Postsecret
www.postsecret.blogspot.com.
I’ve loved this site for years. If you’ve somehow missed the international blaze of publicity it’s now had (which has led to a book and a regular slot in a British newspaper), it’s a collection of confessional postcards anonymously sent to the site’s creator, Frank Warren. I did an interview with him for a magazine once. “One reason I feel people trust me with their secrets is they feel that I will treat their admissions with respect and understanding,” he told me. “PostSecret is a community where people know that what they share will not be judged and may help someone else.”
Warren describes Postsecret as an “ongoing community art project”, but doesn’t take the darker confessions lightly - his site includes the number of the National Hopeline Network, a phone-line for people contemplating suicide. It’s just possible he has saved one or two lives. Everyone has a different secret, but you can’t help noticing that certain things come up again and again - childhood abuse, self-harm, unrequited love, infidelity etc.
Other confessions - a lot of them, in fact - are just silly and funny, locker room sniggering scribbled down. But the appeal, arguably, is the same in each case. It’s about being granted a glimpse into other people’s private worlds, the same voyeuristic thrill we get from Big Brother or tabloid horror stories. It’s also about the absurd fact that it can be easier to make a connection with another human being across continents via the internet than to strike up conversation on a bus (one of our songs, The Fakester Genocide, was probably partly inspired by Postsecret).
Every confessor has a different motive, of course. Some are using Warren’s site like a church confession booth, and would undoubtedly be traumatised if identified. Others are desperate to be discovered. The postcards are art too, as Warren says. He calls them “graphic haikus” - they remind me a bit of David Shrigley and Tracey Emin.
That said, sometimes I can’t help but be suspicious of Warren’s “community art project”. Does he himself have a secret, one about a 41-year-old frustrated artist withering in an unexciting job, who finally made a mark on the wider world by making thousands of postcards and pretending they were sent by other people? (Many of them are undoubtedly real, given the number of hits on the website, but all of them - who knows?) But that’s the beauty of the internet. You can never completely trust anything that you see there - which is why it’s best to view Postsecret as a work of art. There would be truth in it even if it was based on a fiction. A secret I spotted once on the site seemed to understand this. “I know that sending in a stupid postcard to share a secret with a bunch of strangers won’t do a damn thing to change the loneliness and unhappiness in my life,” it says. “And I sent this anyway.” The point is to participate, by posting or just looking.
Andrew
