Secrets

Check it out, new links!

I just discovered this one today; it's a blog called PostSecret. People anonymously mail in their secrets on postcards. It's been done before in various forms, but I think the visual element makes this one particularly interesting.

There's something really intriguing about the tone of these postcards. It kind of reminds me of A Softer World comics. There's something breathless and precious about it. They're very brief, and yet filled with a sense of import, and exhaltation almost. When you think about it, secrecy is kind of a fascinating phenomenon, and closely related to the notion of the sacred. It's a piece of information one possesses and may not share, or may share only with certain elect. So it can also confer status, but if it spreads too much, it becomes irrelevant. Yet here, despite the fact that these secrets are being broadcast to the world at large, they don't actually spread information, because of their anonymity. So it's not that nobody can know a secret, it's that some specific group of people to whom this information actually matters can't know it. Telling it to outsiders has no real effect. So in this case, the missives remain secrets despite being shared with the world at large. The internet has made it possible to speak from within a secret without destroying its sacred nature.

Neato.