Four years ago, I wrote “I’m surprised” in response to Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election. That was it. His victory speech, a set of ellipses, and “I’m surprised” underneath. No insight, nothing. I’m sure I had an opinion - I had only been blogging properly (ha!) for a few months, but I still had opinions on lofty things like politics, philosophy and how to fuck up your emotional development (mostly the latter). But I didn’t express it. Four years ago, I’m not sure it was normal to do so. Tumblr was still in its infancy - Twitter had been around for a bit longer, but hadn’t really taken off. I know that blogs, and LiveJournals, and fucking Xanga had been around for a lot longer, but - hm. They’re not the same.
I had a LiveJournal, back in 2004, and it was… miserably dull. I wrote about myself. A lot. About websites I was making (or failing to make). About my friends, and people who I thought at the time were friends. There was stuff in there about school, and about music, and not much that really betrayed any insight. And that was normal. This was back when we had Myspace, a solipsistic nightmare in itself, where you poured more time into customizing your profile to give your cursor a trail of glitter than actually, you know, talking to people.
LiveJournal and Myspace also predated the massive, pervasive use of the phrase “social media”, because… they weren’t that social. Sure - there was connection there, but the emphasis was on soliloquy and not dialogue.
And now we have this weird, uncomfortable, in-between phase where we’re still effectively doing the same things but everything, everything is telling us to join the conversation. Get your fucking opinion out there, because you have to teach people. You, a fourteen-year-old girl in Texas, have this ineffable wisdom on the sock choice of Justin Bieber that merits not one, not two, but one hundred and forty characters! You, Ivy-League-educated fraternity boy! You have an opinion on the death of Andrew Breitbart, don’t you? Twentysomething men of England! Please, please tell me about how fit that bird was that you saw at a club in Liverpool last night while you were hammered out of your skull on ketamine! The world needs to know your opinions!
I think - and maybe I’m being overly cynical, or maybe I had a little too much whisky - that what we have is this situation where people expect an audience, but they haven’t developed the responsibility to deal with one. Your LJ or Myspace could be irresponsible and immature because no-one cared, but now, that fourteen-year-old girl is getting death threats for daring to touch on the subject of Biebs’s feet, the grieving kids of a terrible bigot might be stumbling across the words of a (clearly very educated) young man who expresses his grinning satisfaction that their Dad is dead, and where there might have been crucial moments of self-reflection that previously tempered the mob mentality that constitutes “laddish” behaviour, now people just pull to refresh and see half a dozen like-minded thugs agreeing with them.
And - and - it’s fucking pervasive. This isn’t something that’s just online. I honestly think that politics has become more divided because we widened the pool on who deserves to have a say - and while it was far from perfect before, now there are no checks and boundaries besides mass popularity. Twitter does not have an editorial board. Tumblr’s attitude towards social policy is to make a GIF. People appear on TV as experts, when all they actually did was find a conservative Christian publisher prepared to produce a short print run of bilious bullshit they made up in their garage. We pay attention to the hysterical ones - on both sides - because they grab your attention. They drive up ratings. They sell products. They’re short, snappy, and for the most part full of shit. I’m guilty of buying into this. I follow The Atlantic on Tumblr, and for the most part I’ve only ever clicked the meaningless little red heart next to quotes of three lines or less.
Whoever won yesterday, at whatever level, moderation lost.
I’m going to end with a link. It’s this. I don’t want to explain it, but that people like that exist at least gives me a glimmer of hope.