Friday the 13th got away from me with an early-morning spring break flight to Florida. Oops. No excuses. My apologies. Here are my notes in full, complete with slideshow pictures. This is basically a rough draft of my final project.
The PostSecret Effect: intimacy among strangers in online anonymous communities
The two core values that have emerged in my observation of these communities are *AUTHENTICITY and SELF-PRESENTATION.
Keep those in mind, so we can come back to them later.
Keep those in mind, so we can come back to them later.
We are so accustomed to anonymity that connecting with the content of strangers is comfortable— Kelly and Kevin both addressed this.
Contemplating something made by a stranger is a sort of present-day archaeology, of others (Found and PS) and ourselves (Mortified).
*These three sites are important because they represent three types of what you could call artifacts.
1. Accidental (Found, rather traditional of archaeology)
2. Intentional for the self (expression of that time, considered a record)
3. Intentional for others (traditional of artwork and intentionally revealing)
“Found” is the most basic element of connecting with strangers. The purpose of the project is trying to decipher a piece of someone’s life through something they never intended anyone to see. And that element alone shows not that we are nosy or curious, but that we really cherish something truly authentic.
Project Mortified is comical in its content. Described on the site as “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.” Some of the guidelines for being part of Mortified:
# Material must be presented by its original author.
# Material must be authentic; language is only altered to protect the innocent, awkward or angsty.”
In this, we see people connecting with their past selves, and enjoying that they are no longer that person. The “former self” essentially functions as a stranger, and there are two options: either we are able to understand that person through self-reflection, OR connecting with them causes self-reflection.
In either case, it more deeply connects people with themselves or parts of themselves that were previously unknown.
As we all read in Thompson’s article, “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."
These interactions 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 Saturated Self: "more charitably regards it as 'playing out our other selves.'"
And this is where PostSecret becomes very relevant.
It is the most intentional form of intimacy with strangers because the content is created for that very purpose. It has had such a deep impact on people, as seen in the site’s Follow-Up stories.
“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.”
PS has become a place for all of the things they have discovered about themselves that would have negative consequences within their social network. That’s what people are willing to disclose.
A need to connect with strangers has emerged as a response to a contradiction of values: authenticity and self-presentation. The element of “microcelebrity” is important here because it limits our expression of authenticity to anonymity.
We're reconnecting with what we have now, and it is through disconnection. We are simultaneously fighting anonymity and using it. And we do this through CREATION.
In the broader context of anonymity and identity, it pulls us away from the emerging mad/smart/bot mobs and back to the "Great American Poets" part where ideas, expression, art, and truth are widely distributed with no biases toward their inceptors.
This is manifesting in so many different ways, especially as we learn more about how to use Web 2.0, XML, and other design programs. They 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 those big, impossible questions. Rather than “What is cool? What is trendy?” we start asking, “What is truth?” “What is beauty?” and of course,“Who am I?”
Frank Warren has recognized this in his answer to the question, “Are all the secrets true?”
“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.”
So what this is revealing overall is that complex, acute self-awareness is the source creativity and creation. This is, more than anything, markedly and definably human.
(Read out loud: 6 ½ minutes)
-Katie
I'm following you because I'm jealous of you. I'm at a university where I can't turn my interest in digital communities/digital humanities/code studies into grades very easily... in fact, when I bring it up with professors here I think it can hurt me as much as help. For example, my comm 101 class taught that every computer gets a URL when they connect to the internet... I corrected the professor but I think the professor resents me for it. I have to grit my teeth when most professors talk about Wikipedia, because they are ignorant of the medium. If they knew it and didn't like it that would be one thing, but banning a tool because you don't understand it is wrong. There's more, but that's a digression. I could write a book on digital illiteracy at my university.
ReplyDeleteI built and run the most visited university sim in SecondLife and I've blogged for years. I dream of getting into a grad school where I can do what you're doing in class.
PostSecret interests me because it is a collapse of the ethos that normally occurs in digital communities. In most other online locations your digital identity will probably encounter the same identities over and over again, which builds up a kind of ethos, or relationship that becomes part of the paratext of the communication. Think Wikipedia or Facebook. These relationships aggregate to form communities. I don't actually beleive that an online identity can be true or false. They are a creative outlet. Some people use realism when making an identity, some people use surrealism, cubism, etc. On postsecret people create identities without ethos. It's the opposite of the chans, where people create ethos without identity, but the result is kind of similar.
Of course, postsecretcommunity.com is a different kettle of fish entirely.