Got a secret? Not on the Internet

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Everybody’s got a secret.

So, why do we need to share them on the Internet?  I speak specifically of PostSecret, a “community art project” in which one creates a postcard-size piece of artwork containing a confession and then sends it into Frank Warren, who then posts about 20 secrets every Sunday on the PostSecret blog (there have also been four PostSecret books and a fifth arriving in October). People send in secrets about everything from small social transgressions or oddities to the darkest recesses of depression and self-harm.

“My wife won’t brush her dog,” one person writes in, on top of a photo of a dog. “So I put the dog’s hair in her food.”

Another person writes: “I cheated on my eye exam to get the glasses I always wanted.” And another: “I religiously read the blogs of 2 women who have recently given birth to their first children. It distracts me from the fact that my husband doesn’t want to have children.”

All the secrets on PostSecret, confessions to the anonymous Internet gods, are carefully constructed by the confessor. Each secret’s presentation is "aesthetic-ized," through word choice and drawing and graphic design, like the confessor is trying to make their secrets (which are too ugly for their immediate social circle) beautiful for the entire world. This highlights the inherent tension between the artifice of the medium and the supposed honesty of the content.

But there are other sites like it. My personal favorite these days is Dear Old Love, where contributors send in “pithy, specific” notes directed to their former flames. It is a more literary pursuit, as opposed to the visual beauty of PostSecret, where writers are trying to outwit and out write each other on the subject of old, lost or future paramours.

“I taught you how to fold towels and properly iron shirts,” writes in one disappointed woman. “Didn’t you know you were in training to be my husband, not hers?”

They’re all only a few lines each — I doubt many are longer than the 140 characters of a tweet, and yet they all tell a story within them. It’s like the anonymous writer wants the intended recipient of the note to know, but be unable to confirm, that it was he or she who sent it.

It’s a little strange to turn our deepest secrets, the ones that would normally only be whispered to the most dear of confidantes after a few glasses of wine, into small spectacles for public viewing. But for generations of Americans forced to read “The Scarlet Letter” in high school (or college or both), secrets are seen as destroyers of personal psyches. Hester Prynne, at the very least, had her secret out in the open. She couldn’t hide it — her symbol of a child and the letter she was forced to wear were evidence of her sin, her secret. But Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s partner in adultery, was left unexposed and thus tortured himself as penance.

Dimmesdale’s brand of self-flagellation, I suspect, is not nearly as popular as anonymous truth telling. I think that the popularity of PostSecret and other incognito secret Web sites (SecretTweet, FMyLife, Txt Frm Lst Nght, Group Hug) has a lot to do with an open type of voyeurism. Finding amusement in the pain and humiliation of others is a lot more acceptable when the pain and humiliation is willingly packaged for public consumption — it takes the taboo out of looking in secret at secrets.

Looking at or reading the secrets is a cathartic experience. The human intricacies brought to light through self-examination invite the voyeur to identify with the secret. The writer/artist/confessor is seeking that affirmation from the reader: See me, hear me and love my secret.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, September 23, 2009.

Today's 20-somethings have reason to envy the '60s

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

We deny it, but I think my generation of 20-somethings is jealous of the kids who came of age in the 1960s.

This week, the third season premiere of "Mad Men," a cult TV hit about an advertising agency in this illustrious decade, coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival. The virtual second coming of the Beatles in the form of a video game will be arriving in early September.

Coincidence? I think not.

The '60s have been thoroughly mythologized as a time of change and revolution — the good kind. Young people believed in their causes, and peaceful protest worked. The causes had an immediate moral weight, because they were so basic and just: civil rights, anti-war and the beginnings of the women's movement. They say that America was naive in the '60s, like it’s a good thing.

And maybe it was. The myth of the '60s, with free love and Martin Luther King Jr., walking on the moon and Jimi Hendrix playing the electric guitar with his teeth at Woodstock, is quite glorious. My feeling is that the young folk today (that means me, too) just can’t measure up. I mean, what are Youtube videos compared to the March on Washington? Or, the Internet compared to space travel?

Don’t get me wrong; the Internet is awesome: It’s practically made libraries go the way of outhouses. My mom thinks it’s funny that I think a newspaper on microfilm is fun and novel. But the material point is that the '60s are now 40 years in the past, and a new wave of nostalgia is rising.

Not that the '60s were all that great. The rampant sexism and racism must’ve been awful. The draft and thousands of Americans dying in Vietnam stunk. We chose to remember the “redeeming” qualities for a reason and forget that life was just as gritty then as it is now.

Generally, I think that my generation is jealous because of the sense of unified purpose, or unified outrage, our parents say they had. Even more, I think we’re jealous that the movements in the '60s had a measurable and memorable effect — not just at the time, but an effect that is still felt 40 years later.

I was 14 when Sept. 11 happened and the perception of our world changed. Many of us in college and straight out of high school can barely remember the pre-Sept. 11 world; taking our shoes off in airports is normal. The political consciousness of a generation was made during years in which fear of terrorism overwhelmed the country and the nation accepted, even applauded, massive curtailments of civil liberties.

This does not exactly foster a sense of faith in America among young folks.  

And this, I believe, is what we are most jealous of: that there was ever faith that the United States could rise above its current condition and live up to its ideals. And not just America, that we ourselves could be better. Sure, we got Barack Obama elected, but the president (even the first black president) is a symbol, not a movement of epic proportions that fundamentally changes the fabric of the county.

Despite the fun to be had playing Halo, this is something that has been lost.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, August 19, 2009.