Why does Memorial Day always feel like New Year’s to me? It’s about now that I both want to waste time and attempt to atone for all the things I failed to get done over the past nine months…ah, might as well blog.
So, in any event, over the holiday I finally got a chance to read the much-discussed New York Times Magazine cover article by former Gawker editor Emily Gould, about her painfully acquired insights into the danger of blogging the intimate details of private lives (hers and others). Not only did she trade in celebrity gossip for Gawker, she also maintained a private blog in which she discussed her personal life, detailing the ups and downs of her relationships and romances. Since nothing on the internet stays private forever, this was something that later came back to bite her, especially when one of her coworkers, with whom she had an affair, used her blog as a reason to publish his own apparently embarrassing account of their relationship.
All of this is pretty bewildering and pretty alien from my own quaint, quiet corner. Still, I found the article interesting: it suggests that what we have in this new public sphere is a kind of presentation of the ‘private’ self that may or may not be a historically unique configuration. Let me try to spit out a scattershot argument and see if it makes sense, and perhaps I’ll try to tear it down later, if I’m inclined.
My feeling is that in the old public sphere people used to keep up appearances, only to reveal their true selves ‘in private’: to their intimate others at home or in secret assignations, as well as in their diaries, journals, and love letters…a classic frontstage/backstage formulation. Of course, this doesn’t mean that people’s ‘private’ selves were more reliable, or more real, than their public personas - people were bad spouses and parents, unreliable business partners and untrustworthy lovers, guilty of all kinds of improprieties and so on. But, any consequences for these ordinary hypocrisies and breakdowns were dealt with there, and kept out of the papers only if divorce or some other ‘moral failing’ (vice, sin, forms of criminal behavior) became too pressing for others to ignore.
This dynamic or configuration isn’t invalid, but it may be changing. In the new circumstances of on-line publicity, the reversals, regrets, and failings that are the stuff of ordinary life have become sufficient reasons in and of themselves for publication - in the New York Times, no less! But more generally, because it’s so easy to join the blogging world, we now have hordes of people blogging about their personal triumphs and troubles, the strengths and weaknesses of their respective wills: and there’s an army of readers ready to express sympathy and support or to heap trollish scorn. Upon what basis does this new kind of public sphere, this sea of communicated ordinariness, persist? What functions does it serve?
I’d suggest on one level what people obtain is a kind of typically (but sometimes not so) innocuous confirmation of their social instincts and self-image. Look, their problems are just like mine. Maybe I can learn from them - or at least take comfort from the fact that others feel/act this way, too. Or, less charitably, but perhaps (unfortunately) much more frequently: Look how stupid and ridiculous people are! I’m better than that! Of course, people used to rely on novels, and then TV, for social instruction, but blogs add a new twist to it. Like previous forms of media, they’re semantic one-way mirrors of a kind, but mirrors which people talk to and which talk back, and the results are not always delightful or civil, though they can be.
What Emily Gould’s article suggests, however (and I think that this is the one really interesting point that she raises) is that these kinds of conversations that emerge and surface in the blogosphere are predicated on the assumption of the reality of the immediate, which is a treacherous assumption indeed. You may read something a person’s written, and take it as honest and sincere, or as so much BS. But it’s there; and that’s what you have to react to, and are compelled to work with: blogs simply don’t give us several hundred pages of exposition so that we can learn and understand, even if we do not always offer approval for, a particular person’s motives. People have but a few shots to explain themselves, or to let the opportunity pass, and the best way to do so is to be daring with their privacy, to risk revelation in order to gain confirmation from others. But Gould’s own example suggests that anything you read online about someone’s private, intimate experiences and attitudes is just unreliable, and not necessarily because it was offered insincerely (or that you should treat everything you read that way), but quite the opposite! She posted about feelings deeply felt, and yet there turned out in retrospect to be distortingly fragile or misleadingly selective, as deep feelings often are. I’m sure she considered what she wrote to be honest, sincere, real - but only at the time it was written. The fact that she later cringed at what she wrote as foolishly naive, misguided, deluded even, doesn’t strike me as reason enough to criticize her for her failings, which she herself acknowledged, at least to an extent, and which aren’t really particularly unusual. The fact of the matter is that none of us are necessarily completely reliable guides to ourselves, and only a willingness to learn, combined with a dose of forgetfulness and a certain amount of self-charity, allows us to live with the fact that we do things we later regret, or maybe even find unrecognizable or inconsistent with our sense of our ‘true’ selves, with who we ‘really’ are. And that this simultaneous reflection upon and concerted effacement of our personal accounts is what allows our identities to develop some kind of polish, or sheen.
More concretely, what I think the example of this article demonstrates is the need to reacquaint ourselves with how to be private-in-public. I remember reading Rebecca Spong’s ‘The Invention of the Restaurant‘ a few years ago, about the experiences of 19th-century Parisians who were introduced to the first restaurants, where you could actually sit down by yourself or with chosen partners and select your own meal at your own table, rather than being forced to dine with unknown others at a common meal, eating what was being served up as the dish of the day. After the restaurant emerged, the public didn’t congregate to carry out Habermasian exercises in collective deliberation and will-formation, but instead turned busily to observing itself (through gossip, through the elaboration of manners, through the presentation of increasingly sophisticated culinary options) as private individuals, carrying out their own (love?) affairs at their tables - in public settings. All a bit familiar, yet the important point is that it was neither completely frontstage nor backstage, but a combination of both. Today, by contrast, we’re increasingly treated to a surfeit of private experience and private action in public spheres, and a worrisome intrusion of public inspection into private activity: things seem out of kilter, out of whack. How to achieve a balance, when our technologies seem designed to militate against this?
