A few research notes

It may be right in the middle of an abnormally beautiful weekend, but I'm working on my new trailer. I'm thinking of calling my project something like The PostSecret Effect: Intimacy With Strangers in Online Anonymous Communities.

The term "intimacy with strangers" comes from Frank Warren himself. In sifting through recent news on his myspace blog, I found an interview with Authors on Air from Monday evening. As PostSecret is an anonymous community, Frank is its only face. He seems to take that very seriously; he talks about secret-senders as if they are family members.

This is interesting. Warren is a celebrity: he is a sought-after speaker and best-selling author. Yet the nature of his fame includes him in the intimacy that is experienced by PostSecret community members. They feel connected to him (as most people might with their favorite actor), but he also feels connected to them. This has to be a rare case.

Anyway, in the interview linked above, Frank references several other sites that form the same kind of "intimacy with strangers", like FoundMagazine.com.

I know some of my classmates are looking at the history of all of this, like the Industrial Revolution and how it increased the level of anonymity in everyday society, so I might need to collaborate with them. But let me jump the gun and take this one step further: did that increasing anonymity cause our culture to lack a way to provide such a basic human need as emotional connection?

I think it did. And things like PostSecret and Found Magazine are just ways that we are grasping at reconnection to one another.

So maybe the historical parts of this project will tell how we got to be so disconnected, which will definitely show some mind-blowing stuff. I'm liking how PostSecret turns that around and will show how we're reconnecting with what we have now. The need to reconnect is a key point though.

I hope that I'm able to thoroughly address all of these things over the semester.

*Check back for the new trailer: it will be up by midnight Sunday!*
-Katie