Catch27.com boasts a “wicked twist”

Catch27.com is the latest addition to the list of interactive Web sites for college students,… Catch27.com is the latest addition to the list of interactive Web sites for college students, which includes Friendster.com and Facebook.com. But, as its name indicates, there’s a catch.

“It’s like Facebook, except with a wicked twist,” said Lindsey Johnson, the Web site’s representative. “Instead of just networking your friends, you trade your friends for hotter, smarter ones.”

E. Jean Carroll, the current editor of Elle magazine, created the Web site with the intention of making “a satire on social lives in general,” Johnson said.

Not everyone can join Catch27.com, though.

“It’s kind of an elite, edgy group of hot minds and hot bodies,” Johnson explained. “If they’re not, we kick them off the site.”

Another prerequisite for membership is age. A member must be at least 18, and few are older than 27 — a fact that fits the Web site’s name well. Johnson explained that “basically your life as you know it is over at 27.” After all, she added, both Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix died at 27.

Each player who makes it through the initial screening process is then assigned to an even smaller group. Based on a person’s personal information card, the member is labeled a bitch, brain, freak, geek, jock, rebel, slut, star, wiseass, MVP, or blogger. Johnson explained that the Web site has its own separate community of bloggers — those who aren’t there to play the game, but simply to get feedback.

After members create a profile that includes information like the number of hearts they have broken, their favorite swear word and their posh or evil social talent, the game can begin. Unlike Facebook.com, Catch27.com is not university specific. Profiles are comprised of statements like “what sin [the member] would like to try” rather than general information like what school the member attends. Because of this, it is unclear how many Pitt students are currently involved in the site.

Initially, players must build up a pack of friends, either by inviting them to join their packs or by buying three friends for 99 cents. Other members rate each person’s card, based on looks, humor and the amount of trading in which that person is involved.

“The voting is subjective, objective and everything in between,” Johnson said.

Prizes like iPods, shoes and Sidekicks — cell phones with superpowers — offer further incentives for members to trade and create groups of 27 friends with similar traits, which gives them double points.

“For example, 27 blondes winking their belly-button rings, or 27 people drinking out of Starbucks cups,” Johnson said.

And during the month of April, the incentive is heightened. Catch27.com is holding a nationwide “Trade Your Friends for Charity” contest that guarantees the winning person or group $10,000 — half for the charity of their choice and half to throw a party. Members may join in groups as small as a single person or as large as an entire university, Johnson explained.

Carroll originally funded the Web site, but now it is self-maintaining, Johnson said. Thanks to sales of friend packages and participation, no sponsors are involved.

The contest is a way to reward people for using social networking and stereotyping to their advantage, Johnson said.

“I think people are blind to the fact of how the social world really works, but it is really cruel in a lot of ways,” she said.

This cruelty stems from the social exchange theory, according to Richard Moreland, a Pitt psychologist.

“[Social exchange theory] was a combination of behaviorism and economics, and the premise of the theory is just like in economic exchange,” he said. “One party gives something and another gives a service in exchange.”

He said that the Web site brings the theory to life by “making alternatives available, and describing these alternatives in glowing terms.”

Moreland explained that by making the exchanging of friendships possible, the Web site demonstrates the social exchange theory in a very simple, but potentially destructive, way.

“In the old days, social exchange theory was viewed as appealing to our worst instincts,” he said. “They’re tempting people to do this.”

Campus Women’s Organization Vice President Melissa Patti said that by calling girls sluts and handing out prizes for forming groups of blondes, Catch27.com goes against the issues of equality and feminism that CWO promotes.

“It’s a destructive process, and it only perpetuates culture’s standards of beauty, which are problematic,” she said. “It kind of decreases the work that women have created in the past to be looked at as equals in society’s eyes.”

Patti also explained that rejection based on appearance and on society’s standards of beauty encourages problems like eating disorders.

“It goes back to everything in culture that tells women that their only value is them as sex objects,” she said.

Offering money for this type of socializing “is very dehumanizing and also shallow,” Moreland added. “It makes you see people as commodities.”

But Johnson explained that the Web site is not simply a way to treat your friends as possessions and win prizes. At its heart, she said, the Web site reflects the mentality of today’s youth.

“Because of the demographic of the site, we’re essentially a bunch of idealist kids,” Johnson said. “Whether you’re red or blue, you want the world to be perfect.”