The Pageless Book

“Some find God at church on Sundays, but where does God bubble up in our lives the Other 6 days of the week?” - Other 6, Welcoming.

Photo by Jeff Kubina

Spirituality is a social experience for many. There is something uniquely spiritual about sharing your feelings with another person and having those feelings accepted. Other 6 is a website designed to facilitate that social aspect of spirituality, creating a online community geared towards shared hopes and joys.

When you first enter this flash-based website, a burst of blue bubbles emerges from the center of the screen. Some of these bubbles are dark blue, while others are light blue; this is to determine what type of post the bubble represents. Darker bubbles are comments on where an individual poster had found God today - whether it was in a child’s smile, or in a friends laughter - while lighter bubbles are comments from individuals who feel a need for God to be in a particular aspect of their life. Move your cursor over one of the bubbles and a message box will appear, displaying the comment left by that bubble’s creator. Move to another bubble, a new comment will appear in place of the previous.

While it may be tempting to remain a voyeur, peaking in to see other people’s thoughts, the real purpose of the website is within the interaction. Double click on any one bubble, and a larger message box will appear on the right hand side of your screen and display a number of options. You can view comments left by other readers concerning that bubble or add your own comment.

When you get tired of reading the messages of the bubbles in front of you, there is an option just under the mass of bubbles that allows you to view a new set of messages. As you do this, you may notice that some bubbles are actually larger then others. This represents the number of comments left for that message. This tends to make the visitors gravitate towards the bubbles that have been commented on, so the website designers wisely chose to expose only messages that have not been commented on when you first enter the site.

If you want one of those message bubbles to be your own, you have a choice to make; do you want to talk about where you’ve found the Divine in your life, or do you need to express where you need the Divine in your life? By dividing the messages up into those two categories, the administrators of Other 6 can make sure that every visitor is exposed to a fair mix of both positive and negative. I think this is another good feature that deserves to be mentioned, because without it, you might be tempted to cycle through the bubbles until you only can see one type or another.

Other 6 also keeps your identity private; you only need to provide your city and state, as well as initials with which to identify yourself if you wish to post your own bubble. This allows for users to share deeper feeling and issues that you might not want to share publically. I find this to be a good feature as well; it’s hard to be truly spiritual when you have guard your words.

This website is the brain-child of Loyola Communications, a division of Loyola Press, which is the publishing arm of the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus (a.k.a the Jesuits). While this means that this site is Catholic owned and operated, Other 6 is not geared towards one particular religion or another. They claim to push no particular agenda and welcome all “who seek God with a sincere heart.” I’ve tested the limits of what that means myself and believe that their open invitation is honest. That being said, Other 6 is mainly Christian, and you will encounter a few messages and comments that reflect the site’s Christian leanings.

I find Other 6 to be a refreshingly simple web page that achieves what its purpose through thoughtful design. I hope you give it a try… and while you are there, see if you can find my bubbles.