tweet: performance and production of self online

23rd July 2009

Quote reblogged from Something Changed.

In a crisis, the ability to simultaneously communicate with all our friends (and “friends,” and people we met once or knew in middle school or strangers who have taken an interest in our doings and thoughts and the links we like) can be a huge asset. Not having to expend the time and effort needed to individually contact everyone who might care about us — well, that is very useful, in a crisis. And when we’re feeling alone, Facebook and twitter and tumblr and blogs can make us feel less alone. As these technologies, and the people using them, come of age, it will stop seeming so jarring that news of our loved ones’ deaths and diseases and injuries and endangerments are
delivered to us by proxy, sandwiched between other people’s musings about the Real Housewives of New York. I think.

Because it’s not actually that weird, that people use these means — which we associate with informality and jokes and offhandedness, because that’s how they’re most often used — to share serious and consequential and personal information. In real life, seriousness and absurdity aren’t kept cordoned off from each other, so why should online life be any different? That is how I’m trying to think of it, anyway. Remember that old Dave Chappelle sketch “what if the internet was a real place,” where the Internet is represented physically as a mall full of people who offer you free music downloads and debt consolidation and “goat play?” I mean, that sketch is so funny because the internet really is exactly like that, except in one corner of the mall there’s a funeral going on, right next to where the goat play happens.

The question, I guess, is does it trivialize death and trauma to talk about them in real time, online? Inevitably it does, a little. What especially trivializes bad things is when anonymous commenters are given the opportunity to talk about them, because inevitably someone will say something that, even if it’s well-intentioned, reads as direly wrong and offensive. And while anonymous commenters pretending to care about something bad that’s happened to someone who they feel a false sense of familiarity with are bad, anonymous commenters using the opportunity of someone’s tragedy or trauma to mock them — well, that is probably the worst thing about the Internet. Besides, you know, white supremacist sites and sexual predators and Tucker Max.