Confessions
Human nature is imperfect. Everyone carries guilt, has made mistakes and have regrets. Despite this, people should not be defined by things they have said or done in the past. We’re only human after all.
This past year, during our time in Ryerson University’s Interactive Storytelling course, myself, Jake Benaim and Sonya Proehl, developed a digital media piece that encompassed that philosophy. The result was a crowdsourced project Confessions, which was compelling enough to be awarded at the 2018 TARA awards this year, winning for Best Intermediate Digital Media Piece.
In order to make this audio confessional we had to gather secrets from a wide variety of people. A google form was created so that people could submit theirs anonymously. We then called on friends to act as voice actors, recorded them reading the confidences shared with us and created a soundscape from it.
The concept of crowdsourcing information was not foreign to us, but in all honesty, not something we looked forward to. Flash back to grade 11 marketing class: where we pulled teeth and called in favours just to have our own friends fill out a quick survey about their knowledge of tortilla chip brands. Riveting stuff, am I right?
So upon approaching this project, it stands to reason why we weren’t enthusiastic about crowdsourcing information from the masses, much less for something as serious as personal confessions. We were all fully expecting to have to make up a number of confessions in the eleventh hour of the project to account for our crowd’s lack of interest. We were also expecting a lacklustre collection of half-truths and petty confessions. What we were not expecting, however, was the response we received to our project.
In a matter of only a couple of days, we received over 70 confessions, all collected through the anonymous google form that we advertised on our social media accounts. Even after we recorded the confessions and edited the project, more kept coming in!
So why such support for this project specifically? Without trying to diminish that revolutionary tortilla chip research project done back in Grade 11, there’s something much more alluring, and tempting to tell someone a secret. Especially since submissions were anonymous. There’s a sense of relief or accountability when doing so. In other words, it’s a way of admitting to oneself something you were never able to come to terms with.
Comparing this project to past experiences with crowdsourcing information, we found that people were much more interested in sharing personal information anonymously than filling out survey type forms. We didn’t specify what kind of confessions people could make, nor provide examples, thus ensuring that participants could interpret the call as they wished. Surprisingly, even though respondents couldn’t see each other’s contributions, their confessions revolved around similar themes. What ended up happening is that a lot of people’s confessions aligned with one another’s. So much so that we were able to group some together in our audio piece to show that many people are going through the same stuff. Strangers have a lot more in common than they think.
The project was intended to connect people and demonstrate how human nature is beautifully flawed. People tend to wallow in their regrets and guilt, believing they are alone with their negative, self-deprecating feelings. You can’t look at a person and know exactly what they’re going through. Even when you know someone well, you still may not know exactly what they’re going through. And more often than not, you can find common grounds with almost anyone; there’s always someone else dealing with the same demons. As we listen to Confessions and open our minds, we’re less likely to judge, and we’re made to feel less alone with our deep, dark secrets.
