This newsletter is a big chunk of word vomit and some thoughts I’ve been having lately – sorry in advance for the lack of structure or sense.
If I Google myself (though I wouldn’t recommend anyone does this), the first full page of results are as follows:
My Twitter profile
My LinkedIn profile
My Facebook profile
Another Millicent’s Instagram profile
My old Carrd.co site
My Rotten Tomatoes critic profile
My Dazed author page
My Zavvi author page
This makes me immensely uncomfortable.
It terrifies me how much I exist online, how much of myself is known, and how much of myself is on the internet that I might not even know about (thinking lots about photos I shared on Tumblr at 14 that I’m sure I deleted…). This is, of course, all my own doing. I chose to talk about myself on Twitter, Instagram, etc. I chose to share all those things – hell, if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have a career.
But I’ve been thinking about my online self a lot over the past 10 or so months – largely spurred on by a blissfully offline partner. I’ve been thinking about privacy, and how much of ourselves we actually allow for just ourselves. I feel as though I’m spread so so thin across various social media and that I’m a different person on each of them to the extent that I wonder who I actually am when I’m stood on solid ground. How many times am I going to archive and unarchive Instagram posts to curate a perfect version of myself? I even made my account private and removed all followers who I don’t have a real relationship with, and yet I still do it. I deleted Instagram again today; it won’t stick.
I recently made my Twitter account purely a work account too, following only influencers and industry folk I need to keep up with for my job, and promising myself that I will tweet as little as possible and allow my job title to be all the personal information I share. I can use a mass Tweet Deleter, but can I really take back everything I’ve already shared over the years?
The lack of faith I have in myself about holding back online is something in itself that lowkey scares me. Obviously, I have been conditioned since the age of 12 or so by huge corporations and social platforms, yet I can’t help but feel I should have been better than all this.
Ian Bogost in The Atlantic talked about how we all share too much now because we all talk too much now. I am inclined to agree.
A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most. Maybe her statement would be recorded, but there were few mechanisms for it to be amplified and spread around the world, far beyond its original context.
And Nylah Burton in The Verge said:
More and more, I’ve found oversharing on large platforms unpleasant and unfulfilling. I know that I can help people through sharing and community, but I reject the idea that I have to expose my own struggles and traumas in the process, that I have to bleed out over a pixelated screen to be of worth to society.
Why do I feel I have to expose so much of myself, as Burton posits, to be worthy? And worthy of what? Why do I have to prove I’m the biggest fan of something I love by tweeting and posting more about it, why do I have to prove that I saw something first by making sure I post an opinion on something the second an embargo lifts? Why am I asking all these questions in my silly little newsletter knowing that no one has an answer?
What gives me even more anxiety is that I could delete and wipe every trace of every social account I’ve ever had, but I would still have a humungous digital footprint. People would still know things about me because of my writing as a journalist, my appearances on podcasts, pictures and social posts about me that I didn’t share myself, and all of that data that sites and businesses create about our online behaviors, locations, and more. I would love to snap my fingers and start over. But I can’t – at least I’m not alone in that, huh.
Social media was heralded as the great connector. You can talk to the people you love who have moved far away! But you can also see all the beautiful people in the world that you will never look like and how much better everyone’s lives apparently are than yours. I would argue, and I think the majority would agree with me, that there is such a thing as too connected. We have constant access to countless channels of communication. When do we have quiet? And why, when we do have it, do we feel the need to share it still?
Why do I finally kick back with a cup of tea and a book and think, that mug is so aesthetic I should take a quick IG story pic before I start, damn I hope my Be.Real goes off right now so I look like I have my shit together. And then– the kicker – why do I recognise this instinct and hate myself for it? The irony is not lost on me that I’m talking about oversharing online while very much oversharing online. Maybe I just need therapy.
Anyway, don’t forget to track and share with everyone online the films you watch on Letterboxd, the books you read on GoodReads, your sick playlists on Spotify, your ideal interior on Pinterest, your entire career history and schooling on LinkedIn, what you’re doing right now on your Be.Real, your ‘day in the life’ on TikTok, your nights out on your finsta, your fitness journey on your fitsta, oh yeah your books on your booksta too. And all the rest.
Further Reading:
We Should All Know Less About Each other – Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much – Ian Bogost, The Atlantic
When Does Sharing Become Oversharing? – Nylah Burton, The Verge
How To Erase Our Digital Footprint? – Telefónica
I feel inspired to be very offline now