(Not So) Defiantly (Maybe): Profile Fatigue and Why I'm Hiding My Blog From You Now

So, tonight marks sort of a big moment for me and my relationship with the internet.

I started my first blog in December of 2004, and ever since then, first on Livejournal, then Blogger, then Tumblr, and then Blogger again, I've written whatever came to mind about whatever came to mind, and left it all available for anyone to read, both in the interest of generating discussion and as an exercise in self-expression. Before blogs, before social networking was a thing, I wrote pretty consistently (both fiction and just general thoughts) on my computer from 1995 or so up until 2004, and though there wasn't as ready a mechanism for making those writings widely available at the time (thank god!), I was willing to share them with whoever was interested.

As of tonight, I'm changing my primary blog over to private, so the entries can only be read by people who I've personally okay'd. Here's why.

One of my absolute favorite times to be doing anything on the internet was when I was blogging c. 2006-2008. Facebook wasn't a huge thing yet (at least not in my social circles), I had a MySpace, but it was a secondary form of communication, for the most part, to email, and blogging was fun. I've never had a large readership on any of my blogs, but I never wrote for other people, just for myself, so that wasn't a big worry. What I did have were a few friends who followed my posts, occasionally responded to something that interested them directly, and often blogged in their own right. Not only did it feel like I had a small, invested group of friends/readers who would take an occasional personal interest in what I was writing (an important thing for an insecure writer, thinker, and human), I was allowed access to their thoughts in kind, and some of the most interesting conversations I've ever had arose from back-and-forth comments during this time. These experiences were in large part what led to my declaring, when I started writing professionally on new media issues, that relationships and communication online could be just as meaningful and "deep" as those offline.

Then something changed. It would be reductive to say that the impetus for this change was the rise of Facebook, but that certainly had something to do with it. Suddenly, nobody (including me, much to my own surprise) read blogs anymore, and took to reading status updates instead. More importantly, nobody used blogs to communicate anymore, but took to writing status updates instead.*

This change wasn't as immediate as I'm making it sound, but at some point in 2009, I realized I wasn't really blogging as much anymore, and people weren't responding anymore. I still had conversations with the same people, but they were on Facebook (and later on Twitter). These conversations were, by necessity, faster but also shorter, at times near-synchronous but oddly unsatisfying for all that. Blogging started to seem like something that took too much effort, when other, faster methods of online communication were so readily available. In 2008, I posted 723 times on my blog. In 2009, it was down to 378. By last year, it was down to 32.

Obviously, this wasn't some sort of dystopian disintegration of virtual community. It didn't happen to me; I just stopped writing, albeit slowly over the course of a few years. For one thing, I was working harder at grad school, I was in a relationship, I had more friends in "the real world," and I was spending a decent amount of time virtually socializing on Facebook (and later Twitter) each day as it was. I had hobbies and other interests, and it seemed natural that pursuing those hobbies and interests was of primary importance, while sitting in front of a blog writing about pursuing them should be of secondary importance. It wasn't until last week, in the midst of a discussion with my Digital Diversity students about Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together that I realized how drastically things had changed: I realized, in the midst of one student's particularly strident defense of texting as an emotionally nuanced form of person-to-person conversation, that relationships and communication online was not as meaningful or "deep" as "real world" interaction, at least not for me. Not anymore.

I don't have any fancy academicese to back this up with at the moment, and I don't really want to cast about for any. I don't need it. That golden age of blogging is gone, and it's been replaced by a fistful of different social media profiles, a tangle of different audiences, all with their own expectations of me as a writer, and as a person, and it feels more and more, day to day, that my interactions on Facebook and Twitter, even with my best, dear friends from "real life" are really just a series of carefully calculated acts, impression management, with at least one eye always toward a bigger audience that might or might not be watching. And it feels like it's sucking all the fun out of this whole internet thing.

Now, obviously, I'm not going to stop using Facebook, or Twitter, or blogging (clearly). I study these things for a living because they're interesting to me, and they're just as fascinating when they don't work as they are when they do work. But. I can't help but feel more and more as time goes on, that a lot of my time spent on social networking sites is just sort of a waste. I have a very difficult time having meaningful conversations with real human beings over a medium like Facebook ("meaningful" academically, philosophically, emotionally, comedically, whatever). Everything is bite-sized pieces of information that people (including me!) have a tendency to attach planet-sized amounts of meaning to, and if you try to explain a point of view or opinion or whatnot "at length" (by which I mean "in the amount of text you might be able to speak in 45 seconds), half the comments that follow are "TL;DR lol" or similar. I'm not a huge fan of what it's done for our discourse. It seems pretty often that your options for communication on Facebook are: 1) talk about very trivial things constantly and 2) try to talk about something more substantive, but spend most of the following thread defending yourself from wild misinterpretations of what you were trying to say from generally well-meaning people who naturally project their own agendas onto your comments on a site that's really all about self-absorption (I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else, of course).

It's not that I have anything against trivial conversation. Between the ages of 16 and 32, the percentage of my daily conversations that end up being about bodily functions has only slightly decreased from 70% to about 55%. But I don't like the fact that after a day of trading Facebook/Twitter info-bites, the idea of writing a long-form blog post deeply exploring some issue seems like "too much." I don't like that I would rather refresh my News Feed for the twentieth time instead of reading a few pages out of a book that's been sitting on my desk for a month, gathering dust. Clever and funny as they are sometimes, I don't want to think in memes for the rest of my life, even if the instant-gratification part of my brain keeps trying to convince me I do by pumping me full of dopamine.

When I have a particularly full day at work, or some other professional/personal/emotional difficulty, I really enjoy going for a walk or a jog, or even a drive (without music). It's about the only way I've found to give my brain space to sort through the knots and try to make sense of what's going on so that I can respond to stress productively. I love climbing mountains; it's a beautifully rewarding hobby to have, both physically and spiritually. But half of what makes me get out there and do it on a regular basis is it's one of the few ways I have nowadays to actually get away from all the Facebook-level stuff (both online and in "real life") and let my brain process at what feels like the actual speed a brain should be allowed to process at. I still have some spaces like this in the physical world, clearly. And I really appreciate them, because they keep me from going nuts. I used to have a space in the virtual world like this as well, but then me and everyone else stopped going there. I'm still not sure why, but now, finally, I know that I wish we hadn't.

So what does making my blog private have to do with this?

An even more important question might be "Why are you still reading this?" But I digress.

I want to have a chance to reestablish this lost virtual space. Doing that means that I need to set up my online presence in such a way that I'm encouraged to write long-form posts again instead of the shorter, spur-of-the-moment content that social networking requires. To do this, I need to have at least one space where I know my audience and feel like I'm able to screw up in front of them without being harshly judged. At one point in my life it was important for me to prove to myself that I could be honest about who I was publicly, in front of anyone who happened to stumble across my blog. I know I can do this now. Now, I worry about losing a friend, a colleague, or a job over saying too much in a virtual space where we've all agreed to only say very little.

I write about a lot of things. Most of them are stupid. Some of them might be smart, but I doubt it. But I enjoy this, and, like going for a walk, it helps clear my head. It helps even more if certain people are willing and able to chime in with constructive observations along the way. And maybe the worst part of the blog-to-Facebook transition is not the dumbing-down of post content, but the fact that there's no easy way to share with these people without sharing with everyone you've ever friended, or with everyone who's ever chosen to "follow" you. This, I believe, fundamentally alters the way in which we perceive of our own identity formation and our written communication with others. No, seriously.

In the past, if you wanted to be weird, foul-mouthed, juvenile-y poetic, or even (the worst sin when all your online friends are academics!) self-contradictory, you could probably get away with it as long as you were audience-literate and made sure that each of the selves you presented to different people/groups was consistent for the particular audience you presented it to. Now that option is gone. The people who know the Facebook You also know the Physical World You. The people who read your tweets also sign your paychecks. And so on. People can say "Oh, just be yourself!" or "Just use Facebook Lists!" or "Just don't put anything stupid online!"

To these I say, in order:
1) The world must be a wonderfully uncomplicated place for you, random 13 year-old objector!

2) These sorts of workarounds are possible, for sure, but notice how they're always fairly complicated to enact. It's almost as if the people behind the social networks don't really have any interest in making it so you don't share everything with everyone all the time...

3) Well, then what's the point of being online? What's the point of socializing at all if you're not going to say anything interesting, make a few mistakes, learn from them, and then make a few more in the process of being a human being?

Back in the old days, we socialized in private. We talked on phones, we hung out in rooms, we passed notes that were quickly disposed of, lest our various social circles intersect, with disastrous results. The sender of the message and the receiver understood the rules of the particular circle that they shared: some circles were playgrounds, some were deadly serious, many were in-between. You could tell a friend about a serious misgiving you were having about, say, your current relationship and get some meaningful feedback as well as a little discretion. Now imagine having this same conversation in the middle of a restaurant completely full of people you know while your friend sits at the other end of the room and the only way you're allowed to talk to him/her is by using a megaphone set to full blast. It's easier to not talk at all.

And that's what I worry about, at least for myself, if not for Today's Society at large: that these "heavy" conversations are happening less and less because it's just difficult to have them within the logistics of online impression management. Certainly, not all talk goes on online, but more and more of it does. Research from the aforementioned book by Sherry Turkle shows teens growing up today frequently prefer texting to phone calls because the phone "gives too much away": emotions can be betrayed, information is conveyed through the voice, breathing, inflection, and it's much less scary to be able to perfect the presentation of your message, of yourself, by writing a text, posting on Facebook, etc.

This scares me. If people aren't willing to let the "information" of emotions into their discourse because it's "easier" to reduce everything to text, short paragraphs, soundbites, then it can't be terribly far from here to the point where bothering to think about difficult things becomes inconvenient enough that we simply prefer to pretend our problems, our brain-knots as it were, don't exist. Some people might be okay with this, and that's fine. This isn't a call to arms by any means. I'm not okay with it, though, not for me, and I'm hoping to get back to something that strikes me as a more holistic form of online communication and expression in the hopes that it'll bleed back into my "real life" a bit. I guess what I've been trying to say is that my day-to-day life is, to the smallest but scariest degree, starting to resemble Facebook. When I write in tweets all day, I start thinking in tweets all day. And there's too much world out there for tweets to contain.

Obviously, I'm going to keep using social networks. For one thing, they're part of what I study. For another, there's a lot of social inertia built up there; if I simply disappear from the FaceScape, Bad Things will happen personally, professionally, etc. I spend the majority of my 50 or so hours of work per week in front of an internet connected computer, and it's fun to tab away from work from time to time to throw up an observation on Facebook or a photo on Twitter or Instagram. But, as I said above, these networks are, from my perspective, mostly about the self, built on the supposition that if you have something to say, not just someone but everyone you know is potentially interested in hearing it. I think that's pretty rarely true (at least for me), and I don't write to get people's attention. 95% of the posts I make on social networking sites are made to specifically inform a few people of something (to share pictures with my parents, to let a few of my friends know where I'm going to be in 4 hours, etc.); it just so happens that because we're all in the same restaurant and all I've got is this damn megaphone, everyone else gets to hear, too, whether I/they like it or not.

So I want to go back to having a space where I know who I'm writing to, just one space, because I think that might just make a lot of difference for me. I've created this new blog, Recomposing the Pines, so that I can continue to cross-post academically relevant and publicly-appropriate thoughts (and then, yes, share those thoughts on Facebook and Twitter), but Defiantly, Maybe will be invite-only.

And yes, I realize the irony of making yet another blog as a response to profile fatigue, but whatever. This felt right, so I'm giving it a shot.

The reason I really wrote all of this, if you're still with me, was to say this: anybody who is interested in reading my old, less orderly and less presentable blog: I would absolutely love for you to. I'll continue posting, hopefully more frequently and more freakishly now, and we'll probably all have a good ol' time together. You don't have to comment, you don't have to post back; just knowing people are reading is a neat thing, and will likely keep me more interested in keeping the project going than if I'm just writing into (virtual) space. Get ahold of me in whatever way is easiest, and I'll add you to the reader list. I know there are a few of you out there who still read that blog now. If you can bring yourself to click a few times on the internet on behalf, I would like to add you to the reader list, because you are all awesome and I like having you read my stuff and things. I would be sad if you got shut out at this point. It's at locke456.blogspot.com.

For the 95% of you who aren't interested in the weirdo-Ben blog at all, awesome! You can do nothing at all and your reward will likely be having your Facebook and Twitter feeds a little more free of my inane rambling. What a deal, right?!

I'm certainly not doing this to hide anything (except the GPS coordinates of the bodies), but instead to just make sure I know who's looking when I jump from video game reviews to webcam videos of yoga ball Plinko to the blog equivalent of going on a walk to clear my head all in the space of a week. The web used to be a wilderness and now there are fences everywhere and gates and fees and frowning police officers and it'd be nice to just have a little piece of land to build something that's just mine again.

Is that stretching the metaphor too far?

Ah, overburdened metaphors and pages and pages of rambling text typed in the middle of the night. It's already starting to feel like old times in here...

Thanks for paying attention, and at the very least look for future academic-y, smart-people discussions about pedagogy and new media and conferences and whatnot here on Recomposing the Pines!

* I should clarify here that when I say that "nobody was reading/writing blogs anymore," I mean specifically as a means of general, day-to-day narration and mundane philosophizing. Of course blogs continued to be (and continue to be) a popular medium in other contexts.