"I pretend to be braver than I really am."
Or so admitted one of the many contributors to "Wrinkles of Discretion: The Confessional Booth," an interactive sculpture created by Jennifer Lopez '08 that was on display earlier this month at the Hop. In its week-long run, the sculpture elicited over 200 confessions from the Dartmouth community, ranging from the lewd and shocking to the poetic and inspirational. Yet, despite the sheer number of confessions, perhaps none encapsulated the plight of the average Dartmouth student as well as the one above.
Ours is a culture that is built upon pretension -- one that seems intent on projecting a particular brand of bravado and machismo that leaves little room for vulnerability. This is compounded by the fact that Facebook and the Internet have drastically reduced our privacy, thus creating a need to spruce up our virtual identities so that they may be judged by the faceless masses of cyberspace.
Indeed, the Confessional Booth may ultimately represent a backlash to the phoniness that permeates our culture. When I interviewed her, Lopez told me that she had envisioned her art as a space for candor -- a space that would encourage emotional honesty by, as she put it, "cutting judgment out of the process." It is little wonder, then, that cathartic forums like Lopez's have emerged as coping mechanisms for our reputation-conscious, privacy-deprived world.
Lopez's artwork is indicative of the more general proliferation of anonymous forums in which people are given the opportunity to post their deepest, darkest thoughts. These forums range from gossip sites like Bored at Dartmouth (formerly Bored at Baker) to community art projects like Post Secret, in which people from all over the world anonymously mail their secrets to artist-blogger Frank Warren. While the popularity of Bored at Dartmouth has waned significantly -- now generally relegated to the category of finals-week guilty pleasure -- the Post Secret phenomenon has enjoyed remarkable staying power since its inception in 2004; its blog site is among the most heavily trafficked on the web. And I'm willing to bet that had the Confessional Booth stayed up a little longer, it would have only grown in popularity.
The compulsion to appear braver, smarter, cooler, etc., than we are is one that we are all familiar with. Our culture of perfectionism -- our need to uphold an illusion of academic and social poise -- tends to breed a fair amount of self-ironic posturing. We end up becoming caricatures of ourselves based on what others expect us to be. Even the oft-eulogized Dartmouth rager seems at times like a carefully contrived persona -- one that we perform in order to live up to Dartmouth's Greek-centric cultural legacy.
This kind of performance is especially apparent in our internet-saturated College culture: we painstakingly word our Blitzes, carefully edit our photos and meticulously craft our Facebook profiles to convey just the right degree of effortless wit. There's nothing inherently wrong with this; the freedoms of cyberspace allow us to present ourselves however we please, and we naturally want to put our best foot forward. But the whole endeavor ultimately seems like a sham.
What I find equally frustrating sometimes is the fact that it's much more chic nowadays to appear, in one's speech, writing or attitude, cynical and sardonic rather than honest and sincere. Any hint of true openness or earnestness is often dismissed as sentimental, awkward or lame. But in the end, isn't this just another front we put up?
On the one hand, it was dismaying, after reading the confessions, to realize how fake we can be -- the secrets we keep, the lies we tell. It was depressing to see that hidden away underneath the layers of our carefully constructed veneers was a simmering sea of unhappiness and even self-hatred.
But instead of judging the confessors' infidelities, sexual perversions, grudges, and discontents, I found myself empathizing. The anonymity imbued the confessions with a universality -- and a sincerity -- that made me feel more connected to the Dartmouth community than Facebook ever could. True, some of the confessions provided little more than off-hand entertainment. But their ultimate power and potential lay in their ability to unify us as a College community -- a community borne of mutual failings and regrets, a community that penetrates the perfectionist facades that we put up.
