It’s disturbia out there.
September 14, 2015 8:50 AM Subscribe
does this count as navel-gazing about our navel-gazing?
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 9:47 AM on September 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 9:47 AM on September 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
Ryan O’Connell, who wrote about his personal life for Thought Catalog from 2010 to 2014, said that the volume expectations and traffic pressures kept escalating until he found himself emotionally exhausted. He moved to Los Angeles last year, partly to, in his words, “escape the first-person Internet.”
Oh my goodness, this. I just... I have a lot of feelings about this, as someone who burned badly out from blogging back in 2011 partly because I was putting too much of my vulnerable self out there in public and feeling obligated to do so because audience! People said it was helpful, people talked back to me, and page hits can be just as addictive as any other clicker game, and... it turned out it wasn't sustainable for me.
And I wasn't even getting paid. I'm kind of horrified at the thought of how much I would have been pressuring myself to do more, talk about more, frame myself to make a point, talk about how scared I was, if there had been a paycheck encouraging me to do it. And I didn't even have anything remotely as vulnerable to talk about, as.... let's call it as private or weighted as the kinds of topic this article is describing. Certainly nothing that would have drawn clicks on the level they're talking about, and I was writing under a pseud so I had the option of not tying that to my professional life. I really feel for the people who do put themselves out and wind up feeling too-raw about it, too overwhelmed by the enormity of response, and who aren't quite sure what to do about it next.
posted by sciatrix at 9:52 AM on September 14, 2015 [13 favorites]
Oh my goodness, this. I just... I have a lot of feelings about this, as someone who burned badly out from blogging back in 2011 partly because I was putting too much of my vulnerable self out there in public and feeling obligated to do so because audience! People said it was helpful, people talked back to me, and page hits can be just as addictive as any other clicker game, and... it turned out it wasn't sustainable for me.
And I wasn't even getting paid. I'm kind of horrified at the thought of how much I would have been pressuring myself to do more, talk about more, frame myself to make a point, talk about how scared I was, if there had been a paycheck encouraging me to do it. And I didn't even have anything remotely as vulnerable to talk about, as.... let's call it as private or weighted as the kinds of topic this article is describing. Certainly nothing that would have drawn clicks on the level they're talking about, and I was writing under a pseud so I had the option of not tying that to my professional life. I really feel for the people who do put themselves out and wind up feeling too-raw about it, too overwhelmed by the enormity of response, and who aren't quite sure what to do about it next.
posted by sciatrix at 9:52 AM on September 14, 2015 [13 favorites]
Corset not included?
posted by humboldt32 at 10:02 AM on September 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by humboldt32 at 10:02 AM on September 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
I think one of the reasons I've been able to keep my blog running for over a dozen years now is that I do virtually no personal (or political) blogging, aside from posting photographs of the occasional cat. Keeping the focus on my research/academic issues/books/the occasional film or TV show has its own potential pitfalls (e.g., how much do I have to keep quiet so that I can get actual double-blind peer reviewing later on?), but then again, there's a lot less "me" out there for people to chew on...and spit out.
posted by thomas j wise at 10:49 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by thomas j wise at 10:49 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
It seems like there's a sort of analogy to a reality TV competition about journalism, with a contemp-conform veneer: the contestants think they're all ascendant stars, and some of them may indeed be talented, but really the majority are being exploited by moneyed interests in the media so they (and their tragic pasts™) can be gawked at for a pittance. The one that really brought that comparison home for me was the backstory to the "yoga class" piece:
posted by en forme de poire at 11:09 AM on September 14, 2015 [14 favorites]
Rebecca Carroll, formerly an editor at xoJane, recalls reading one submission by a white woman about how few black people were in her yoga class that was “pretty tone deaf, just totally un-self-aware.” It would have taken too much time to fully overhaul it. Still, Carroll published it, knowing that—brutally honest as it was—it was sure to be provocative. “There was an enormous backlash, and the writer was traumatized,” Carroll says. “I felt like I just shouldn’t have run the piece at all, because I fundamentally misestimated how prepared the writer was for this to go public.”(Or to continue the analogy, the writer was "cast" in the show because the producers knew she'd give a good, outrageous sound bite, not because they thought she'd "make it" as a journalist.)
posted by en forme de poire at 11:09 AM on September 14, 2015 [14 favorites]
From about 2002 to 2010 I engaged in what I considered to be "confessional blogging" drawing on confessional poets like Plath and Berryman and novelists like B.S. Johnson. For the last 6 years of that I helmed a now-defunct community centering itself around the same styles and darkest of depression and neurosis. I loved my community, they dissolved gradually when I passed on ownership.
The currency was raw emotion and endless recursive self-definition. My self grew into this metastatic glob writing in that style and deep depressions kept getting deeper. A year or so after quitting for good, getting off certain drugs in favor of prescriptions and giving up on reading the others I started to see more clearly why the original confessionals had a tendency toward suicide.
Now I look back on how my writing structured myself and bloated my ego and reinforced negative patterns and I'm happy to be downsizing that old self, I feel impulse to disappear in the long grass of being and practice (getting easier every day) resisting the delusion I must speak or realizing the impulse to speak impulsively and without varnish.
Sometimes you absolutely have say something or share an experience, as an action it can be liberating but as a lifestyle it can be suffocating.
I write here to say mostly that I would not recommend the course I had taken.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 11:11 AM on September 14, 2015 [21 favorites]
The currency was raw emotion and endless recursive self-definition. My self grew into this metastatic glob writing in that style and deep depressions kept getting deeper. A year or so after quitting for good, getting off certain drugs in favor of prescriptions and giving up on reading the others I started to see more clearly why the original confessionals had a tendency toward suicide.
Now I look back on how my writing structured myself and bloated my ego and reinforced negative patterns and I'm happy to be downsizing that old self, I feel impulse to disappear in the long grass of being and practice (getting easier every day) resisting the delusion I must speak or realizing the impulse to speak impulsively and without varnish.
Sometimes you absolutely have say something or share an experience, as an action it can be liberating but as a lifestyle it can be suffocating.
I write here to say mostly that I would not recommend the course I had taken.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 11:11 AM on September 14, 2015 [21 favorites]
chavenet: I would suggest tagging it NSFW & for triggers given that opening paragraph.
For those wondering: the paragraph in question is about incest. (I think specific warnings are more helpful than a blanket 'triggers'.)
An interesting article -- I've only read the first page and don't have time to read the second right now, but I may drop back in here when I have done.
posted by daisyk at 11:29 AM on September 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
For those wondering: the paragraph in question is about incest. (I think specific warnings are more helpful than a blanket 'triggers'.)
An interesting article -- I've only read the first page and don't have time to read the second right now, but I may drop back in here when I have done.
posted by daisyk at 11:29 AM on September 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
The problem isn't that the writer wasn't "prepared" the problem it's impossible to be prepared for something for which you have no experience and context.
Yeah, I also thought her explanation was very telling in how it seemed to totally outsource her ethical responsibilities. (I'm not surprised she's covering her own ass in an interview for a Slate article, of course, but neither am I impressed.) It also seems like an even more relevant ethical question than whether the writer was "prepared" is that, if the end result is that the editor profited by publishing something that she knew would offend Black people and POC but would also get xoJane a lot of eyeballs, isn't that itself pretty racist? I mean, at the end of the day, the practical result is that she knowingly helped offend Black people for money. Zero self-reflection about her part in any of that, of course.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:40 AM on September 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
Yeah, I also thought her explanation was very telling in how it seemed to totally outsource her ethical responsibilities. (I'm not surprised she's covering her own ass in an interview for a Slate article, of course, but neither am I impressed.) It also seems like an even more relevant ethical question than whether the writer was "prepared" is that, if the end result is that the editor profited by publishing something that she knew would offend Black people and POC but would also get xoJane a lot of eyeballs, isn't that itself pretty racist? I mean, at the end of the day, the practical result is that she knowingly helped offend Black people for money. Zero self-reflection about her part in any of that, of course.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:40 AM on September 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
This was something heavily on my mind when I wrote for The Message (on Medium) and we got bonuses, very large bonuses, for what amounted to pageviews. As a middle aged lady who is interested in libraries and rural living, the big way to get pageviews is to reveal things that will be interesting to other people, whether it's personal or just sort of contentious-professional. To be fair, my editors and colleagues never tried to nudge me (or others) into this sort of writing, but it was like a market pressure, you knew if you wrote about your own sexual harassment or "the babysitter tried to feel me up this one time" a lot of people would read it and hot potato it around.
And I've been blogging since there was blogging so I felt I knew the impact of sudden random attention. But it was weird writing for a big platform and the random amount of "negging" that I'd get from internet randos (some women but mostly men). I'm in a comfy enough place that I mostly ignored that sort of thing, but it was poignant looking at the lay of the situation and realizing that it was structurally just sort of wrong. They changed our reimbursement scheme a few months later and then last month laid off ("did not renew contracts" of) all The Message writers except for three (out of ten maybe) who happened to be the top pageview getters. Still have weird feelings about the entire enterprise for reasons sort of like the author outlines.
posted by jessamyn at 12:11 PM on September 14, 2015 [31 favorites]
And I've been blogging since there was blogging so I felt I knew the impact of sudden random attention. But it was weird writing for a big platform and the random amount of "negging" that I'd get from internet randos (some women but mostly men). I'm in a comfy enough place that I mostly ignored that sort of thing, but it was poignant looking at the lay of the situation and realizing that it was structurally just sort of wrong. They changed our reimbursement scheme a few months later and then last month laid off ("did not renew contracts" of) all The Message writers except for three (out of ten maybe) who happened to be the top pageview getters. Still have weird feelings about the entire enterprise for reasons sort of like the author outlines.
posted by jessamyn at 12:11 PM on September 14, 2015 [31 favorites]
Still very much in progress, but I'm looking into making an extension to change all personal essays so that they all come from a single person named Pageviews. Poor Pageviews :(
posted by naju at 3:40 PM on September 14, 2015 [12 favorites]
posted by naju at 3:40 PM on September 14, 2015 [12 favorites]
I never thought much about the sheer quantity of memoir-type writing until an ex put our relationship in such an essay. I was traumatized, and still am. When I found out about that, suddenly I realized the stuff was everywhere. I still avoid sites that are heavy into that sort of thing. And I can't have a relationship with anyone who might do the same in the future. (In fact, on a dating site, I just ran across someone who was famous for doing just this. I thought, yeah, I'll pass on this person. (I don't want to give this person's work any more eyes.))
posted by persona au gratin at 5:16 PM on September 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by persona au gratin at 5:16 PM on September 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
This quote in the article got to me. “The minute I have an interesting idea or turn of phrase or experience now, I’m like, OK, who do I send this to? How fast can I monetize it?” I mean, as a Ph.D. student, I am liable to measure idle thoughts and chance encounters for their suitability as potential research directions. But to have that lens on your personal life seems exhausting and warping in ways I can't quite put my finger on.
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:13 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:13 PM on September 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
“Writing about my interior life for the Internet has disfigured my relationship to it,” Alana Massey says. Massey had been working in PR, knowing she wanted to be a writer but not quite knowing how to start, before she began writing online essays about her body-image problems and her eating disorder, first for xoJane, then BuzzFeed and Medium. “The minute I have an interesting idea or turn of phrase or experience now, I’m like, OK, who do I send this to? How fast can I monetize it?”
Yup. It's already enough of a struggle to remain authentic as it is.
Also I hate that they always try to turn these essays into some uplifting learning moment. Life isn't tidy conclusive narratives. It just happens.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 6:52 PM on September 15, 2015
Yup. It's already enough of a struggle to remain authentic as it is.
Also I hate that they always try to turn these essays into some uplifting learning moment. Life isn't tidy conclusive narratives. It just happens.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 6:52 PM on September 15, 2015
Article on the "It Happened To Me" essays at xoJane.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:00 AM on September 22, 2015
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:00 AM on September 22, 2015
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posted by chavenet at 9:14 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]