Blog #5 - Free Write: "PostSecret"

After we learned about the role of OSSGs (online social support groups) in class, I started to pay closer attention to similar types of support groups online and the types of benefits they provide for users who choose to reach out through these websites. As I mention many times in my previous blogs, my communications class frequently focuses on the same topics that we discuss in our class – mainly because people communicate through media just as much as they communicate in real life. While flipping through my communications textbook, I found an example of a teenager, Tina Malament, who turned to an online social support group to recover from anorexia, depression, and suicidal thoughts when she was seventeen years old. This social support group was in the form of a bog, called PostSecret, where “strangers mail in postcards to be posted online every Sunday” and on the postcards, “people anonymously share their secrets – funny secrets, happy secrets, and secrets filled with anguish, remorse and pain” (Adler 2011:319). The popularity of this blog is reflected in the amount of people who visit it each day – the website gets nearly 1 million hits a week! Tina sent in a postcard in which she took a picture of herself standing in front of another postcard, which had a cupcake crossed out on it. She wrote on the postcard that she was going to win her battle against anorexia. I felt that this type of online social support group relies on three specific beneficial aspects discussed by Tanis – the need for anonymous disclosure, the need for text-based conversation, and the need to expand a person’s social network. Naturally, the nature of the blog allows participants to share their secrets completely anonymously. This way, they don’t have to feel embarrassment or guilt sharing personal and intimate information. Moreover, if they were to say something incriminating, they would be able to express themselves with more honesty and self-disclosure because they could not be held accountable for the information that they had disclosed. I also think that actually writing your secret on a postcard helps lessen a burden emotionally and psychologically. It’s the process of actually writing a problem out that has been found to positively affect mental and cognitive health (Pennebaker 1997; Pennebaker and Harber 1993; Pennebaker et al. 1997 in Robinson 2011). I think for Tina personally, writing out that she was going to win the battle against her anorexia somehow made the idea much more real and the goal a lot more attainable because it was tangibly expressed- on a postcard and not just said out loud or thought in her head. Finally, Tina reflects that the “idea that someone else might read [her postcard] and get something out of it [was] encouraging” (Adler 2011: 319). Even though she remained anonymous, Tina knew that other people from all around the world would be able to read the postcard and perhaps identify or support her through her difficult battle with anorexia, even if they did not know her personally. Overall, I just thought that Tina Malament’s recovery via PostSecret was a heartening illustration of the Internet healing people who can not attain a recovery in any other way. It’s one of those positive things about the Internet that I applaud – the way a community of unrelated people can work together to help each other.

Works Cited

Adler, Ronald B. and Proctor, Russell F. 2011. Looking Out, Looking In. United States:

            Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Robinson, Laura et al. 2011. Technology in Our Time. United States: Cognella.