In November of 2004, Frank Warren, a small business owner in Germantown, Md., printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards and handed them out to strangers. These, he told them, were to share a secret, which had to be something true and something they had never shared with anybody else before. Slowly cards began arriving, at which point Warren posted them in a Washington, D.C., art gallery.
At first, Warren would receive two to three secrets a week, written on the backs of the cards he handed out. As the gallery exhibit drew to a close, however, the number of secrets sent to him each day continued to grow and were now arriving in various forms, including photographs, wedding invitations and parking tickets. Now he receives between 200 and 300 secrets a day, most of which are handmade and have something to do with the secret they display. Some of the more successful secrets, which are now sent from locations around the world, have found their way into a Post Secret book and onto Warren’s Web site, PostSecret.com.
“I don’t really know why I started the project,” Warren said. “Looking back, I think it’s because I had secrets that I was struggling to deal with, and by encouraging strangers to share, I could begin to deal with my own secrets.”
What began as personal fulfillment has now turned into a global community with its roots online – a Web site faithfully visited by fans, eagerly awaiting a new set of secrets to be posted each Sunday.
“I think it’s great that people are able to express themselves without fear of being judged,” said Sarah Ellison, a first-year history student and creator of a UCLA Facebook group dedicated to Post Secret. “By reading these secrets, people know there are others who feel that way and (also) have a hard time communicating.”
Warren feels similarly. “I think I’ve tapped into something very human,” he said of Post Secret’s remarkable popularity.
Web sites and publications such as these are all part of a movement toward using a hybrid of media, technology and art as a method of interpersonal communication in a world where people are becoming increasingly isolated.
Davy Rothbart and Jason Bitner, co-creators of FOUND Magazine and its Web site, FOUNDMagazine.com, have begun their own such project by compiling various found and discarded items, usually notes, letters, photographs or drawings, and sharing them via their publications and the Internet. This also began simply out of personal interest.
“For me it started when I was 16,” said Bitner of his affinity for collecting found objects. “I worked at this recycling center, and I was in charge of separating the newsprint from the glossy paper. So me and all these people would go through all this stuff and there would be random notes and things dropped in there, some of which we would take out and keep. At the end of the day we’d share them with each other and try to find the best thing that was found.”
Bitner began to focus more on this hobby when he met Rothbart at a party in 2000, who had the idea of taking various things that had been found and creating a magazine. The first publication was released in 2001 and was originally intended for just their friends.
“We brought (the first magazine) to a Kinko’s in Chicago to have it copied, and the guy working there thought it was awesome,” Bitner said. “He told us that he would sift through stuff in the recycle bin at Kinko’s, so he totally got it. We asked him for 50 copies but instead he made us 300, so we brought (the extras) over to an independent bookstore and started selling them.”
That was all it took. They have now sold more than 35,000 copies.
Similar to Post Secret, FOUND creates anonymous connections between people around the world. Though the material shared isn’t necessarily a secret, it is usually something that wasn’t meant to be read or wasn’t intended to have an audience.
“What ends up happening is you get a really good window into what people are doing with their lives,” Bitner said.
In another parallel to the Post Secret phenomenon, FOUND has become a largely collaborative effort.
“The mass majority of the stuff comes from other people,” he said. “It is viewer-created content. We are as enthusiastic and amazed as anybody else is about some of this stuff.”
And people are certainly enthusiastic. Submissions to the Post Secret Web site suggest it has branched out much further than the usual teen and college-age crowd.
“They cover such a wide range of interests. They’re not (for) just a certain group of art fans. My mom has even started reading them,” Ellison said. “Even people who aren’t very art-centered enjoy the human aspect of such a piece.”
But the creation of a community using a medium such as the Internet, which naturally discourages immediate human interaction, is certainly paradoxical.
“That’s one of the things I have mixed feelings about,” said Ellison. “It’s good because a random person from Holland can help someone from Texas, but at the same time I wish these people were really able to speak to one another and not just share online.”
Warren sees this newfound sense of community as a positive development with lots of opportunity, and he hopes that people get a sense of that through his Web site.
“New technology is creating the potential for new kinds of conversations,” he said.
The site has proven to be a haven for people going through difficult emotional periods, as they take comfort in the fact that they’re not alone in having such problems. For Warren, this is yet another surprise he has encountered along the way, which resulted in the raising of $30,000 for suicide prevention.
The FOUND Web site focuses on sharing things in a more lighthearted manner.
“A lot of the stuff we find is hilarious, some of it is heartbreaking,” said Bitner of the types of finds he comes across. “It reminds me of being in kindergarten when we had show-and-tell time. People bring things in that are interesting and that they want to share with the rest of the class. I feel like I’m in the classroom, just helping people share.”
Bitner’s favorite types of found items, however, are ones of a more emotional nature.
“I like love letters and break-up notes,” he said. “Then, when I am writing those things myself, it reminds me that I’m just like everybody else.”
Such communities also create forums that allow almost anyone to exhibit a piece of art, regardless of previous experience or someone else’s prior approval of its artistic merit.
“Sometimes courage is more important than talent or training in creating meaningful art,” Warren said.
The openness with which such projects receive people’s work has even inspired a group of students in Rieber Hall. Alejandra Cerros, a first-year physiological science student and member of the Facebook group created by Ellison, periodically gets together with a group of friends to work on her postcard.
“I think it’s the simplicity of the project that makes people participate in it,” she said. “By the way you decorate your postcard you’re expressing your feelings.”
Cerros has created her own community within the Post Secret community by bringing people together on campus to work on their individual projects.
“We want to do it as a group thing. But we still won’t let each other know our secrets,” she said.