UCLA has a secret

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.