...This title for me is an attempt to recreate the melodramatic dialect of the recent-past era of blogging, specifically on LiveJournal, MySpace, and “heyday” queer Tumblr. I was thinking about LiveJournal a lot when reading Wendy Chun’s piece – about how hard it is to imagine that space as it was reappearing successfully in 2018. Though in some ways “finstas” have a similar pull of being publicly accessible diaries (you just need to be accepted as a friend to view a finsta, usually), it seems a far cry from the “thrillingly dangerous and utopian ‘cyberspace’” of early social media prior to Facebook’s rise and monopoly, interconnected login/corporate web relationships, and the increased need to have a Googleable “brand” and internet paper trail to point to when you apply to any job (17).
The internet as a dimension or spatial imaginary has shifted so much in the fifteen years or so that I’ve been a user. In terms of social media and messaging platforms, the brands that have boomed and busted and everything in between have largely been trying to grab my age demographic’s attention, only more recently trying to pull in somebody like my dad, a somewhat internet literate 60-something man who, in many ways, has a completely different way of moving around a computer than I do. This is both true IRL (there are differences in what we view as appropriate spaces to be computing—on a lap vs. at a table, mainly on mobile vs. desktop, during a specific time of day such as “tv time” vs. ubiquitously, ambient or with intention, always finding ‘free’ platforms vs. “surfing” with an understanding that services will cost something) and in terms of how we use the same sites. This is cliché: of course many of our aunts are using Facebook differently than we are, and my teen students last year explained to me that for them, Facebook is their world-facing ‘professional’ platform as opposed to whatever kind of political/life update/curated musing genre that peers of mine use the platform for. Yet this still feels related to what Chun was talking about when she said perhaps finding a new form of generosity could make social internet use more sustainable or equitable (17).
I agree with Chun’s call to find another way to interact with or deal with data being compiled about us. The “epistemology of outing” is especially wild when we think back to how many different and contradictory norms users are expected to pick up and drop when each new network genre/brand/aesthetic comes into being and focus (13). If “repetition breeds expertise” and then boredom, it is a real wonder that people are able to still so cruelly enforce an idea of internet decorum or acceptability in a way that keeps its shape in IRL discourse and as the platforms themselves change (1).
This “acceleration” of possibility and then abandoning particular internet activities brand-by-brand not only engages with an appetitive loop of users (pleasurably or anxiously or both) reforming themselves and their mood with every new social media platform (2). I think it also produces kinds of cultural microgenerations. I mean this to be quite outside the “native internet user” discourse; instead, microgenerations gestures to the fact that within millennials and gen Z, there are clearcut age-specific variations on how people seem to be interacting with digital platforms made for them, at least in a US context. This makes sense when I think about how quickly memes will take hold of a person and fade away, with the viral meme moment continuing as a sort of cultural event in that microgeneration or community’s memory. This is a totally political dynamic, even if we keep the focus on purely apolitical memes. The sharing of ephemera—especially IRL verbally, such as “whatever happened to the moth meme?”—lately feels like it is touching more and more of our cultural selves, as the alt-right and leftbook reach users using familiar meme dialects and aesthetics, as “white” brands on Twitter use AAVE to gain clout, as we experience Berlant’s “genre flail” in the realm of the digital political.
Why does it matter than my dad and I use Facebook wildly differently, that my slightly younger sister and I use Facebook wildly differently, and that so many grandmas seem to use it exactly the same? It has something to do with giving away power or obscuring contextual legibility that makes me nervous. If white supremacists can flash racist symbols on camera well knowing that millions of people will miss out on its context because they won’t ever grasp what political community building looks like on forums, it feels useful to imagine restaging the internet’s microcontexts (not more ice bucket challenges, but maybe more commons-spaces) or—more realistically and in a less fascist direction—an internet culture that fosters and incentivizes critical reading, accountability, play, mistake-making and generosity. Though Chun stops short of naming this so explicitly, a good first step would be to cut ties between Snapchat and headhunters, to continue onboarding people playing with data to thwart constant surveillance, and to explain to our families what is happening in the meme world when we have the breath.