On This American Life episode #48, Ira investigates The Apology Line, a phone line that anyone could call up and anonymously apologize for just about anything.
Quoting from Jason Kottke:
“The way it worked was that you could call and confess to anything that you wanted, and you’d be recorded, or you could call and listen to other people’s confessions.” Sounds sort of like a phone-based message board.
Now quoting the apology project:
Over the course of the project, the Apology line received more than ten thousand confessions, for misdeeds ranging from pulling pigtails in grade school to a series of sadistic ritual murders. Click here to read a small selection of some of the messages recorded on the Apology Line. In a period prior to the emergence of the Web and online communities, Allan pioneered the use of telephone technology to permit confessions to be recorded, played back and commented on by an ever-expanding virtual community.
I think we need The Apology Podcast. If it doesn’t exist already (I’ve looked, didn’t find it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there), I’d love to see someone create it, or create it myself.
So I did a search on iTunes in Podcasts for ‘confession,’ because I was curious if you just searched for ‘apology.’ These apologies are similar to confessions, so I did the search. I came across a podcast called The ConfessionCast. The website it here: http://confessioncast.net/
How is this not religiously affiliated at all? Or is it, and I’m not looking deep enough?
I don’t believe it is. Looking again at the search results in iTunes for “confession” there are more than the one, and most were short-lived. The one I posted above doesn’t seem to exist (meaning that I can’t seem to download it at all).
I’ll keep researching.