Confessionals: When typing doesn't quite cut it

The second half of Turkle’s book moves us out of the land of robot toys and into that of devices, the every ready cellular telephones and instant messengers.  We are constantly connected, constantly able to reach one another, be they friends or strangers.  We have become busier because we feel we need to do more.  The things which could have saved us from over expending ourselves have turned out to be the very things which keep us from one another.

                As in the previous part of her book, Turkle inundates the reader with examples, providing first hand accounts to support her claims that we wire in more and keep our walls up almost constantly.  We become “masters of the universe” (169) because we have the ability to talk to loved ones, maintain long distance relationships, answer emails, make plans with friends, and accomplish business tasks.  We have the whole world at our fingertips with our little black boxes, and we retreat further and further into ourselves.

                I was primarily interested in the section Turkle writes about confessional sites.  Confessional sites, such as PostSecret and Six Billion Secrets allow people’s ‘real life’ avatars (or themselves) to express themselves, to vent, confess, and let go of their secrets.  Confessional sites serve as a mirror, as Turkle puts it, allowing us to see the “complex times” (230) in which we live.  But, the problem with these websites is three-fold (at the least).  People dash off their secrets, either on postcards or anonymous posts, and release them into the internet for all to read, but it ends there.  Even though individuals can read the posts and sometimes respond, these are faceless people posting to another faceless person—a person who may or may not be telling the truth.  The conversation needed to take place for healing and recovery to happen stalls.  Healing cannot take place.  While Turkle admits that such an action may be cathartic, it is not healing. 

                Turkle goes on to assert that aside from the fact that these sites do not allow us to cope with our problems, they can serve to be the exact opposite of what we need.  Because we create impressions of ourselves over the internet, we are, in essence, playing a character, which can lead us to be cruel.  So, according to Turkle, when we put these confessions up online, we invite cruelty, and indeed people can be cruel.  We transfer our own feelings about ourselves to other people and lash out at them via comments on their confessions.  Turkle gives the example of Jonas, a man who lashed out at a woman confessing that she may have messed up her relationship with her son.  He said cruel things, letting her know that she is to blame if he were to die over in Iraw, but in reality, he transfers his own worries about his own estrangement to his son and places it firmly on another human, someone who is as vulnerable as he is.

                The third problem that confessional websites presents is that of responsibility.  Turkle asks us to consider our responsibility to these people online.  We will often feel responsible when we see a post dealing with suicidal thoughts, anorexia, abuse.  But should we really?  And, if we do, what can we do about it?  Not much, because, as Turkle mentions, we cannot know for sure if we are reading a performance or reality.  The internet allows us to construct ourselves the way we want to be seen and in doing so we can write out for attention, for fun, as an experiment.  But, even if those confessions are truthful, we cannot do anything other than sit and worry.  We can stay up for hours talking to someone over the internet trying to help them through whatever it is they going through, but in the end, we cannot know for sure if they threw up their food, cut their wrists, or suffered more abuse. 

                The other interesting aspect Turkle talks about in this second half of her book is human connection, an idea which permeates her entire book.  We have this desire to telephone people, to hear their voice, develop a relationship, but it is easier to do it online or over text message.  We do not want to take the time for those relationships to develop because we need more time to do the things we now need to do—a ‘to do’ list that was only created because of our new use of the internet and smart phones.  We feel our relationships deteriorating and we watch it happen, but we don’t have the time to fix it.  We don’t want to be tied down to an hour phone call.  We want to read our information in snippets, in bytes, on blogs, and on postcard size/140 character limit posts. 

                Turkle’s argument that we are alone, together, is, indeed, compelling.

Questions:

1) Do you read any confessional websites such as PostSecret?  Do you ever feel a sense of responsibility towards those people?

2) Are there ways in which confessional websites could be repurposed for a more useful use?  Can we make them work, so that people can begin to consider their problems in new lights?

3) When you construct profiles and avatars online, do you consciously attempt to make yourself someone you're not?  Or rather, do you try to bring out specific aspects of yourself that would otherwise be hidden in other situations?