ABSTRACT
Each week, an online community stops by to get inspiration, insight, and other satisfactions from an online community called “PostSecret.” In its eighteen years of existence, PostSecret has inspired a number of imitators and has fostered a broad community of shared interest expressed in both online and offline contexts. Its logic is simple. Its founder asks people to anonymously submit a physical postcard on which they have inscribed a secret they have never before told anyone. The resulting cards are a broad archive of emotional and affective labor in a broad international circulation. But PostSecret is more than that. It has generated a range of forms of online and offline community, as well as its own political economy of circulation of its cards, of the discourses they engender, and a range of products and practices based in it. This chapter explores the meaning, significance, and implications of the way that religion and spirituality have emerged and been articulated in this practice seeing within this history a particular instantiation of a “third space.” It argues that seeing PostSecret in this way allows broad learnings about sources, extents, limits, and possibilities for the emergence of new and voluble forms of religion, spirituality, and other meaning practices in contemporary digital contexts.
