As is the case with reality television, the typical social network helps people push forward a highly edited version of the truth designed to make them look better - or worse - than they really are. Social media, you see, is the purveyor of our half-truths and outright lies. Rather, it's a place where our masks come off. It can offer the same pleasurable sensation as gossiping with your hairstylist or spilling your guts to the stranger sitting next to you on a plane.īut Whisper is not really about spreading secrets, CEO Michael Heyward insists.

Whisper, she said, also caters to the very human desire to speak our innermost thoughts, the things we can't even tell our best friend. 'They like to look inside at the internal, personal side of people's lives.' 'People are very voyeuristic,' said Karen North, who holds a psychology doctorate and is a professor at the University of Southern California, where she runs the university's social media masters program. Then, when you get real, when you bare it all to strangers, you're no longer alone. Whisper's premise is that because your posts aren't linked to your identity, you can actually get real with what's going on in your life, like say revealing that you didn't have sex on your honeymoon, you just found out your boyfriend was going to jail, you eat your feelings, you're attracted to a felon, or you're having dark thoughts. The app's popular feed exposes some of the top secrets on the service, a nearby stream highlights whispers posted around you, and a featured feed offers up content curated by the app's content moderators. Or, they can strike up a conversation with you via private message. On Whisper, your confession is posted to a public feed where strangers can see it, like it, and post a reply. Essentially, Whisper is the digital reincarnation of PostSecret, the celebrated art project in which people mail their confessions on the back of postcards. The end result is an image with text overlaid, visually similar to Internet memes. Whisper works like this: type a message, any message, and the app will attempt to find an image that matches the meaning. In many ways, Whisper is a reaction to the over-embellished existences we find on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, making it often moody and melancholy - and real in the most unsettling of ways. If it's true that you are who you are when no one is looking, then Whisper, the anonymous app where college-aged kids hang out and bond over their candid confessions, is arguably the most authentic social network of them all.įounded in 2012, the not even 2-year-old smartphone application returns us to the roots of the Web when anonymity, not identity, was the norm. Platform 9 3/4 alludes to Harry Potter and Hogwarts. Whisper CEO Michael Heyward at the company's temporary headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif.

How does whisper app work