“Overheard” sites are outlets for campus humor

Pitt student Samantha Hafner overheard someone outside of Market Central say, “I’m gonna… Pitt student Samantha Hafner overheard someone outside of Market Central say, “I’m gonna start trading dining passes for blow jobs.”

Another Pitt student, Bernard Siu, overheard someone say, “I was taking shots in a port-a-potty. It was SO lonely!”

Thanks to a new Facebook group, “Overheard at Pitt,” everyone on campus can see what other people have overheard.

The group, like sites such as “Texts from Last Night” or “Overhead in New York,” is part of a growing Internet trend in which people post out-of-context and anonymous snippets of other people’s conversations.

Pitt sociology professor Dan Romesberg said, “Social skills, in general, in this technological age have deterred quite a bit. It’s not strange that people tend to gravitate toward anonymous and faceless forms of communication.”

Recent Michigan State University graduate Ben Bator said “Texts from Last Night,” the website he created with his friend, Lauren Leto, is “perfect for college students.”

Students send their text messages to the website, which posts them online.

The texts range from nostalgic and slightly random, “(801) My entire childhood was an ugly sweater party,” to the social commentary of, “Tiger just f*cked it up for all of us … She grabbed my phone this morning and started asking questions” and the raunchy “All I wanna do is slam about 38 beers, eat a whole pizza and wake up naked in the Taco Bell parking lot.”

Bator said, “Everything is out of context, so it’s not just some inside joke that only 10 people get. We try to use texts that everyone can relate to, and since it’s out of context, people can create a surrounding story of what happened.”

He added that he thinks students also like it because, “You’re not going to lose your job over something you post on this site.”

The site receives about 15,000 texts per day, but not all of them make it online. “We just can’t keep up with that many,” Bator said. Some of the funnier unposted texts will make an appearance in a “Texts From Last Night” book that will hit shelves Jan. 26.

“Texts from Last Night” currently has more than a half million fans on Facebook and receives about 4 million hits a day.

Pitt sophomore Dan Whitman, who created the Facebook group “Overheard at Pitt,” said he believes the locality and familiarity of the group make it appealing to students.

“It’s more local than sites like ‘Texts from Last Night,’ where it could have been anyone who said it,” he explained. “I think people like it because they can relate and say, ‘Oh, I’ve been there.’”

He said his inspiration to start the group came from a visit to Penn State, where his friends showed a similar Facebook group, “Overheard at Penn State.”

Whitman created the group last year, and it remained relatively small with about 200 members at the end of last semester.

But at the beginning of November, the group’s popularity suddenly exploded. It currently boasts almost 4,500 members.

Whitman said he has no explanation for the sudden popularity of the group. He said it surprised him as much as everyone else.

“I just got on it one day and I was like, ‘Oh my God,’” he said.

The group currently has more than 1,000 posts from students describing overheard pieces of ditzy or bawdy conversations, as well as strange things that professors have announced to classes.

A similar citywide blog, “Overheard in Pittsburgh,” was popular as well, but it has been having technical difficulties since August and is currently not active.