The Internet as a Liminal Space
Topics explored: the old days of the Internet, LiveJournal vs. current social media platforms, and where to write about grief online without over-annoying strangers or feeling like nobody cares.
In the middle of a pandemic lockdown in NYC, when my parents were dying of cancer last year, I joined a Facebook group called "Hospice and End of Life Care Group." I am embarrassed to say that it was my only support system through those months. Although friends checked in, very few people were ( understandably) available to physically come and help. Whenever I shared what I was currently going through with others, it felt like most people would rather (understandably also) leave the room than engage in thinking about death for too long.
In that online group, I could post about what I was going through every day as a primary caretaker, others could relate, and I could relate to them. Maybe I’ve always needed to over-share. Or maybe it’s a bad habit that makes you a writer, but that group was the closest I've felt to the old Internet days. There were no ironic snippets, no curated posts. Instead, it was all about asking practical questions, sharing the angst and the exhaustion of the job, and sharing my grief with a private community of other strangers who were also part of such an unpopular club. Other caretakers like me, people who had also lost loved ones to cancer, end of life doulas wrote and responded to posts. They offered words of support, but fundamentally, they got it.
For a while, I had a space inside the world of social media, where I could indeed be myself in all my existential mood while others did the same.
Since my parents died last year, I stopped posting in that Facebook group. Yet, still, I've been looking for a different social media platform to write about grief and loss (and about life) and continue to do it as authentically as possible. Yes, I go to therapy. Yes, I have close friends with whom I can share my grief, but as a writer, what if I want to share about grief online to connect to others? And what if I don't want to write short posts with curated images, 140 character funny-sounding tweets, or blogs limited to 1,000 words? Then, where do I go?
MAYBE I WANT A NEW INTERNET
Even though this newsletter is as close as it gets to it right now, I'm nostalgic for the old Internet days. I miss an internet with smaller online communities that had in-depth discussions. I miss the days when posts were not curated, where images did not matter as much as the words written. Where there was some irony, but it wasn't all irony, and where you could talk about angst without limiting it to 280 characters.
A long time ago a platform like that existed, at least for my friends who also used it, and for me.
Rewind twenty years ago...
LIVEJOURNAL
In 2004 I started writing almost daily on Live-Journal, a blog that connected me to a few friends whom I knew in person and online. At the time, access to the Internet was not super common in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I grew up. Most of us in the country still had dial-up Internet or had to go to an "Internet Cafe" to pay for a few hours of web use.
I met most of my best friends from Argentina through that journal. Later, when I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in my twenties, I continued adding readers and writers to my blog, people who had similar interests as mine: art, music, films. I later met most of my Live_Journal friends in person. To this day, many of these online friends are now some of my best friends.
I often wrote on LJ until 2008, then almost stopped in 2010, when other forms of social media such as Facebook and later Twitter and Instagram started to take over. It was in this liminal space where a genuine newness and a bigger, yet still intimate, world was revealed to me. The concept of "persona" or "brand" had not been invented or exploited yet (or I was not aware of it), so one's private life and one's public ramblings on the Internet were not that different from each other. There was a continuity between thought and experience and a less paranoid sort of authenticity to the platform that probably helped me meet the friends I still have now. And, further, it helped me develop a writing voice.
Maybe I say this with some nostalgia for the old internet days, for being young. LiveJournal allowed many of us to be as angsty as we wanted online. Topics such as alcoholism, depression, boredom, music, unhappiness, existentialism, sexuality, drugs, not having money, and relationships were discussed openly in those pages without becoming empty entertainment or clickbait.
In this, Mashable article, Sasha Lekach describes her own experience with LJ:
"It was a place I shared very emo and high school-level drama and feelings with a close group of LJ friends," recalls Mashable's Sasha. It fostered friendships with out-of-state camp friends and friends of friends that I didn't go to school with. Without LJ I wouldn't have gotten to know them."
And for Lekach, same as for me, LiveJournal was more than just a way to keep in touch.
"It also became a place where I would talk about really personal things with people I wouldn't have been able to talk about those things in a face-to-face conversation," she noted. "But I knew my audience and the way I used LJ wasn't public, so it was this really cool middle ground between a personal diary and a social network."
How did it all change so fast?
INTERNET BETWEEN 2000-2010
Chuck Closterman writes about The Nineties, as an era that was "in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The Internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome." (p.3)
I would add that at the beginning of the 2000s, the Internet was still pretty awesome. Until I would argue, Facebook came along, then Instagram, etc. There was a more significant need to create separate public and private personas or show a constantly curated private persona in those new platforms. Again, nothing wrong with this. I go on Instagram and Twitter all the time for entertainment, escape, and to witness snippets of other people's lives. Still, I always wonder (not to make this all deep, but) who are we writing, dancing, performing for nowadays when we share online? Or does it even matter?
WHO ARE YOU WRITING FOR?
I took a creative writing class last year, and the first question we had to respond to was, who are you writing this piece to?
Back in those LJ days, the question was easy to answer. I wrote blog posts for thirty readers or less, whom I knew, who also wrote and commented on my writing. I wrote openly about my day, my job, my frustrations, and I miss the friendliness and innocence of that era. Mostly, I miss the me who posted there.
Back to the present, we all have added way more people than we even know to our Instagram or Twitter feeds. Let's not even start with how many strangers might follow us on Facebook. So, when I try to answer, who am I writing for? My concern is NOT about what someone might think of my posts, but rather, does anyone online even has the time or the attention span to care about what I'm saying/writing/posting??? Am I writing to everyone and nobody at the same time?
Probably yes.
So, the question is more about the indifference of an already saturated audience. On some days, that's great. The fact that nobody cares that much about what one posts on social media is an excellent excuse to keep sharing any writing, art, memoir, poetry, or fiction with less self-consciousness. But it is also why many of us still cannot find a space to share more genuine content that isn't just curated snippets, and why it's probably harder to develop a voice.
You might suggest…
SO, GO WRITE A BOOK THEN AND QUIT COMPLAINING ABOUT NEEDING TO FIND AN ONLINE SPACE TO SHARE YOUR GRIEF.
True.
One solution is to share the more authentic self through art: writing a memoir, fiction, creative non-fiction, a song, a novel. I have plenty of writer friends who are already doing that. But, not to be too negative, publishing and art depend so much on social media promotion these days. So, one would still need to promote that writing/art, and it would have to be on the same platforms that are taking away from people's attention spans in the first place.
As Elle Griffing explains in her article, No One will Read your Book,
"Almost a third of Americans don't read books at all. And, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ones that do spend only 16 minutes per day reading. Compare that to the average Netflix watcher who spends close to three hours per day consuming video content. At that pace, a watcher might get through 681 movies in a year while a reader gets through only 16 books — and that's presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books."
Not only is one’s art/novel/story competing with Netflix. It would also compete with the social media platforms most people wish they could initially escape or spend less time on. And, through the process of sharing one's work, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. one has to keep feeding the old Internet beast that is constantly alienating us in the first place.
I will end this by saying that I don't hate social media. I'm just looking for platforms where I can share things without over-annoying strangers or feeling like nobody cares. Right now, it seems like newsletters, memoirs, and fiction writing might be the best spaces to give some embodiment to my grief. Meanwhile, social media is still useful for networking, finding a broader audience, and monetizing one’s work once it’s ready to be shared, which are all essential tools, but, boy, do I still miss the old Internet days.
Until next thought,
Carolina
PS: Speaking of finding platforms where one can be more authentic, yesterday was Valentine's. I organized a conversational Spanish speed-dating class for my middle school students. I then reminded them that they could be perfectly happy as single people while giving them candy hearts.
I also read this article on what nobody tells you about love ( and wasn’t surprised). Then, I read Emily Oster's newsletter post on how Marriage Happiness Declines with Children. My husband is the best in the world to me, so I look forward to juggling all of that with him shortly, but it won’t be shared in curated snippets.
Un placer leer este ensayo. Estoy totalmente de acuerdo en que hay que aprovechar lo que nos dan las redes sociales, mientras soportamos sus puntos más flojos como, por ejemplo, la saturación de información y la poca atención que dan sus usuarios a textos más elaborados que requieren mayor concentración.
Este es el tipo de escritos que me gustan a mí: acá ya tenés una lectora esperando el próximo posteo.