Craigslist’s Missed Connections has been a part of my creative practice for close to 10 years. It started in 2009 when I began saving funny and poetic messages I’d find when scanning several of the feeds around New York City and New England. In November 2010, with the help of Amber Hinds (who wanted to teach herself WordPress website development), I launched Lovelorn Poets. This literary blog served as a way to save and share the many forms of creative writing I found and continued to discover. Brooklyn, Las Vegas, Seattle, Savannah, NYC, Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham, London, and Flagstaff were just a few of the places I found intriguing, anonymous (or pseudonymous) work over the years. The Lovelorn Poets blog not only satisfied my interest in saving these bits of writing but it also provided me with an outlet to explore my creative interests. For this, I am very fortunate and thankful.
When I decided to photograph and document all 739 of Pittsburgh’s city stairs last May, I knew it had to have a “missed connections” angle, which is how the “Mis.Steps: Our Missed Connections with Pittsburgh’s City Steps” title came about. When I started publishing my Mis.Steps photos and stories on Instagram that summer, I simultaneously published the work on the Pittsburgh Craigslist Missed Connections forum. While my stories weren’t technically a “missed connection” (you know, the kind where you see that person at the gas station, coffee stand, bar… and wished you had gotten their number but didn’t) the forum readers and moderators didn’t seem to mind. Pittsburghers have a deep connection to their city steps, not unlike that first crush you had on the teenager who was your babysitter or who lived next door. You might not think of them often, but when you do, it’s with a certain fondness. From July through the end of March I posted Mis. Steps stories on Craigslist every Monday. Wednesday and Friday and received a large number of very positive emails from people who saw the stories and enjoyed what I had to share. It was rewarding to know that my work was “connecting” and resonating with people in the city.
However, in March, significant changes of the legal variety occurred. The federal government passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which holds websites responsible for anything posted containing sex trafficking content. Craigslist’s response to this was to immediately remove its Personals section, of which Missed Connections was a sub-group. The change happened pretty suddenly. One day, everything was there – and then the next, it was all gone.
After a few days, Craigslist relocated the Missed Connections forum to the Community area (events, lost-n-founds, classes, and activities). While this solution made some readers/users happy, it no longer worked for the Mis. Steps projects as the new version of the forum does not allow for the posting of images. The Polaroids and iPhone photo of each stairway are a major element of this project (and something almost everyone wants to see), so to post the story, without the images, was something I didn’t want to do.
And it currently stands, any and all forms of “creative writing” are being flagged and removed from Missed Connections – not just in Pittsburgh, but on almost all of the feeds around the country. When I made the decision that I wouldn’t post the Mis.Steps stories without the photos, I posted a message, saying something like “Hey, if you’re missing the Mis.Steps stories, look for them on Instagram!” but that message was flagged and deleted within an hour. Boo-hissssss, Craigslist!
There were many reasons people read, posted and responded to Missed Connections and I’d like to think the overwhelming majority of those were not nefarious (as the new law and subsequent regulations intimate). But, when an online message-board is free and open, those dark elements do creep in and ultimately change the space for the worse – for everyone.
The Mis.Steps project is going to be meandering along for a few years, so part of me hopes that in time, the high-level of policing and ban on images will be relaxed, and I can go back to sharing my stories as I originally intended. But, there’s a part of me that knows the chances of that happening are about as slim as running into that first crush from 1976 and having them be just as spell-binding as I remember them to be.
This is the final Mis.Steps post I was able to share on Craigslist’s Missed Connections. Will Simmons of Pittsburgh Orbit is featured in the photo.
