Truly Connecting:

My friend Ian and I are currently in the middle of a heated prank war.

It’s all in good fun, really. I fired the first shots by telling him to meet me at the Perry-Castaneda Library on Labor Day. Fool that he is, he did not realize that the library was closed, it being a holiday (and yet he had the sense to enjoy hours of blessed sleep). He walked through the sweltering Texas heat for thirty minutes, only to discover that it was closed. I can only imagine the despair that crossed his sweat-ridden face once his attempts to push at the door were met with resistance.

As retribution, he put an ad on Craigslist.com with MY phone number that enthused: FREE GUITARS! FREE BOOKSHELVES! FREE MATRESSES! CALL ME NOW!

Of course, minutes after this posting, my phone exploded with calls. ”These poor, deceived people,” I thought as I listened to their voicemails. Over the course of a day, I received over twenty calls and a full voicemail box, all because of this one stint on the Internet, this miniscule contact I had apparently made 

with the online world.  

I had no idea that such a trivial thing would affect so many others. Even though the Internet connects us, I never really felt that it truly connected us. How could it, when this connection was interlaced with anonymity and space? In the early 00’s, my view of the Internet was that is was rigid and cold, devoid of human emotion and compassion. The only thing I needed from it was Google.com, and in return, I received absolute knowledge.

This was all before I came upon a website called Postsecret.com. The premise, as stated on the site, is this:

“PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard.”

I almost didn’t know how to handle myself in the face of such personal issues as I scrolled down the page. These secrets ranged from disturbingly dark, extremely weird, to unbelievably hilarious. And yet, in the midst of all of these, I felt that I could connect to each person who had taken the time and the courage to write a piece of their soul onto a 4x6 postcard. I wanted to reach out and touch the person just as they had touched me.  

“The death of a loved one, a severe illness, a financial setback, or extreme adversity can cause us to stand back, look at our lives, and ask ourselves some hard questions: “What’s really important? Why am I doing what I’m doing?” Covey, pg. 131

Reading these secrets made me reflect upon my own life. I began to write my own secrets down, and tore them up when I was finished. Seeing them in print, so vivid and real, now almost as things outside of my entity, I resolved to let go burden of having them. And at the end of the day, after I had mended fences and reconciled feelings, I could not believe that a mere website had made me a better person.

This is the first time I had an encounter with a website that wasn’t solely based on information. This website was based on emotion and the human condition. Now, with millions of visitors everyday, it has truly changed the way I look at the web. The fact that it is still so popular in this ever-changing world can be best explained with this quote from the article “Revenge of the Right Brain”:

“To flourish in this age, we’ll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are “high concept” and “high touch.” High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative and to come up with inventions the world didn’t know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.” Revenge of the Right Brain (Course Anthology) pg. 331

Postsecret is both unique in concept and universal in content. Imagine people all over the world, separated by language barriers and distance, bonding and connecting, truly connecting with a simple image on a page. Isn’t this what the Internet is all about? Being able to empathize and understand is one of the greatest levels of humanity, and a mere website has managed to evoke the deepest and most complicated of feelings.

More and more websites like Postsecret are popping up today. Perhaps people are beginning to realize the advantages of having such easy access to others (and I do not mean advertising). I am talking about using this expansive machine to make it truly ours, to try to pour into it some of the qualities that make us human. 

In "The Machine is Us/ing Us", the creator of the video states,

"The web is no longer just linking information"

"Web 2.0 is linking people...people sharing, trading, and collaborating"

This is truly our generation. We have access to virtually the entire world, and all it takes is a leisurely stroke of the finger, or a tap of the thumb. In a day when anyone can edit (Wikipedia) or publish (Blogger) and instantly gain access to a wide range of audiences, we must be careful with how we use this newfound power.  We must take full advantage of this strange connection we can make with people over the web, and use it to better ourselves.  How we manipulate text, how we format the page, and how we choose pictures--all of these HOWS eventually coalesce into the biggest HOW of all: How we connect. The Internet was once a YOU age, and recently a ME age with the advent of YouTube. Now, as it progresses and changes, maybe it can be an US age, the true connection that we all long for.