I Own Both the Care Bears Movies.

This week I was looking for material to use in one of my classes, and I spent some time looking at Post Secret. For those of you who don't know, it's a website where people anonymously mail in homemade post cards with secrets on them, and then the person they're mailed to puts them up on a blog to read. I was looking at them to possible use to demonstrate my six word memoir assignment, but since hardly any of them are only six words it didn't really work out, but the concept is still engaging to me.

The notions of public and private interact here in really interesting ways. I feel like this flux of new media technology, along with a desire to be "known", have made people more interested than ever in having their private lives made public (but only in ways that we control). I already mentioned this in class on Thursday--there is a part of me that wants to be known, to be read by a lot of people (although if I really wanted that I would change my writing style slightly so as to not be so clearly for people who know me, and if I REALLY wanted it I would try to advertise and get the word out, and I'm really not willing to do that). What makes me want this? Does the desire to be known have anything to do with the various new communicative tools that we have at our disposal, or is it simply more pronounced because anyone can post anything online? Why do we (and maybe "we" as a cohort don't, but "we" as a society definitely do...) want our personal lives public in the first place? This constitutes an anonymous but deeply personal leap into the world, and at what point is interaction with it inappropriate? Am I a voyeur for looking at these secrets, even though they're freely offered? Am I nosy if I respond to them in comments (which I don't, but other people occasionally do)? What happens if I recognize a secret mailed in by someone I know (which will probably never happen...)?

The other thing I notice while looking at Post Secret is the way that we as a culture are becoming more and more adept at telling stories in very few words. I don't think it's because of Twitter, but I definitely think that the goal to say something in 140 characters or less, combined with prolific texting, has definitely influenced the way that we communicate, particularly online. At a time when films are getting longer and longer (though I think that no matter how great the film, we're maxed out at three hours, and I think it will continue to be so), our personal stories are getting shorter and shorter, as if whole aspects of our personalities can be condensed to sound-bytes. I don't know how I feel about this.

I feel like I've sort of covered how I would use this in a classroom, but just to be explicit, here are some things I could potentially use Post Secret for:
1. A discussion of the ways that image and word work together to create a story (this is what I was originally looking at the images for).
2. A discussion of the personal/private space discussion in relation to online interactions.
3. A discussion of short form storytelling.

And in case you didn't figure it out, my secret (that I'm okay with you knowing) is in the title. It's not a good one, it's just what I could think of at 6:30 in the morning.