Are you in on the Secret? For a fortnight now, since a friend introduced me to the app, I’ve been waking up to dozens of notifications on my phone saying that people I know have shared their secrets. I am not sure if it is the word secret or the idea that it is being shared with me, but it provides quite a thrilling start to the day.
The secrets themselves are a mixed bag — some are confessions or invitations of a sexual nature, some are criticisms of politicians, publishers or writers (the app assumes that everyone in your phone book is a friend, and since my phone book is full of journalists, publishers and writers, it gives me a tailor-made ringside view of these worlds) and some are, quite simply, observations. The first kind, I ignore, I am past the age where strangers’ prurience interests me. The second kind — being a journalist in Delhi, where all gossip is a possible weapon in your arsenal — I follow keenly. But what I really look forward to is the third kind. These are simply revelations — common admissions of an individual’s failings.
Take this for example: “When the cheque comes and someone offers to treat me to dinner, my first thought isn’t ‘Wow, that’s a nice gesture,’ it’s, ‘Damn, I should have ordered more’.” The author of this secret lives in San Jose, USA, and that’s all I know about him or her, but the secret itself, I am certain, is a universal guilt. Most of us, at one time or the other, have been there, yet it is not an admission anyone would make publicly. Or this: “When you see me texting in public I’m really just looking at the weather app because I want to look like I am doing something.” The fake text is a pretence that everybody indulges in but never owns up to.
I am not sure what’s in store for Secret, whether it will grow to hundreds of millions of users and thereby self-destruct the very reason for its genesis, or whether it will hang around for a bit and then quietly die. At a time when users are hankering for celebrity, the app is a platform for anonymity. You can say what you like and unless you have left clues yourself, it is fairly impossible to trace your words back to you. For now though, it is an endearingly interesting place to be in. It’s not social, nor is it media. And therein lies the secret to Secret’s charm.
In the last few months, I have been increasingly weary of social media. For someone who lived pretty much all day on Facebook, this is a huge turnaround. When I started, I was working from home, and Facebook provided virtual water-cooler conversations. It was where you could let off some steam, indulge in some raucous exchange of comments before going back to the story you were writing. Increasingly though, Facebook is a place where people go to outshine one another. The wall is a warzone in this insane competition to be cooler, hipper, wiser. Each time I scroll down these days, it seems to me, there is no one whose life isn’t fabulous. You went to Vietnam for your holidays? Look, I went to the South Pole. You had squid ink risotto for dinner? I hunted my own scallops in Florida and then braised them in the olive oil I pressed myself in Crete. Nobody, it seems to me, goes to Panchgani for a holiday or eats thairsadam and papad for dinner. One bunch mocks people for their vocabulary and grammar, another publishes pleas, which can essentially be summed up as, “if you aren’t hot and successful, please don’t send me friend requests.” Facebook is the online equivalent of the mean kids’ table at the school cafeteria.
Of course, people aren’t all like that. There are people who post requests for adopting rescued dogs and people who actually believe that Liking a photograph of a baby with a brain tumour will trigger a medical miracle. In fact, on social media, doing good has its own mafia. So there are the relentless calls for outrage — against ISIS, against paid media, against non-vegetarians and non-vegans, against people who litter, people who swear, people who watch sports, people who don’t worship. Everyone is an aspiring social reformer, with a tone that either mocks the reader or threatens to name and shame them. And when Mother’s Day or Fathers’ Day comes around, goodness, brace yourself or be swept away by declarations of eternal gratitude and undying love.
All of this is often more forgivable than what goes on in Twitter, trawled by trolls and stuffed with the smug. For most people, it takes several rounds of pranayams to gather the courage to just log on. And if you get sucked into a conversation, the phone pings endlessly with the jabber of half-a-dozen people trying to fit deep thoughts into packages of 140-characters.
If Facebook is a collection of carefully curated vignettes of pointlessness, Twitter is a mad-dash on mission me-too. Neither is real and no one is honest. It’s just a bunch of pompous blind folks describing elephants that don’t exist.
Which is why I am addicted to the coy admissions in Secret. Where else do you have people confessing to grief, loneliness or self-doubt? I’d rather read about the 40-year-old in Stockholm who isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life, the person from Boston who hasn’t done his/her laundry in three weeks or the ‘friend’ who wipes snot on restaurant tablecloths. But most of all, I like Secret for the fact that before you post a comment, it reminds you, in a manner so old-worldly that it now feels out of place, to ‘say something kind’. You can keep the smart and the smug social media, I’ll stick with the kind.
(Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law. Follow her on Twitter >@veenavenugopal)