Not an answer to your question, but Sarah Constantin’s essay seems relevant. As usual it’s hard not to just quote the entire piece:
But one thing I have noticed personally is that people have gotten intimidated by more formal and public kinds of online conversation. I know quite a few people who used to keep a “real blog” and have become afraid to touch it, preferring instead to chat on social media. It’s a weird kind of locus for perfectionism — nobody ever imagined that blogs were meant to be masterpieces. But I do see people fleeing towards more ephemeral, more stream-of-consciousness types of communication, or communication that involves no words at all (reblogging, image-sharing, etc.) There seems to be a fear of becoming too visible as a distinctive writing voice. …
What might be going on here?
Of course, there are pragmatic concerns about reputation and preserving anonymity. People don’t want their writing to be found by judgmental bosses or family members. But that’s always been true — and, at any rate, social networking sites are often less anonymous than forums and blogs.
It might be that people have become more afraid of trolls, or that trolling has gotten worse. Fear of being targeted by harassment or threats might make people less open and expressive. I’ve certainly heard many writers say that they’ve shut down a lot of their internet presence out of exhaustion or literal fear. And I’ve heard serious enough horror stories that I respect and sympathize with people who are on their guard.
But I don’t think that really explains why one would drift towards more ephemeral media. Why short-form instead of long-form? Why streaming feeds instead of searchable archives? Trolls are not known for their patience and rigor. Single tweets can attract storms of trolls. So troll-avoidance is not enough of an explanation, I think.
It’s almost as though the issue were accountability.
A blog is almost a perfect medium for personal accountability. It belongs to you, not your employer, and not the hivemind. The archives are easily searchable. The posts are permanently viewable. Everything embarrassing you’ve ever written is there. If there’s a comment section, people are free to come along and poke holes in your posts. This leaves people vulnerable in a certain way. Not just to trolls, but to critics.
You can preempt embarrassment by declaring that you’re doing something shitty on purpose. That puts you in a position of safety. You move to a space for trashy, casual, unedited talk, and you signal clearly that you don’t want to be taken seriously, in order to avoid looking pretentious and being deflated by criticism. I think that a lot of online mannerisms, like using all-lowercase punctuation, or using really self-deprecating language, or deeply nested meta-levels of meme irony, are ways of saying “I’m cool because I’m not putting myself out there where I can be judged. Only pompous idiots are so naive as to think their opinions are actually valuable.”
Here’s another angle on the same issue. If you earnestly, explicitly say what you think, in essay form, and if your writing attracts attention at all, you’ll attract swarms of earnest, bright-but-not-brilliant, mostly young white male, commenters, who want to share their opinions, because (perhaps naively) they think their contributions will be welcomed. It’s basically just “oh, are we playing a game? I wanna play too!” If you don’t want to play with them — maybe because you’re talking about a personal or highly technical topic and don’t value their input, maybe because your intention was just to talk to your friends and not the general public, whatever — you’ll find this style of interaction aversive. You’ll read it as sealioning. Or mansplaining. Or “well, actually”-ing. And you’ll gravitate to forms of writing and social media where it’s clear that debate is not welcome.
I think what’s going on with these kinds of terms is something like:
Author: “Hi! I just said a thing!”
Commenter: “Ooh cool, we’re playing the Discussion game! Can I join? Here’s my comment!” (Or, sometimes, “Ooh cool, we’re playing the Verbal Battle game! I wanna play! Here’s my retort!”)
Author: “Ew, no, I don’t want to play with you.”
There’s a bit of a race/gender/age/educational slant to the people playing the “commenter” role, probably because our society rewards some people more than others for playing the discussion game. Privileged people are more likely to assume that they’re automatically welcome wherever they show up, which is why others tend to get annoyed at them and want to avoid them.
Privileged people, in other words, are more likely to think they live in a high-trust society, where they can show up to strangers and be greeted as a potential new friend, where open discussion is an important priority, where they can trust and be trusted, since everybody is playing the “let’s discuss interesting things!” game.
The unfortunate reality is that most of the world doesn’t look like that high-trust society.
Thanks for the recommendation! LW’s been growing in content steadily since she wrote this essay, which is nice. I wonder why she herself stopped blogging. I feel sad when I see someone whose writing I enjoyed quits blogging. A strange middle ground. A fair number of bloggers my brain interprets as being in my tribe, even though I’ve never met them, and I feel genuine concern when they go silent.
Not an answer to your question, but Sarah Constantin’s essay seems relevant. As usual it’s hard not to just quote the entire piece:
There’s more, do check it out.
Thanks for the recommendation! LW’s been growing in content steadily since she wrote this essay, which is nice. I wonder why she herself stopped blogging. I feel sad when I see someone whose writing I enjoyed quits blogging. A strange middle ground. A fair number of bloggers my brain interprets as being in my tribe, even though I’ve never met them, and I feel genuine concern when they go silent.