So it’s not surprising that this human tendency should be even more widespread in the age of the Internet. Boy, do we like to talk about ourselves. When did full disclosure become such a selling point? Fiction is no longer adequate to address our urge to hear and tell all: reality has become the final frontier. Meanwhile, reality TV nurtures this need — fuels it, fills it.
Being heard, being understood — the desperate hope that someone will "get" us — has become a sort of religion to the digital masses. Fittingly, a new blog site patterns itself after a Catholic confessional: PostSecret accepts people’s true confessions — their darkest secrets, their tortured hidden thoughts — and renders them as catchy online postcards, with edgy graphics and handwritten messages that make for instant art.
The blog phenomenon (short for "web log") has always tapped into the confessional urge. A century ago, if you had predicted that people would be spending hours per day reading the random daily thoughts of complete strangers online — well, they would have told you to get a life. This website, though, calling itself a "community art project," simply boils people’s non-stop blog blather down to the bare essentials: the juicy disclosures, the stare-into-the-abyss musings, the things people used to reveal only after several pitchers of beer or margaritas. Then it takes the handwritten one-line messages and pairs them with aesthetically interesting images.
Updated weekly, PostSecret allows visitors to dig deep down into their recesses, come up with the dirt (anonymously, usually) and pass it on to readers craving another dark look into the closet. Some of the messages are simply candid and engaging ("My secret is… I want to be an outlaw biker") while some point toward darker preoccupations ("I show pictures of my feet to a man online so he’ll buy me stuff").
Some of the blog confessions simply amount to bitchy venting ("I think my actor roommate is ugly and untalented") while others are imponderable, possibly meaningless ("I save all the staples I pull out at work. They’re in a box in my desk. It weighs over a pound and a half").
These kinds of unwanted disclosures may be the reason that humans have never evolved the ability to read each other’s minds.
In a world where people are expected to act and speak in a certain way, it is perhaps refreshing to glimpse people’s candid thoughts online, such as: "I don’t care about recycling (but I pretend I do)."
Such thoughts can be simply gross ("I love to pee when I’m swimming," or "I like the smell of my own farts") — little tidbits of information that you really wish the person had not freely shared. They can provide insights into the sense of failure that hovers over many ordinary people during the course of the average day ("I make up fantasy stories because my real life SUCKS… And my fantasy life is starting to SUCK, too"); or they can be frighteningly revealing, candid snapshots: the sort of things that people dare not utter — out loud. One postcard simply shows an image of the World Trade Center Towers, smoldering after the 9/11 attacks. Chillingly, the caption reads: "He didn’t go in to work that day. Sometimes, I wish he had."
Others tap into mass televised culture, like the one about the global experience of watching Pope John Paul’s funeral… but even here, there’s a bit of guilt attached: "I deleted the Pope’s funeral unwatched off my TiVO to make room for an episode of Survivor."
Of course, truth is often another casualty in the world of blogging. The question then arises: how many of these posted "confessions" are real, and how many are invented? Knowing that people will pretty much say anything to get attention, one must approach such revelations with a large dose of salt. For instance, one confessional blogger offers this tidbit: "I cried for Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars Episode III… but not for the tsunami victims." Sad as that may sound, it’s hard to swallow the idea of anyone actually being emotionally engaged enough by Episode III to shed tears for Anakin. That’s where the credibility just falls apart.
Still, it’s a catchy phrase, and just the sort of thing that would make a dandy T-shirt — that is, if bloggers bothered to read T-shirts anymore.
Many of the posted messages rely on a punchline, of sorts: a zinger that betrays much about how people will say one thing, but actually mean to say another: the unheard cavalcade on the tip of their tongues. One card shows a skeletal female figure with the message: "I want to be anorexic… but I can’t stop eating."
Unsettling, at times ("I sit in public and pretend to read, but actually I’m eavesdropping on your conversation"), the weekly contributions to PostSecret often remind one of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire — that scene where Bruno Ganz’s angel is moving patiently from one troubled soul to the next, lost in their private thoughts and worries, spoken confessions that are audible only to him and the audience. He offers a soothing, angelic hand to their troubled lives. But we, the readers of PostSecret, have no such absolution to offer: only our momentary attention, and our immediate reaction. This, perhaps, is what passes for absolution these days.