female counterpart to Tucker Max, who she explicitly mentioned in her thesis, but she wanted nothing to do with this style of vulgar writing.

Several people identified problematic aspects of college such as the partying culture in which Owen's document revealed and it is something that should be addressed on a larger scale . Not only did people see this as Owen's problem, they too took it out on Duke. GQ magazine, following the F*** List scandal, crowned Duke America's second most douchy school.

Online Reaction

Online, many people began to attack Owen for her actions and lack of real accountability once the dust had settled. Interestingly, Tucker Max spoke out and defended her actions, claiming that people accessed her diary and her personal information was compromised. In reality, Owen had no intention of showing this thesis to anyone outside of her friend group. It was one of Owen's friends that posted the thesis without her knowledge or permission.

Ethical Concerns

Privacy

Richard Mason states in Four Ethical Issues of the Information Age that, “Collections of information reveal intimate details about a person and can thereby deprive the person of the opportunity to form certain professional and personal relationships.” This case violated the males’ privacy, as the stories detailed intimate details about their sex lives. Additionally, according to David Shoemaker's definition of control theory one has informational privacy when one has control over the access to and presentation of information about one’s self-identity. According to the control theory, though Owens chose to reveal intimate details about herself, Owen's privacy was violated as well by the friend who forwarded the list as well as anyone else who shared the list, as she gave access to three specific individuals. When the list went viral, media outlets had control of the distribution of Owen's list.

Anonymity

While Owen originally made an oversight, the news sites that published the list failed to protect the anonymity of the men involved. Kathleen Wallace states in Online Anonymity that, “computer-mediated or online communication may encourage the impression that one is anonymous”. While this communication of information started in person, the men didn't expect that this information would surface online. They acted in a manner that was accepted by all immediate parties involved, not with the judgment and opinions of those who ended up being privy to their actions as a result of the list being posted online. But when Jezebel and Deadspin posted the list without blacking out any of the names, is proof that maybe they should have. Deadspin has since updated the article to exclude names. Names, pictures, education, and extracurricular activities of all the men were instantly spread across the web, not to mention the grotesque details of sexting, dirty talk, and unconventional sexual activities. These websites committed atrocious oversight when releasing information about people to the entire world.

Digital Identity

If you searched Karen Owen on the internet today, nine years later, all of the results are regarding the Duke scandal. Luciano Floridi provides the statement that new ICTs in our time have evolved the way we interact with and control our own personal data. Karen Owen, as this PowerPoint became viral, saw ICTs cause her to completely lose control of her digital identity, with this story of her PowerPoint being the central descriptor of who she was. This is in direct contrast to a more tailored form of identity production technologies, like social media, in which a person is in complete control of what is included and excluded on his own profile. Thus, one can see that the viral nature of the internet can have irreparable forces on one’s digital identity.

However, this idea is contrasted with the results returned for the men involved in the PowerPoint. If one were to search for the men included in the presentation, one would find very traditional information about them and almost no link to the Duke F*** List. Ben Grisz is a Senior Analytics Consultant at IBM, Zach Howell is a banker, and Jake Lemmerman is an analyst at Taco Bell. The Duke scandal does not come up in their Google searches, while it is what solely comes up in Karen Owen’s. The internet holds Karen Owen completely accountable, while the men are unaffected. There is much public debate regarding this double standard and questions are raised as to whether or not this situation would be different if a male were the author instead of a female. Though it has been made clear that Owen never intended for this list to spread to anyone besides the three people she sent it to, she still received the most backlash of any party involved. While the men have went on to become Major League Baseball players or businessmen, Owen's name is tarnished. She has become an "example of everything wrong with college party culture."

As a society, we must now examine how the internet is able to influence one’s reputation and digital identity, and especially in this case how it selectively chose who is affected and who is not. Luciano Floridi also raises the question of the right to be forgotten, which is that if someone should be able to have their history and data removed from public knowledge. For someone like Karen Owen, she will never be able to fully remove the stories and publications regarding this powerpoint, and cannot recreate a new digital identity or destroy her existing one. As ICTs and the internet continue to grow in scale and popularity, this question of whether people have the choice of keeping their data in the public infosphere must be answered. These ideas can ultimately be linked back to an import statement from Jeffery Tobin, “Digitization and cheap online storage make it easier to remember than to forget, shifting out ‘behavioral default’”.

Google image results for Karen Owen

Google image results for Zach howell