In Blogging as a Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog (available here), Miller and Shepherd discuss the purposes of blogging for both the reader and writer. Yes, I know this is an article from pretty early on in the term… but bear with me. I will use their research to examine Post Secret (here), Six Word Memoir (here), and Facebook (here… I’m impressed that you need a link for that). I know that we have done considerable work with this in class (and at home, for some of you), but I think this will be a new angle on familiar topics.
Miller and Shepherd turn to James Atlas’ phrase “culture of confession” (link above, middle of page 4) to describe the current climate of American culture– people are sharing more personal things in increasingly public spheres than ever before. Post Secret, Six Word Memoir, and Facebook all exemplify this in their own way. Post Secret is, by its very design, made up of actual confessions. In the words of Post Secret itself: “[y]our secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.” (Source) It is, straight up, confessional. Very few submissions are selected to be posted, most will never be released in any public way. Even with this knowledge, thousands of submissions are sent– there is a deep desire for many people to have their experiences see the light of day, even if that is just through contact with one stranger.
An atypically PG example of a Post-Secret confession
Six Word Memoir is mostly significantly less “juicy” than Post Secret. It is less exclusive– anyone can post, and the only curating that happens is when posts are selected for books or highlighted by the editors. It allows the writer to confess, in a way, but it is from a much more literary/storytelling standpoint. Contributors are supposed to share their life stories or important aspects of their lives, rather than let slip a single illicit detail.
Finally, Facebook– by far the most well known and widely-contributed-to of the three sites. When describing Facebook, it is difficult not to make it sound like an extremely narcissistic endeavor. Though it is less public than Post Secret or Six Word Memoir, its relatively small-scale sharing is more than made up for by the complete lack of anonymity of its users to each other. It is fundamentally a social endeavor– after all, you are sharing posts with your entire community of friends. The personal confessional aspect, though, is loud and strong. This truly exemplifies a “culture of confession”: not only are you choosing to broadcast details of your life to basically everyone you know, but the details themselves are often the most banal minutia of your day. Lunch selection, a single youtube video, a haircut. Where else but a culture that values and demands confessions would such consistent over-sharing be seen as not just acceptable, but standard?
I definitely agree with the idea that, over time, our society has developed an insatiable hunger for self-disclosure. Sadly, I think it is becoming more evident that we’re immersed in a culture where some people would readily exchange privacy for a celebrity status, or for an opportunity to obtain therapeutic release. I particularly liked that you drew attention to the differences between these three “confession sites” and how confession takes place in starkly different forms in each. Yet in reading your post I started to wonder, where else do we find evidence for this “confessional culture”? Do you think that the value that our society places on confession is partly responsible for the growing popularity of life narratives?