THE CRUELTY OF STRANGERS
Harriet, thirty-two, posts to online confessional sites when she feels depressed, maybe two or three times a month. She prefers sites on which her readers can leave comments. She says, “It makes me feel in contact.” Otherwise, she says, “it’s like putting a post in a glass bottle and putting it in the ocean.” At first she claims that “critical comments” about her posts don’t bother her. But only a few minutes later, when we talk about specifics, Harriet admits that, somewhat to her surprise, they can hurt a lot. Her worst experience came after confessing that she had been seduced by her uncle as a teenager. “My aunt never found out. She recently died. He’s dead too. There is no one I can tell now who it would matter to. So I went online, just to tell. People were really critical, and it hurt. I thought there would be some, like, religious people who wouldn’t like it. But really I got a lot of disapproval.” Harriet begins by saying, “Who cares what strangers think?” She ends up describing a human vulnerability: if you share something intimate with a stranger, you invest in that person’s opinion. Anonymity does not protect us from emotional investment. In talking about online confessions, people say they are satisfied if they get their feelings out, but they still imagine an ideal narrative: they are telling their stories to people who care. Some online confessions reach sympathetic ears, but the ideal narrative is just that, an ideal.
When Roberta, thirty-eight, types her online confessions, she describes being in a state of mind that is close to dissociative. When reality is too painful (for example, the reality of abuse), people may feel that they have left their bodies and are watching themselves from above. Leaving the self is a way not to feel something intolerable. So, Roberta types her confessions but sometimes doesn’t remember the details of doing so. Then she leaves the site and returns to read comments. They are not always supportive, and the dissociative state returns. She says,
When I was about fourteen, I began an affair with my mother’s boyfriend. He lived with us since I was ten.... When I confessed online, I found that I didn’t even know I was typing.... Later that day, I checked back and there were some very positive comments but there were some that said I had completely betrayed my mom. . . . I should tell her. Others said I shouldn’t tell her but that I was a bitch. I didn’t faint or anything. But I . . . found myself in the kitchen and I don’t remember how I got there.
We build technologies that leave us vulnerable in new ways. In this case, we share our burdens with unseen readers who may use us for their own purposes. Are those who respond standing with us, or are they our judges, “grading” each confession before moving on to the next? With some exceptions, when we make ourselves vulnerable, we expect to be nurtured.
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This is why people will sometimes, often prematurely, tell their “sad stories” to others they hardly know. They hope to be repaid in intimacy. The online setting increases the number of people to whom one applies for a caring response. But it also opens one up to the cruelty of strangers. And by detaching words from the person uttering them, it can encourage a coarsening of response. Ever since e-mail first became popular, people have complained about online “flaming.” People say outrageous things, even when they are not anonymous. These days, on social networks, we see fights that escalate for no apparent reason except that there is no physical presence to exert a modulating force.
When Audrey described an Internet fight in her school, we saw how flaming works: “Someone says a cross word. Someone calls someone else a name. Large numbers of people take sides.... They had a fight for a weekend. Twenty or thirty interchanges a day.” In her opinion, by the end of the weekend, nothing had been resolved. Nothing had been learned about how to deal with other people. “No one could even say, really, what the fight was about.” But people who were friends no longer spoke to each other. Freed from the face-to-face, some people develop an Internet-specific road rage. Online, Audrey knows, it is easier to be a bully.
Yet teenagers, knowing this, are frequent visitors to online confessional sites. Brandi, eighteen, compares them to Facebook and MySpace, her other online places. Through her eyes, it becomes clear that what they have in common is that people form a relationship to the site as well as to those on it. “Online,” says Brandi, “I get the private out of my system.... I put my unhappiness onto the site.”
With such displacement of feeling, it is not surprising that the online world becomes fraught with emotion. On confessional sites, people who disagree about a particular confession begin to “scream” at each other. They displace their strong investments in some issue—abortion, child abuse, euthanasia—in fights with strangers. They put their “unhappiness onto the site” because, often, they are most angry at others for what they dislike in themselves.
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Jonas, forty-two, admits to being “addicted” to a range of confessional sites, some religious, most of them not. He interrupts his work by “dipping in” to one or another of them during the day. Divorced, Jonas is preoccupied by the idea that he is becoming estranged from his son, who is choosing to spend more time with his mother. Jonas doesn’t think there is anything in particular to blame; he and his son haven’t had a fight. “I’m just seeing him less and less.” But with this issue on his mind, he tells me that he became enraged by a particular online confession by a woman named Lesley, who is concerned about her nineteen-year-old son. Lesley and her son had a falling-out during his junior year of high school, and it was never repaired. Shortly after graduation, the son joined the army and was sent to Iraq. Lesley worries that she drove her son away. Jonas says, “I attacked Lesley for being a bad mother.... I said she was close to responsible if her son dies.”
It seems apparent that instead of exploring his feelings about his own son, Jonas had lashed out at Lesley. Of course, this kind of thing happens between friends. It happens in families. But it is endemic on the Internet. There is no barrier to displacement, no barrier to rage. Online confessionals, with their ethic of “getting the private out,” as Brandi put it, reassure users with the promise that they do not need to talk to someone in person—expression alone is helpful. And, of course, it sometimes may be. I think of the authors on PostSecret who might feel better when they make postcards that say “Divorcing you was a mistake” and “Celebrating the last year you abused me. They don’t make cards like that.” But confessional sites are often taken as therapy and they are not. For beyond self-expression, therapy seeks new ways to approach old conflicts. And thinking of Jonas and Leslie, therapy works because it helps us see when we project feelings onto others that we might understand as our own.
It is useful to think of a symptom as something you “love to hate” because it offers relief even as it takes you away from addressing an underlying problem. To me, online confessional sites can be like symptoms—a shot of feeling good that can divert attention from what a person really needs. One high school senior tells me that she visits online confessional sites at least twice a week. Most recently, she has been writing descriptions of sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend. When I ask her what she does after she writes her confessions, she says that she stays alone in her room, smoking. She thinks that she has unburdened herself and now wants to be alone. Or perhaps the confession has left her depleted.
Like a conversation with a robot, online confession appeals because someone silent wants to speak. But if we use these sites to relieve our anxieties by getting them “out there,” we are not necessarily closer to understanding what stands behind them. And we have not used our emotional resources to build sustaining relationships that might help. We cannot blame technology for this state of affairs. It is people who are disappointing each other. Technology merely enables us to create a mythology in which this does not matter.
SEEKING COMMUNITIES
In what framework does confessing to online strangers make sense? It does not connect us with people who want to know us; rather, it exposes us to those who, like Jonas, may use our troubles to relieve them from looking at their own. It does nothing to improve our practical situations. It may keep us from taking positive action because we already feel we’ve done “something.” I know these things to be true. But people who confess online also tell me that they feel relieved and less alone. This is also true. So, if sites are symptoms, and we need our symptoms, what else do we need? We need trust between congregants and clergy. We need parents who are able to talk with their children. We need children who are given time and protection to experience childhood. We need communities.
Molly, fifty-eight, a retired librarian who lives alone, does not feel part of any community. She doesn’t have children; her urban neighborhood, she says, is “not the kind of place people know each other.... I don’t even recognize the people in the Shaw’s [a local supermarket chain].” She says that she has memories of grocery shopping with her father as a girl. Then, she had felt part of a family, a family in a neighborhood. Every visit to Shaw’s reminds her of what she doesn’t have. She imagines her favorite confessional sites as communities and says that this has been helpful to her, at least to a point. Molly has posted stories of her mother’s struggle with alcoholism. She is Catholic, but as both child and adult, she never felt comfortable talking to a priest about her history. “It wasn’t something to confess. It just seemed like complaining.” Speaking of her “real life,” she says, “I don’t see the goodness around me. Online I have found some good people.” She uses the word “community.”
One can only be glad that Molly has found sustenance. But her view of “community” is skewed by what technology affords. Although she claims that on confessional sites she has met “good people,” when she gets feedback she doesn’t like, Molly leaves the site so that she does not have to look at the criticism again. Communities are places where one feels safe enough to take the good and the bad. In communities, others come through for us in hard times, so we are willing to hear what they have to say, even if we don’t like it. What Molly experiences is not community.
Those who run online confessional sites suggest that it is time to “broaden our definition of community” to include these virtual places.
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But this strips language of its meaning. If we start to call online spaces where we are with other people “communities,” it is easy to forget what that word used to mean. From its derivation, it literally means “to give among each other.” It is good to have this in mind as a standard for online places. I think it would be fair to say that online confessional sites usually fall below this mark.
Perhaps community should have not a broader but a narrower definition. We used to have a name for a group that got together because its members shared common interests: we called it a club. But in the main, we would not think of confessing our secrets to the members of our clubs. But we have come to a point at which it is near heresy to suggest that MySpace or Facebook or Second Life is not a community. I have used the word myself and argued that these environments correspond to what sociologist Ray Oldenberg called “the great good place.”
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These were the coffee shops, the parks, and the barbershops that used to be points of assembly for acquaintances and neighbors, the people who made up the landscape of life. I think I spoke too quickly. I used the word “community” for worlds of weak ties.
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Communities are constituted by physical proximity, shared concerns, real consequences, and common responsibilities. Its members help each other in the most practical ways. On the lower east side of Manhattan, my great grandparents belonged to a block association rife with deep antagonisms. I grew up hearing stories about those times. There was envy, concern that one family was doing better than another; there was suspicion, fear that one family was stealing from another. And yet these families took care of each other, helping each other when money was tight, when there was illness, when someone died. If one family was evicted, it boarded with a neighboring one. They buried each other. What do we owe to each other in simulation? This was Joel’s problem as he counseled Noelle in Second Life. What real-life responsibilities do we have for those we meet in games? Am I my avatar’s keeper?
AFTER CONFESSION, WHAT?
After a morning immersed in reading online confessions, I suddenly become anxious about my own responsibilities. The sites make it clear that they do not collect IP addresses from those who write in. If they did, they would be responsible for reporting people who confessed to illegal actions. (When people confess to killing someone, the caretakers of these sites do not pursue the question, choosing to interpret these posts as coming from members of the military.) But what of my sense of responsibility? If this is not a game, how do you not get anxious when a woman talks about letting her lover suffocate her until she fears for her life? If this is not a game, how do you not get anxious when a mother talks about nearly uncontrollable desires to shake her baby? My time on confessional sites leaves me jumpy, unable to concentrate. People are in dire straits. And I am there bearing witness.
Yet, my anxiety may be ill placed. Some people tell me that what they post on the Internet bears only a glancing relationship to reality. One young man in his twenties says that the Internet is our new literature. It is an account of our times, not necessarily calling for each individual’s truth to be told. A twenty-four-year-old graduate student tells me she goes to confessional sites to say “whatever comes into my mind” in order to get attention. A forty-year-old college professor explains that when he does anything online in an anonymous forum, he takes on the persona of “everyman.” For him, anonymity means universality. What he says on the Web does not necessarily follow from his actual experience: if the world is violent, he feels free to write of violence in his own voice. So, when I read online confessions and go cold, am I tuning out the voice of a woman who was raped at nine, or have I ceased to believe that the confessional Internet can connect me to real people and their true stories?