The Transparency Of Anonymity On SMITHTeens

According to Frank Warren, PostSecret started as an art project and grew into a therapeutic outlet he never anticipated. For the team behind SMITHTeens and their growing teen community of six word memoirists, a similar story has already started to emerge.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with the folks at SMITH the other day, and talking to them about the passion of their young contributors: A small, but devoted international network of 3,300 teens who at last count had submitted more than 53,000 six-word memoirs to the SMITHTeens site,  800 of which were curated by co-editors Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser for the upcoming book I Can’t Keep My Own Secrets. The anthology will be the third installment in the SMITH series of mini-memoirs, founded by Larry and Tim Barkow back in 2006,  but it seems to be only the beginning of the SMITHTeen saga.

We’ve talked on Ypulse before about the importance of tone when it comes to anonymous online communities—a topic that incidentally was touched on just yesterday by commenters after we reported in Essentials that teen gossip site People’s Dirt was being shut down— and from even a brief look at the sparse, but cheerful design of the SMITHTeens site it’s clear that the vibe is a positive one. You can see this positivity reverberate in the the dynamic of the users, even when the subject matter of their entries—darker topics that loom large in the site’s word cloud include “breakup,” “divorce” and “suicide”—falls on the negative side.

Regardless of heaviness—and Larry has been consulting with Warren on how to direct the more serious cases to the proper resources—the value of speaking out and being heard by others who have felt the same, or just understand why you feel the way you do, remains the same. Offering a private outlet of self-expression with the communal benefits of group therapy.

A post from earlier today “my dad won’t be at graduation,” for instance, has already inspired multiple comments offering empathy and support to the memoirist. It seems this is the norm - not just the validation, but the instantaneousness, an almost equally important component in keeping the momentum of these communities going. For SMITHTeen’s most committed members (deemed “the ambassadors” by the editors) the site has become a part of their daily routine alongside checking email and Facebook. Also, like FB and other adult-built, teen-shaped spaces, the lines of ownership have come to gradually blur to the point where members have taken the liberty of creating their own Facebook group and Ning forum, only the former of which the creators of the site actually belong.

To me what’s interesting here is less the need to have a walled-off teen only online space (i.e., the post-parental Facebook dual citizenship we’ve been anticipating for a while)  and more the need to open a portal from the SMITH world into the more “real” sectors of their digital lives (like Facebook). This desire to make their anonymous friends, as un-anonymous as possible, as far as the collective one-on-one is concerned, while still keeping them separate from outsiders via invite-only groups, and thus preserving the sanctity of the secret-sharing environment.

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