Every Sunday I have a mid-afternoon ritual. No, it’s not spending time in prayer, cleaning my room, or even cutting up that hose that my neighbour always sprays on my window when she thinks the music is too loud. Instead, I log onto Post Secret to read this week’s round of anonymous over-shares.
The idea is fairly simple; people send in their secrets on the back of a postcard, designed in any way they want – with absolutely no identification – and the supreme lord of the site will post it on the web. The secrets people choose to share range from ridiculous to heart breaking (with a few stops at psychotic along the way), and each week I find myself with a small keyhole view into complete strangers’ lives.
It makes me wonder about the desire to transmit our secrets over the web. I suppose that might sound strange from someone who writes on a blog using a fake name – but in my case, the idea is to practice writing (and give my friends and family a break from my whining). The whole idea of casting a secret into the abyss strikes a chord with me.
There seems to be something primal and necessary about the confessional. I remember that while writing my thesis, I came across a pamphlet entitled “The Confession Unmasked; Shewing of the Depravity of the Romish Priesthood, the Iniquity of the Confessional, and the Questions Put to Females in Confession” (pithy title, I know) that formed the basis of the Hickson obscenity trial. The pamphlet railed against the perceived betrayal of the priest who took advantage of the female confessor.
Within this space, there is something distasteful about the betrayal of a confidence.
But, the internet itself lies outside the consecrated ground of the confessional – and certainly the geeky webmaster of Post Secret enjoys no privileged relationship of confidence, like that, say, between the lawyer or psychiatrist and their clients. Also, unlike in those cases, the idea of Post Secret is to publicize (albeit anonymously) your greatest secret. The vicious, moving, or hopeful little works of art are published in books and sold in several countries. And more than once I have wondered whether some people want to have their identities discovered.
The strange thing about things that we publish on the internet, is that sometimes it feels as if we have taken a part of ourselves and thrown it down a deep and hidden well, obscured by the technology. But then, every day, we see the way that the internet makes the world smaller and smaller – providing a safe, if mediated space for people from either side of the world to bond over their shared love of wookie figurines.
I suppose that the primary purpose of Post Secret is the sense of interconnectedness that comes from seeing that other people are experiencing the same things as you are, even if you will never know who they are, the anonymity is a sort of intimacy in itself.
After all, something keeps me performing my Sunday ritual.
