Social Media and Self-Revelation
At the beginning of April, Michael and I took two weeks to road-trip to Texas for the solar eclipse. We borrowed my parents’ VW camper van and drove east to Kansas, south through Oklahoma, and parked in Dallas for four days to see one of my best friends and her partner. After Dallas, we progressed to the Texas Hill Country, centered in the eclipse’s path of totality. We spent a few glorious days lakeside, then drove through the flat, flat Texas panhandle, spent a night in the completely unexpected Palo Duro Canyon, and stopped by the Great Sand Dunes before driving home. Something about a long road trip with so many vistas and staggered destinations seemed well-suited for sharing on social media, so each time we stopped for gas, I clicked on the pink-and-orange icon on my phone screen and updated my Instagram stories.
It turned out to be a fun way to preserve some of the fleeting glimpses of the trip, the highway thoughts that otherwise would’ve appeared and disappeared as quickly as roadside rest stops. But however much I posted, there was more that I wanted to post. The online appetite is insatiable, lubricated by the ease of well-designed user interfaces and the law of diminishing returns. For every decent wildflower picture I snapped, I took ten more blurry pictures of the bug-splattered windshield. I wanted to capture drinking late-night Irish whisky next to the lit chiminea on my friend’s back porch, our efforts to roll tiny pasta spirals of trofié, the blissful hours that I spent floating in my duck-themed inner tube on the surface of the lake. I didn’t take any photos of the eclipse.
Part of me feels like it’s too cliché to even bring up the division between “living” life and recording it, how the camera/cameraphone becomes a scrim (and therefore also a barrier) through which experience is filtered, the wave-particle theory that suggests an observed phenomenon is altered by the act of observation. John Jeremiah Sullivan, an essayist I love(1), writes about this dynamic in an essay about the night he spent partying with the Miz, a former star of MTV’s genre-defining show, The Real World. Sullivan says:
“Now, when you watch a reality show—when you follow The Real World, for instance—you’re not watching a bunch of people who’ve been hurled into some contrived scenario and are getting filmed, you’re watching people who are being on a reality show. This is now the plot of all reality shows, no matter their cooked-up schemes. And here’s the lovely, surprising thing about this shift toward greater self-consciousness, greater self-reflexivity, more uniform complicity in the falseness of it all—it made things more real. Because, of course, people being on a reality show is precisely what these people are! Think of it this way: If you come to my office and film me doing my job (I don’t have one, but that only makes this thought experiment more rigorous), you wouldn’t really see what it was like to watch me doing my job, because you’d be there watching me (Heisenberg uncertainty principle, interior auto-mediation, and so forth). But now dig this: What if my job were to be on a reality show, being filmed, having you watching me, interior auto-mediation, and so forth? What if that were my reality, bros? Are your faces melting yet?”
Social networking has evolved—almost undetected, at least by many of its users—into social media, with the rise of influencers and advertisements and sponsored posts, and everyone who participates has become some level of content creator. In this context, to be online is to perform a curated and aestheticized version of yourself, ideally calibrated for algorithmic optimization and some level of mass consumption.
It’s weird, and worth noting, how this mirrors the evangelical pressure to perform satisfaction in Christ as a tool for evangelism, how one’s social and emotional presentation is cannibalized for another’s “edification.” (Stay tuned for a whole essay about that, folks.)
This is the burden, the price we pay, for having turned over our social machinations to corporations for whom sustenance of the social fabric is not remotely a priority. The rule of thumb regarding online platforms that provide a “service” in exchange for strip-mining our privacy rights and selling off our data is, if you’re not paying for it, you’re what’s being sold. A whole generation of enterprising young digital natives have decided to repurpose the platforms for their own profit. Kill or be killed; eat or be eaten.
The more I read about [the difficult road to] publishing nonfiction, the more I encounter the advice to “build a platform.” The argument goes that while readers/consumers will purchase a novel based on cover appeal alone, to sell nonfiction(2), the author has to furnish some kind of authenticating credentials, to be recognized or validated as an authority on their topic. Memoir straddles a middle line.
It’s intimidating to be naturally adverse to social media and be told that “building a[n online] platform” is a prerequisite for the kind of professional trajectory I desire. And yet, I also find myself enlivened by the possibility of connecting with people (because there are, theoretically, human individuals behind [some] online accounts) who resonate with my “content.” That’s how I found Stephanie Stalvey, an artist working on a graphic novel about re-evaluating her relationship to evangelicalism. Through a panel about How to Leverage Social Media to Build Your Audience at AWP2023 (a national writing conference), I learned about Tia Levings, former fundamentalist and author of the forthcoming A Well-Trained Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy (which is one of the best books about fundamentalism I have read; go pre-order your copy now!). Twitter’s(3) Recommended For You tab turned me onto Rachel Syme via her little online game, Perfume Genie, and I’ve loved following her work since then. Her essay, “How to Make Sense of Scents” (ignore the dumb title), is thumbtacked up in my craft lab.
I recently met a woman who told me it’s her dream to be a food blogger for Boulder, as a way of promoting Boulder’s underrated restaurant scene. Her enthusiasm reminded me that even if our efforts are being fleeced by corporations and our imaginations are being surveilled for billionaires’ profit margins, I’d still like to be someone whose life is marked by enthusiasm and imagination. I want my social media profiles to reflect rigorous engagement with my place and what it offers. I want to promote the work of small organizations that I love, that are unlikely to get widespread “coverage” or media attention. I want to show off my friend AJ’s kick-ass performance in a queer production of Romeo & Juliet, and I want to post about the gorgeous seed plants that my farm is selling at the Farmers’ Market. I want to share the links to my friends’ publications and I want to spread awareness about breathtaking art exhibits, even when I can’t attend them.
But the scary thing about posting online is the risk of (too much) self-revelation. Those of us who have grown up with Facebook know the incrimination of immaturity. It’s all still out there: our juvenilia, the stupid status updates we made when we were fifteen, the digital detritus of whatever past choices we haven’t gone out of our way to scrub from the virtual fossil record. The double-bind of digital permanence is that I don’t want the kind of personal trajectory where I continue to identify into perpetuity with whatever I wrote or posted or obsessed about when I was younger. I want to grow beyond my former predilections and presumptions.
In an essay on “Writing and the Body” for the fabulous Write or Die magazine, Christie Tate writes,
“Every piece of writing I've ever done—essays, memoir, Instagram captions, e-mails, texts—has exposed me. I’ve signaled what I care about, what makes me laugh, what I remember, what I’m hung up on, what humiliates me, grieves me, disgraces me, and saves me… I’ve dragged my body to the page and let it speaks its memories and sensations. I cannot write without connecting to my body; that’s where all my stories live.”
Another thing I cannot do is write, post, promote, and pretend like my perspective will not belie some lacuna, an erasure, a blind spot. I remember spending the summer of 2020 pacing my apartment, nauseous with anxiety over my self-presentation online while Americans in quarantine reeled from what felt like the constantly breaking news about police and white supremacist violence against Black folks. Say their names: Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd. My reaction was a narcissistic misallocation of concern: an overinvestment in performative allyship, not enough investment in systemic change(4).
I’m uneasy with the politics of engaging critically on a platform that’s not designed to facilitate political discourse (that might, in fact, be designed to stifle or distort such discourse), but these spaces may be the closest thing we have to a public forum or a town square.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, my corner of the internet was awash in mourning over the loss of an online meeting grounds. I was just getting on Twitter, and it felt like I’d arrived at the precise moment the platform was emptying out—like I’d showed up just in time for the funeral. When Musk changed the name, Vox joined a spate of other online news outlets lamenting the death of Twitter, and they published this disarmingly sincere elegy. The internet in general, and Twitter in particular, have provided previously unfathomable access to millions of perspectives. They are engines for propagating conspiracy theories, yes, and they are spaces for intersectional consciousness-raising.
I’m currently reading an anthology of collected essays from the feminist literary site Weird Sister, and it's made me sad all over again about the loss of so many feisty feminist publications and blogs: Bitch media, Feministing, Man Repeller. Michael has told me repeatedly that I missed the golden age of the internet, when it was open, inventive, and experimental; where you could meet like-minded weirdos in forums and chat rooms; before every click was commodified for shareholder profits. But every “golden age nostalgia” is a fallacy. As Mariame Kaba, Andrea Smith, Lori Adelman, and Roxane Gay reported in The Nation, "The world was and is currently structured by white supremacy, settler colonialism, heterosexism and patriarchy… How [could] social media exist independently of the dynamics and forces of oppression that structure the world at large?” The internet has always been both soul-sucking and potentially revolutionary. The internet has always been a tool for polarization and for organizing. That’s what tools are: means to ends, not ends in themselves.
My ends are to connect with people pursuing the same questions that I am. People who might connect via the internet or social media but develop rich, embodied relationships beyond its purview.
My friend Caroline runs an instagram account that incorporates her experiences as a cancer survivor who lives with chronic illness. She recently posted a succession of images critiquing the algorithm’s emphasis on tragedy and trauma narratives and refuting the expectations that she, as a survivor, should be expected to perform gratitude to “inspire” others. (Again, the commodification of one person’s subjective experience for another’s elevation.)
“I should be vulnerable and expository, but not too honest,” Caroline captions. “My posts need to be relatable to all, have an overall edge of hope, and paint myself as a resilient, brave hero amidst distress.
“I cannot win at this game,” Caroline declares, “and I do not want to.
“I want to feel connected, to share photos of light, water, flowers, and moments of joy. I want to focus on my real life, not what in my life would make a good reel.”
Social media is a focussing tool: a set of concerns, which is to say, a set of values.
I want to participate in the political discourse and consciousness-raising of my time. I want to problematize the unthinking consumption of images of violence and subjugation while also doing my part to ensure that America’s ongoing facilitation of genocide doesn’t go unnoticed. I want to be ethically responsible for the space I occupy while also challenging the structures that have allowed us to interpret consumerist choices as the ultimate representation of moral action(5).
I can doom-scroll until my fingertips lose feeling, but I also turn to social media to stay current with my communities, to read the latest book review everyone is talking about on Twitter, to keep up with controversies within evangelicalism, or read some poetry I wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. It’s the bombing of every university in Gaza and it’s writers promoting their new, visionary, groundbreaking projects. My road-trip Instagram stories featured fields of flowers and markers from where lynchings took place. Social media is ultimately just like every other facet of life, in that it’s terrible and beautiful and gripping and banal all at once. This is what it is to be human: to stretch to hold it all.
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(1) Considered part of New Journalism, the aesthetic movement that preceded Creative Nonfiction, involved with such publications as Harper’s Magazine, the Paris Review, and GQ. Many of his essays are collected in a fabulous, weird, and wide-ranging collection called Pulphead.
(2) Though I resent the homogenization and consolidation of such a huge range of genres and styles under one fairly nondescript umbrella
(3) Fuck you, Elon
(4) Even the term “investment” feels predictably fraught. My friend Ben recently told me he’s been thinking about everything through the lens of market negotiations. There’s a reason that anti-racism work is so often bound up with dismantling capitalism.
(5) My brilliant advisor Claire Dederer’s book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, opens with the question, “Can I love the art made by this (morally bad) artist,” and eventually, in her wrestling, dismantles the question in a scathing critique of the conflation of consumption with ethics. Claire writes, “By immediately responding, “well, are you going to throw out the work of X?”, critics become handmaidens of capital, moving the focus from the perpetrator and the systems that support the perpetrator to the individual consumer.
”This is the liberal, enlightened ideal of individual solutions—people will make good choices because people are inherently good. Liberalism wants you to turn your gaze away from the system and focus instead on the importance of your choices. In late-stage capitalism, this individual choice becomes irreparably soldered to consumer choice…
”We attempt to enact morality through using our judgment when we buy stuff [or post or like or re-tweet], but our judgment doesn’t make us better consumers—it actually makes us more trapped in the spectacle, because we believe we have control over it. What if instead we accepted the falsity of the spectacle altogether?”
I find it interesting the way this excerpt echoes and inverts John Jeremiah Sullivan’s points about complicity in spectacle, falsity eradicated by the open acknowledgement of construct.
