PostSecret, on the other hand, has never been about gaining points. Secrets just exist on the site, for you to connect with or consider. If you have a strong reaction to one, you can email Frank about it. That's about it.
The World of PostSecret contains a section devoted to the best moments from the app's short history. But boy, what an exciting experiment while it was out there.
Those three months were very special. My new dream is to see the world through the eyes of PostSecret. Since he shut down the PostSecret app in January of , Frank Warren has continued to receive thousands of postcards in his mailbox each week.
When asked what he sees as the difference between sharing a secret on a screen versus sharing a secret on a postcard, Warren spoke of the power of ritual: "For me, the ritual of posting a postcard and choosing your words allows you to take ownership of your secret.
Decorating the card and physically sending it off to a stranger… I think that act itself can affect people deeply. It's subversive. I think it surprises them. But Warren remains open and optimistic about the idea of reviving the PostSecret app, with a strong system in place for preventing the abuse that disrupted the last iteration. I see a lot of potential for healing and catharsis and just fun. What else lies ahead for PostSecret's next decade?
For starters, Warren is looking for someone to move into his Germantown home and take over the operation: a new keeper of the PostSecret mailbox. It's really like Willy Wonka passing on the keys to the candy shop. There is also PostSecret: The Show , a play opening in Vancouver this January, and a concurrent PostSecret album — with recordings from live events set to music by One Hello World — coming out in early And in mailboxes around the world, self-starting PostSecret communities continue to thrive.
Secret-sharing start-ups will thrive too, but perhaps for different reasons. Even if Warren finds the means to restart the PostSecret app with heightened security measures, part of me hopes that the mailbox in Germantown will never cease to receive hundreds of postcards each week, and that whoever moves into the house next will continue to hand-scan a few every Sunday, and upload them onto that familiar, lo-fi webpage I've been returning to for a decade.
The ritual, as Warren knows, matters. Perhaps we need postcards and Frank Warren the way we need books bound in paper and plays we see live and letters in the mail, things we can touch, things that don't ping back right away: because there are still parts of ourselves that demand a little bit more than an upvote, parts of ourselves we are still reluctant to leave for others to scroll on by. A secret counts for less than what you do with it.
I often tell my students that to write, as Edwidge Danticat says, is to revolt against silence. In the context of my classrooms, for example, no young woman has ever been forbidden to speak, and yet year after year I encounter some who seem to have internalized a directive to be reserved, sometimes to the point of being painfully shy.
For these students, writing about their experiences represents a triumph of their own agency and authority. It is a refusal to be silent. On the surface, the woman in the audience had also revolted. But had she really? Or had the public admission merely pointed to a private suppression? Had she flipped the coin over only to flip it back again? It hardly matters. Her refusal to be silent was immediately swallowed by the silence it rejected.
Hers was only one voice in a gym packed with strangers, and though she had made that voice heard it sounded more like the gasp of a drowning woman than the relief of a survivor.
The speaker that day was a charismatic man named Frank Warren, and 12 years earlier he had started collecting secrets mailed to him on postcards, which he then uploaded to his popular website. His speech was about the liberating power of sharing those secrets, which Warren called the currency of intimacy.
Considering how much he had been paid to speak, how often he makes such appearances, and then adding in his bestselling books, he must earn a healthy living. The truth is that by mailing postcards to the house in Maryland where he no longer lives, everybody from disaffected teens to victims of abuse is, in a sense, helping him pay for his new life in California. No wonder there were postcards on every seat in the gym.
The beauty of the arrangement is its anonymity. The site guarantees a measure of transparency, but what it really guarantees, paradoxically, is to keep your secrets for you. To post a secret to Facebook would be another matter, but only because the audience would be limited, unlike the internet as a whole, to those very social relations in whose presence a secret, because of its potential to cause trouble, becomes a secret. She had to find a way to tell it, to free herself from its power.
So she went to therapy. She told her secret—to me, among others. On its own, the telling is less interesting than the fact that she continues to tell it. The feeling of isolation because of secrecy is not a new one. The ways in which we can cope with it, however, have been revolutionized.
Sites like PostSecret and the confession subreddit fill the human need to be heard and understood on a new and distinctly modern level. For those without a trusted ear, it goes beyond the step of writing a secret down. Initially, not knowing the identity of a poster would seem to detract from the power of confession.
Privacy Policy Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message. While some secrets may be melodramatic or distinctive affairs, transgressions, assault , the underlying thread of many confessions resonate across lives and experiences. At PostSecret shows, users have even proposed to their significant others. Many have walked into stores and left physical postcards in the physical copies of PostSecret books, hoping others will find them.
Digital confession translates to offline action. JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students.
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