seeing the person behind the piece
Edit: This post is being rapidly upvoted by bots for some reason. Please ignore the upvote count, it’s not real.
Something I noticed as a consequence of online culture and platform design, especially on social media:
It is very common online to follow an account not for the person behind it, but the way they present and discuss a topic or niche, even if they aren’t doing this with a professional intent or style. Then when the topics shift or we get tired of the person, people try to find someone else that scratches the itch.
It’s like we use people online to engage with topics by proxy, and they are rather replaceable. We don’t just watch crochet videos, we watch this specific person crochet, but not for her as a person, and so on. People seem to have roles to fill in terms of who they follow, and they’ll move on if the role is no longer adequately filled, or the roles change. Feeds are highly curated; too many posts considered off-topic and you are ruining the vibe.
In my experience, on the personal web, I really enjoy the culture of people being genuinely interested in learning about someone else. Seems like the general question is “What’s that person up to?” There is a wish to see life from the perspective of them, read their diary, explore their interests through their lens, and an acceptance that this person doesn’t necessarily write for you, but more likely for themselves (or at least, also for themselves). From the responses I get via e-mail or blog posts, people seem to respect that this is the specific situation of a stranger, and they’ll compare it with their own. There is a distinct separation.
Yet, when my posts breach containment and land on link aggregators or social media, a different crowd shows up.
In my experience, people coming from, and heavily using, social media that lets you reshare (reblog/retweet etc) a post onto your own profile tend to read posts as if they are meant to be self-inserts.
What I mean is: Every post or article they come across is read as if they are judging whether this crosses a threshold of when they feel like sharing it onto their profiles to be like “that’s soooo me!”. Because that’s what happens with, I’d say, most reshares you put your name and picture to: You adopt what this person said and say it too. People find your profile and see everything you reshared as an endorsement, as something you re-say with your own voice.
And when this type of person reads my posts, it feels like they do so with tunnel vision, with completely disregarding anything that doesn’t fit into how they see themselves and their own situation. They just wanna plunder my posts for parts that fit enough, so they can plaster it across their feeds as something that represents them, and are mad when there is something in there that is too different from their experience, something they wouldn’t co-sign… and therefore just ignore it or dismiss it, or accuse me of lying.
Their responses, while almost never super rude, are at least not empathetic enough in the sense that they write criticisms as if I told a lie about their own life; a life that is extremely different to mine.
It seems like for this type of person, the human being behind it doesn’t count at all. Every “content” someone puts out is a meme; further ammo to use to further their view on their own situation, or as self-promotion on their own internet presences. The source is forgettable and irrelevant, because in 5 minutes, they’ll find the next thing to consume. Single use entertainment. It’s just words written by someone else to take into their mouth and spit at the feed1, and maybe get upvotes and likes for something they had no hand in.
I wouldn’t even mind as much, if it wouldn’t result in a completely warped picture of what I wrote about or what the conclusion is, while posing self-confidently as an expert in the comments trying to give advice or “correct” my experience. And people challenging those is rare because everyone is tired of beefing with random strangers over semantics.
Did all this come from the way we are expected to engage with professional content creators who decidedly make mass-appeal content you are support to insert yourself in, and we end up applying it to almost everyone online?
How do we feel being treated like a TV channel or magazine? You can be an inspiration, a pastime and distraction to someone; how does that make you feel? Can you withstand the pressure to box yourself in so you are more fitting for the role?
Are you beating yourself up for falling short of a label you applied to your blog? Are you already thinking of the brand you have inadvertently built? Are you ready to tear it down over and over again?
Published
Feeds I cannot even properly access or see, because they are all on extremely locked down Mastodon instances which are either completely inaccessible or unusable (bad or no search/content navigation) without an account, which genuinely pisses me off a lot. It's similar to how much info is locked inside Discord servers. You all profit from posting easily accessible public stuff like my blog, but the people create that stuff out cannot even take a peek what you're saying about them. So much for the "better alternatives" and being "open". It's not more open to me than Instagram or X, who also wall their content to death. At least be so kind and send me a direct link via mail, since search engines don't even pick it up either.↩