30 May 2005

Whatever, Sarah

OK, Sarah Boxer is quite talented, often insightful and entertaining, and sometimes irritating.
Tonight, she's irritating, with Bless Me, Blog, for I've Sinned
You probably need a NYTimes.com login for it, so here it is in a nutshell:
It's about this blog, PostSecret.
From her piece in the NY Times:

One odd thing about PostSecret is that there's a real disconnection between what the confessions are and what the readers think they are. One reader from Texas wrote, "Thank you so much for building a window into so many souls, even if it only shines light on the darkest part." A reader in Australia wrote: "Each is a silent prayer of hope, love, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, guilt, happiness, hatred, confidence, strength, weakness and a million other things that we all share as human beings... there is no fakeness here."
No fakeness? Oh, but there is.
And it is the fakeness, the artifice and the performance that make this confessional worth peeking at. The secret sharers here aren't mindless flashers but practiced strippers. They don't want to get rid of their secrets. They love them. They arrange them. They tend them. They turn them into fetishes. And that's the secret of PostSecret. It isn't really a true confessional after all. It is a piece of collaborative art.


Oh COME ON. Do we have to over-analyze everything?