Aesthetic Snafu

A great “field” example of my previous post just popped up.  It’s based on another divorce – this of the couple behind Apartment Therapy and shows the variety of reactions that readers can have to news about someone they don’t (technically) know but are invested in.  Again, there was a lot of sadness and “I knew its” but there was also the idea that we the readers have certain rights because we read:

Rocza summed it up most succinctly  “When you give your privacy up in exchange for money, on the premise that the exchange allows people in to your life, you don’t get to suddenly say “thanks for all the money and we’re going to lock you out now.” That simply is not how commerce works.”

The problem is once people have bought you, in this case becoming regular readers with the metrics and clicks and whatnot that brings, well they feel they deserve something.  Two recent examples come to mind (strangely both involving divorce):

1)  As I’m sure most of you know, Heather Armstrong and her husband Jon (of Dooce) are getting divorced.  Dooce is by far the most popular personal blog and the news hit far and wide (even in the NYT!)  garnering thousands of people’s opinions.  Heather is no stranger to sharing her private life with the world; she shared her difficulties with post-partum depression for example.

The responses to the news were widespread and ranging.  There was a lot of sadness, of “I knew its”, and even joy – one of the top results for dooce and divorce is a post “Dooce is getting a divorce.  And I’m glad” But, in reaction to a request for privacy and understanding, there was a lot of “why do they think (they deserve) get privacy now”?  In some ways, since Heather had been open before, she was seen to have lost the right to be private now.  Her life was assumed to be public content and  although she provided very little information, people constantly analyzed, cited, and demanded more.  I’d love to know how she navigated that, giving just enough information for her audience/customers but not more than she could personally handle.

2) Chaviva (who I once hired for a job a bazillion years ago) also recently got a divorce, inpacting how she viewed and acted as a Orthodox Jewish convert.  She got a fair amount of negative feedback on some of her life decisions leading her to take down her entire blog – years worth of posts.  This is particularly notable since, like Dooce, she makes her living off of social media and blogging (although to a much lesser extent).  She, in essence, trashed her resume.

Her life was public enough where people felt like they could comment and judge her on her behavior.  She’d set it up that way – becoming a public voice on converting and being an Orthodox convert, but her posts didn’t divert from that – they were on the new religious difficulties that she faced.  But her narrative didn’t match what people expected from her even though it was still coherent, it still made sense to who she had been and who she was becoming.  It makes me think of the out cry when Harry and Hermione didn’t end up together and makes me wonder if there’s a convergence between real people who seem more fictional/narrative and fictional characters who become more real in our lives.

Either way, for both of these women, they lost control over their stories to their audiences – their lives became public consumption to be critiqued.  The reader became the consumer, feeling free to demand something for their attention.

I’ve been having a conversation with Alex recently about the role of the internet, social media, and blogging in our lives – the good, the bad, and ugly   In her case, its internet behavior – she channels Emily Post like no one’s business.

For me, it goes back to who owns the story.  If many bloggers are writing about their lives and are marketing themselves (which many are) and if consumers own brands (which I believe heartily), then well who owns the story?

No one owns my story – at least now.  My three regular readers (I love you guys!) includes probably my sister and others that I’d tell the same things to, email the same pictures to, who are invested in the story but only because the story is ‘me’.

This hasn’t always been the case.  A long time ago, in a land far away (LiveJournal), I was involved in a clique.  For the people I knew, ‘the’ clique.  It was a ratings community, choosing its members by their writing, power struggles, and whim.  There were expectations of us, to write certain things and ways, to lord, just a bit, over those who didn’t make it but tried and tried again to get our approval.  And to some extent my story stopped just being about me but my performance.  What would ‘sell’ in Peoria, in LA, NY, and hundreds of computers in between.

I’m sure this sounds ridiculous to you, but what I was doing wasn’t so different from what a lot of other bloggers are doing now – tracking which posts get the most hits, comments, track-backs.  They do it for the potential cash (and yes, there are really that many people trying to make ‘it’ whatever that is from their blogs), and I did it for the ego rush during a bad time in my life, but at the base it’s the same.  We work on our marketing, packaging, and PR to sell our product (our stories) to the consumer.  And once it’s sold, well that’s where the problems are….