c. scott andreas

Indulging a tangent from an ongoing research project, I spent the better part of this afternoon exploring the secrets that people tell on their blogs. It began as a quest for narratives constructed for the purpose of establishing a sense of authenticity – a peephole, as it were, selectively revealed by the author to an anonymous audience in order to establish a connection of sorts. I refined a new sort of search designed to automatically trawl for these stories, then configured a script to publish them to a web page, updated once every ten minutes.

And it worked. It worked too well, in fact. The stories that came up were not selective revelations. They were constructed, certainly, but most were fits of emotion - veritable hearts bleeding XHTML - and not intended for strangers.

Some things were never meant to see the light of day. I attempted to lock the page, but the authentication process failed and provided no protection. I removed the page completely after a couple hours, closing off a path leading to the back alleys of the blogosphere. Fortunately, server logs indicate that the link was visible to only one individual who visited my site during this window whom I believe was a friend of mine. As such, it appears that no one saw the page.

What was going through my head?

It was a drive to create something new. I don’t code, but I do enjoy finding new uses for existing technologies. As such, this was me “teaching the web a new trick.” It was exciting.

It was going to be my contribution to Web 2.0. Like PostSecret, or Found Magazine, but with blogs. Something to show the world that bloggers are real human beings working to deal with the pain and brokenness of life without anyone to talk to. Instead of whispering concerns into the ear of a close friend, some make the mistake of banging them out on keyboards and firing them into the blogosphere - where they assume they’ll never be read. Clearly, the plan backfired (mine, and theirs).

A guy who slacked on his New Year’s resolution diet. A young woman who was just offered the job of her dreams but couldn’t tell anyone she knew. A man who cheated on his wife. And a woman who lied to cover up her husband’s infidelity.

These stories are indexed. By Google Blog Search. Technorati. And several others. And they are very, very searchable.

To poll such an index at regular intervals with a query specifically designed to trawl for the most painful, revealing, heart-wrenching narratives, then decontextualize them and publish the results with links for the amusement of callous voyeurs was to create something abominable. And indeed, life imitates art.

Haunted by the sorts of stories that kept pouring in, I asked myself: Can anything good come out of this? Education, I thought. People should know better than to post their darkest secrets on the web where anyone can read them.

But then I felt terrible. Sick to my stomach, and uneasy all afternoon. PostSecret is voluntary, freeing, and beautiful - the reader’s pleasure is not in a slimy voyeurism but in the cooperative celebration of the author’s creative liberation from dark, nagging thoughts. Found is decontextualized, entirely anonymized, and obscure. What I’d created was unlike either of these. It was monstrous.

What kind of world would it have made? A world in which people, myself included, take pleasure in others’ pain. A world where we laugh at suffering and cheer for brokenness, scorning rather than honoring the very image of God that lies at the heart of every human being. Indeed, a world of sin and disorder rather than the peace, harmony, and liberation to be revealed at the coming of the Son of Man. And if that’s the sort of world I was making, perhaps I’d find the flames of Heaven burning hotter than the flames of hell.

Please consider this my humble act of contrition. A meta-secret, if you will.

In peace,

- csa