Anonymous confession site

[anhinga_anhinga]

I was loitering around Coolidge Corner today. There is a very nice bookstore there, Brookline Booksmith, and they also have an interesting calendar of events. On Thursday, Jan.13, 7pm there will be a meeting with Gabriel Jeffrey who runs a popular Web site for making and reading anonymous confessions, grouphug.us, and compiled a book out of them called Stoned, Naked, and Looking in My Neighbor's Window.

There is also a brief Wikipedia article about them. Besides voyeuristic value, this seems to be an interesting phenomenon to look at.

:-) Happy New Year :-)

Comments

grouphug..

[darwinx0r.livejournal.com]

Man, I love that damn site. So dope.

=darwin

Re: grouphug..

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

Hi Darwin ! :-)

Is there anything I should ask him if I make it to the meeting ?

I was fascinated with two aspects of it (besides simple browsing).

One is, the way this site it became popular enough to accumulate that many hits and confessions, and yield a book (in American and British incarnations).

The second aspect is also about the dynamics of "information proliferation"/"information processing", but internal, rather than related to the outside world. Basically, this "grouphug" is an example of informational media, and some life (structure) is trying to emerge
(cross-references between postings, etc).

But the moderators try to suppress all instances of such emerging structure (such are the rules), which effectively mean they want to keep this part of cyber-space in its pure simplicity and to keep to its original purpose. The net result is a very strong privacy and also a very uniform structure (basically, only keyword search is available to filter the postings). In some sense, very orthogonal to LJ.

I'd like Gabriel to comment further on these things, but I am not quite sure I can phrase questions well enough...