(I have tried to compile what I have read, researched and thought throughout the semester into a coherent essay. AT THIS POINT, ANY AND ALL COMMENTS OR SUGGESTIONS ARE WELCOME!)
Intimacy Among Strangers in Online Anonymous Communities
Long before the advent of online communities, people have reached out to and interacted with strangers, sometimes in very intimate and unique ways. A fellow passenger on a train, a message in a bottle, a graffiti-covered wall, anything that Edward Norton’s character in
Fight Club would call a “single-serving friend”. Then travel became faster, distances shrunk with the ease of communication, extreme neolocality became the norm. The anomie that
Kevin addresses started to manifest. In new physical surroundings, the convenience of connecting with others, known and unknown, in a virtual setting could not have more appeal.
Trapper covered this in his look at the emergence of online communities.
Within these communities, we see a certain ethos emerge; specific core values of a community without physical characteristics other than the screen on which it appears. In such communities, the two core values that have emerged are authenticity and self-presentation. In both
Brin and
Emily’s subjects, we see how this deeply affects the way that individuals and communities view themselves. These distinct cultural aspects are particularly intriguing among communities of strangers. Detailed case studies of the “anonymous community art project” as a medium included
Found Magazine,
Project Mortified, and
PostSecret. Though the exact medium within these three communities is a bit different, they all result in very deep, meaningful, and intimate connections among the participating strangers. Participants neither know nor care to know the identity of those with whom they feel connected. This project examines such connections and the need/desire for them in relation to art and creativity in our culture’s current state of computer-mediated communication.
Contemplating something made by a stranger is, in many ways, an archaeology of now. It allows us to closely inspect the lives of others and ourselves. Found Magazine is the most closely related to traditional archaeology as it involves trying to decipher a piece of someone’s life through something they never intended anyone to see. Participants submit letters, photos, shopping lists, or receipts that they have stumbled upon in parking lots, library books, or second-hand furniture. The site posts one new “find” each day, and invites viewers to interpret what may have been going on in the life of the person who wrote that letter, posed for that picture, or made that shopping list. One of the most popular finds is a crumpled paper, found on the floor at an elementary school, containing a student’s “
Plan To Take Over World.”
Comments deduced that, “
this kid is a go-getter. He's got a vision, he's got goals, and he's got a plan. Granted, it's a bad plan, but he's young,” and, “
knowing about things like Microsoft and the word 'dictator', seems like this kid is a pretty smart cookie.” The draw to a site that posts “
anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life” shows not that we are nosy or curious, but that true authenticity is deeply cherished, even if it is a truly authentic desire to “kill 5th grade.”
The value of authenticity is also readily seen in Project Mortified, the premise of which is “
a comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids. Adults share their own adolescent journals, letters, poems, lyrics, home movies, stories and more.” All material is presented by its original author, and none of the language is to be changed. Participants present their material at live shows, which are recorded and posted to the website. Visitors to the site are also invited to submit embarrassing stories or pictures from their adolescence on the message boards. The contributions and performances range from unflattering yearbook photos to one man’s diary entry (read aloud) venting about the neighborhood boy who “
tied me to a tree and took my shoes. He took my shoes!”
The presentations are always comical; presenters delight in the chance to amuse others with their childhood traumas. Surfacing those memories is a true “excavation” process. This term does evoke a connection to archaeology, but the subject of study is shifted from that of Found Magazine. Rather than analyzing the life of a complete stranger, the artifacts are those of a “past self”, and the viewing of that past self as a different person. In doing so, participants in Project Mortified make a connection with that person that causes self-reflection.
Giving that self-reflection an audience has a powerful effect. Clive Thompson addresses this in his article, “
Web Ushers in Age of Ambient Intimacy”. He writes that “
having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they're trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.” He concludes with, “
In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself.” The interactions seen thus far in Found Magazine and Project Mortified really show the complexity of this thing we call the "self" and how we respond to a deeper personal discovery of it. Of what we do in these online communities, psychologist Kenneth Gergen, author of
The Saturated Self, "more charitably regards it as 'playing out our other selves.'” It is identity experimentation; individual become more deeply connected with parts of themselves that were previously unknown. This is where PostSecret becomes very relevant.
PostSecret, the brainchild of Maryland native Frank Warren, began as an experiment on Blogger.com. It is the most intentional form of intimacy with strangers because the content is created for that very purpose. Warren invited users to submit their deepest, darkest secret on one side of an anonymous postcard. That was four years ago, and the secrets have not stopped coming. Every Sunday, thirty new, handmade postcards appear on the blog, which boasts over 226 million hits (while writing this sentence alone, it received nearly 300 more). Frank Warren also updates fans of the project on a traditional blog; the first post on that site was flooded with comments. Though hateful troll comments are quite common on popular, public sites, only seven mean or profane posts appeared on Warren’s first blog post. The remaining comments—all 317 of them—were PostSecret fans reaching out to one another, sharing their secrets, or simply telling Warren, “Thank you.”
The deep connections among the more than 60,000 members of the PostSecret community have had profound impacts on their lives. One member found commentary on her secret on a stranger’s blog. She describes her experience in this email to Warren:
“The person wrote the following in reaction to my secret: "
This quote, part of a PostSecret postcard this week, has been resonating within me since I read it. It makes me want to cry. And scream. And laugh. And it makes me angry. And it comforts me that somewhere out there someone feels the same way." I had the support I needed all along in the heart of a stranger.”
In fact, this is one of the reasons that PostSecret has the effect it does. The endless options provided by online communities to re/mis/define oneself allow anyone to not only be anyone, but to be anyones: multiple, distinctive identities depending on the network in use. In the presentation and maintenance of all of these facets of the self, it is no wonder that there are things we might not know about ourselves. That may be why many people experience emotional distress in recognizing such a thing on PostSecret: that recognition is a violence to the part of the self that does not want that secret to be true, or has been living as if it is not true. In this way, PostSecret has become a place for all of the things people have discovered about themselves that would have negative consequences within their social network. That is what anonymity allows them to disclose. There is a real awareness of self-presentation, and a deep desire for authenticity.
A need to connect with strangers, therefore, has emerged as a response to the contradiction of those two values. The element of “microcelebrity” (with the online community as an audience) is important here because it limits the expression of authenticity to anonymity.
We are simultaneously fighting anonymity and using it.
We do this through creation.
In the PostSecret community, as in any anonymous publication, ideas, expression, art, and truth are widely distributed with no biases toward their inceptors. Other online art projects and communities serve this same purpose, in deeply thought-provoking and pointlessly comical ways. Check out
wefeelfine.org for the former, or
fmylife.com for the latter. We will stretch and break the limits of the current code (as Kate and
Steve have discussed) and find new ways to communicate and understand one another within it (as Greta’s research showed). Online anonymous communities have become our defining art form.
Regardless of the medium, art can still shatter us in the best way. It sparks a desire to ask big, impossible questions. Rather than “What is presentable?” or “What is cool?” we ask, “What is truth?” “What is beauty?” and, “Who am I?” In thinking of truth, a concern about authenticity reemerges. Frank Warren has recognized this in his answer to the question, “
Are all the secrets true?” He responds,
“
But I think of each postcard as a work of art. And as art, secrets can have different layers of truth. Some can be both true and false, others can become true over time depending on our choices. Sometimes a secret we keep from ourselves only becomes true after we read it on a strangers postcard.”
Thomas de Zengotita also recognizes this fluidity in the concept of truth in personal identity. In his book
Mediated, he claims that “true and false” is no longer a relevant dichotomy:
“
In a mediated world, the opposite of real isn’t phony or illusional or fictional—it’s optional. Idiomatically, we recognize this when we say, ‘The reality is…,’ meaning something that has to be dealt with, something that isn’t an option.” (14)
By this definition, one cannot say that a piece of someone’s identity is false. Each secret—a product of self-awareness and a desire for connection—is true because it creates a true connection to another individual. What this reveals overall is that complex, acute self-awareness is a source of creativity. The ability to intimately connect with a general, anonymous idea of “someone out there” (even through one small piece of truth) is a source of creativity. To create something that communicates truth is, more than anything, markedly and definably human.
