For No One and Everyone to See All at Once: Late Stage Social Media and the Art of Cringing at Our Past Selves Online
I'm starting to get a little bored with the over-curated side of social media. I want to see your messes, your unfinished projects, your scribbles, and your half completed thoughts. I don't want to arrange my open sketchbook on a white background and place my pens and markers casually angled inward to draw your eyes to the focal point. I don't want to look up the appropriate hashtags to add to the end of my captions, and I don't have an intro, a hook, or a course to sell. I just wanna post the raw sketches as they happen, late at night with my puppy's sleepy butt in the upper right corner of the photo.
I’ve been attempting to loosen up the way I show up online lately, posting imperfect bits of life and raw little sketches here and there, no pressure. Changing the way I share my life online has made me start thinking a lot about my old blog.
I was a blogger, not a very popular one, back in the Golden Age of blogs, circa 2006. I started it to basically make a little newsletter for my college friends as they moved away so that I could share my art and things that I was doing and thinking with them. Back then there were no pins on Pinterest with captions that read “I made $300K during my first 8 months of blogging! Download my ebook to find out how!” Actually, I don’t think Pinterest even existed at that point, and if there were ways to monetize a blog at that time, no one told me.
So last night, I decided to go down my little blog rabbit hole, and I started out by reading my very first post. That one was ok, I guess… But as I kept going and reading post after post, I started to cringe. I actually found myself physically making the cringe face and everything, so horrified at the things I had felt the need to write down and post for all the world to see. So horrified that it was all still there, just hanging out for no one and everyone to see all at once. Some of it was so petty and narcissistic, and I wish I had just kept certain feelings to myself. It's amazing how embarrassed we can feel when we encounter our past selves and revisit our old posts on the Internet. (Does it feel like a weird slap in the face when a Facebook memory pops up for you too?) I ended up archiving a bunch of my worst posts since I was so embarrassed of my past self.
Isn't the act of posting online at all kinda cringe in and of itself? Isn't posting one's own creative work (whether it be a painting, a poem, a song, or a video) in fact, the most cringe-worthy thing that a person can do? What drives humans to post anyway, ignoring potential consequences like embarrassment or ridicule?
Is it the need to be seen, to feel less alone? Or maybe we post in the hopes that someone else will connect with something we post and feel less alone in the world themselves. It’s definitely a mix of both.
I stumbled across something really interesting on my FYP on TikTok a few months ago. The post was about late-stage social media and how the Internet feels a bit flat lately and so driven by influencers and consumerism, which makes it a lot less compelling than it used to be. It feels like most of the apps are adapting the characteristics of the apps they are competing against, and brands, even huge brands like McDonald's, feel the need to be chronically online, on trend, and funny. did u see grimace’s text about yr free med fries?
For most people, the Internet used to fulfill the concept of a third place: a location to “inhabit” that was not home and was not work yet still provided us with a sense of connection and belonging. The Internet of yesterday was more about keeping tabs on friends, sharing news with family, and following your favorite artist's favorite artist to find out about potential new tour dates. Today, everything feels so different, and the resistance to posting new things online has grown, at least for me. I have a harder time bringing myself to push "post" or "publish" these days, no matter what platform I decide to use.
Back in 2006, I was posting to keep my friends up to date with my life and my projects, but at the same time, I ended up making real connections and even some new friends, a few of whom I was lucky enough to be able to actually meet IRL! When I decided to look back on my blog, my first instinct was to burn it all down due to all of the sloppy cringe that was hanging out everywhere, but in the end, I decided to let a version of it survive.
I still have compassion for the 2006 version of myself, and I am trying to love the person that I was despite also feeling pretty removed from that person at the same time. She still deserves to have a little grace and a little bloggy facelift in the form of a removal of some of her most extreme, unflattering bits. The choice between deleting the whole thing or just keeping it “as is” was slightly daunting, so when I decided to take the middle ground approach of archiving only the worst parts for now, and that felt like a good fit for the person I am today.
Right now, I am cringing about my past self less and less and trying to cultivate more compassion for that version of myself who had so many things to say to strangers on the Internet. And when something weird pops up on my Facebook memories from ages ago, I try my very best not to make the cringe face. I am starting to view my past self as part of the foundation that helped build me into who I was becoming. Despite her bad choices and her online oversharing, she is me and I am her, for better or for worse.
Ok, gonna push “publish” on my first blog post in 5 years now…
Comments
Post a Comment