Now that I have started my Research Paper and I am well underway to completing it, I would like to take the time to really reflect on some things that I have found interesting while writing this paper. Now, if the title doesn’t give away too much detail, I am doing my research essay on the social networking site called PostSecret. PostSecret is an online website where anonymous people send their hand crafted postcards to a given address every week and the top 10 submitted every week get uploaded every sunday to PostSecret for all to see. As mentioned before, all postcards and uploads to the website are anonymous making the people who created the postcards unsearchable.

By doing some exploring, I have found another website linked to PostSecret called PostSecret community (http://www.postsecretcommunity.com) where there is much news about different upcoming events related to PostSecret, a PostSecret chat where users can chat about different postcards they see on the website and even offer support to many of the people who send in these postcards, plus much more. This brings me to my research question of the type of community that PostSecret creates and offers for its users.

The first thing I noticed while I was searching through many of the online forums on PostSecret community was the large amount of people that are willing and want to help others out in any way they can. Many of these people are posting numbers for suicide help lines, even their own personal phone numbers and email inviting people to talk. Many people also just say they are there to listen to anyone who needs to vent or get things off their chest. Other people have posted inspirational quotes and even different strategies to help distract yourself from self harming.

In response to much of this feedback, people that have depression and other problems, such as they may self harm to make themselves feel worthy, are responding positively and thanking many of the anonymous helpers that post for support. It creates an environment where these people are not judged and not called names like “emo” or “gothic,” but rather are respected and welcomed. This becomes really contradictory to what really happens in everyday situations where these people are shamed for there actions and not accepted by society.

I find it very interesting in the way that people can come together to help others in an online community such as PostSecret, where they are so open to talk about their problems and also so willing to help others that may be facing these problems. I believe that much of this has to do with our aging population that isn’t so acceptant of these self harming ideas because it is more of a 21st century thing that has developed over the past decade. The reason I see PostSecret and many other online communities to be very much accepting of these things is because the people that are online on these websites are all people ranging from 12 to 30 years old rather than our older population.