This blog has always been a paradoxical mixture of the public and private. There's no denying that it's public. Anyone with the URL can access this blog and read all of my published posts. People who don't know me in person can read everything accounted from my sophomore year of high school up until now. On the other hand, there's a reason why I've usually referred to this as my "private" blog. I never use my real, legal name. I never refer to people by their actual names unless I'm writing about a public figure or celebrity. I've only loosely alluded to my hometown in California.Thinking back, there was no concrete reason why I decided to go by Sophelia online. It was a spontaneous decision.
In hindsight, it was an intuitively smart decision to adopt a pseudonym. Prospective employers and Internet stalkers cannot Google my real name and connect me to this blog. But mainly, it meant that from the genesis of this blog, I'd already made a clear distinction to myself that my Internet persona was separate from my real-life persona. I know many people for whom this distinction is very blurry. They could be online celebrities with thousands of followers on Tumblr and pour their hearts out about their lives. In reality, they could be completely lonely. They grow more and more attached to the virtual world and neglect the real world. Is this bad? Today, most of us would say yes. But I think the lines are blurring socially, and one day the real world persona may hardly matter.
Thanks to social media, I've noticed a certain type of character in my network. These are the people who blast out constant status updates and tweets, who post regular photos on Instagram and Facebook detailing their daily lives, who tag themselves at every location they ever go to. Up to a certain point, you can tell who has become so needy and dependent on social media for positive reassurance of self-worth that it has morphed into something like an addiction. When I voluntarily deactivated my Facebook last October, I discovered that despite the lingering withdrawal effects in the first week, it was refreshing to realize that I didn't know what was going on with my 800+ Facebook friends and that I was feeling happier as a result. If there was someone I actually cared about or if someone noticed my disappearance, we would contact each other via text or e-mail and have an actual conversation about our lives, as opposed to passively reading about it on a newsfeed.
Hence, I've probably made my stance clear at this point. This might make me an old fogey in this day and age, but I am not fond of the immediacy and overloading of personal information in online social interactions. I refuse to ever get a Twitter account--what meaningful thing could I possibly need to say in 140 characters? The only reason I returned to Facebook was that it has become my only means of communication with certain people in an age when you tell people "add me on Facebook" instead of asking for their e-mail or phone number.
Back to blogging. I was reading an article that was linked on the BBC called "How Much My Novel Cost Me--Debt Ridden." After reading it, I believe the title is a misnomer. The debt came not from writing a novel. It came from a series of bad financial decisions made after the author received a six-figure advance for an unfinished memoir and only supplemented the money with a part-time as a yoga instructor. Many of these decisions drove me bonkers. She acknowledged that buying bottled water and cappuccinos every day was a habit she should have kicked earlier (invest in a Brita filter and a Camelbak?) and yet writes in present-day: "In retrospect it seems clear that I should never have bought health insurance." Considering how absurdly expensive American health care is, you're better of paying 400 dollars a month than risking the off-chance you develop major health problems and wind up with a debt spiked up thousands of dollars.
Moreover, it was clear in the article that the author wallowed in unproductivity by spending an exorbitant amount of time on Tumblr and Twitter. To give a context of where I'm coming from, two days ago I received a package in the mail from my mother. In it was the book she had written and illustrated, published this past December. From the moment my brother submitted his last college application, my mother jumped on that empty-nest syndrome like a famished beast and, in December 2013, published a book in which she had painstakingly painted, researched, and written about a Confucian temple in her hometown in Tainan. She did this all in two years. Considering how slow my progress with EP has been, I am only in even more awe at my mother's will power. The creative process is not easy. It's a test of endurance. Self-doubt, writer's block, lack of inspiration--these can all be debilitating to the point that people procrastinate, throw their hands up, and quit. The author eventually has the epiphany that I myself had just a few months ago. Social media is a distracting waste of brain energy that could be channeled towards creative pursuits! It took me a few months of trial and error before I learned to install Leechblock and prohibit my laptop access to Facebook from 8pm-12 am on weekdays and 9am-5pm on weekends. I dunno about the timeframe of the author, but at least I wasn't waist-deep in debt before I got my shit together.
I did catch myself thinking, why am I being so hard on someone who's clearly reflecting back on a miserable naive moment of her life? Maybe because the bottom of the page was a very obvious marketing blurb for her new novel. Maybe because I couldn't imagine what I was supposed to take away from this story, except that I really can't handle people's incompetence. Her writing wasn't bad--in fact, it was well-written and engaging--but ohhh did this author and her story irritate the heck out of me. Maybe because her dreams of fame and success were embarrassingly relatable, but likely because there was an inherent thread of self-importance in the article that I could not reconcile with at all.
I decided to Google the author for kicks, and I was surprised to find that not only does she have her own Wikipedia page, but that there have been a whole slew of articles written about her. I guess I was under the impression that the author was a relative unknown and aspiring writer. No, it turns out she was previously a writer for Gawker and was known for some confessional (read: oversharing) styled articles on other platforms. I found this article, "You've Got (Hate) Mail," which recounts a sympathetic portrait of the Internet hate that the author and her boyfriend received. Going back to my whole gripe with Internet personae, I get really angry when I see people leaving all sorts of poisonous comments no one would ever say to a person's face. If I hadn't read the first article, I probably would have been very sympathetic towards the author, because some of those quote comments were atrocious. However... considering how much I disliked the first article when I read it, I had to acknowledge that I could understand where the negative feelings were coming from. As someone was quote saying in the second article:
"Her whole trick was the idea that the whole world revolved around her, and she was not a particularly clever writer, not a particularly clever thinker. So I, rather unfortunately, got caught up in that eddy. I'm not interested in kneecapping her career, but there's a certain amount of bullshit you want to call a person on, and she happens to manufacture quite a bit of it."There's another interesting bit at the bottom of the article that really caught me. In the 1990s, the writers of the New York scene hailed not from the blogs but from Op-Ed columns in the Wall Street Journal. In one instance, they went after a government official in a series of editorials, who later killed himself and left a note in his briefcase: "WSJ editors lie without consequence." The writer of this article quotes a former lawyer: " There's something called the 'eggshell skull' doctrine. If you bop me lightly on the head and my skull falls apart, well, you didn't know that would happen. But the rule is, when you're dealing with human beings, you take the victim as he comes."
Personally, I think this quote needs to be engraved on every computer in this world. Sure, you're entitled to your opinions. I didn't like that first article about novel debt. Does that mean I need to trash-talk the author in the comments? Can I talk critically about why I didn't like it, instead of telling her to do everyone a favor and get hit by a truck? I'm at the cusp of the Internet age, in that I can still vaguely recall a time in elementary school when I couldn't use the Internet for research projects and had to reserve books from a public library. The Internet has been a nasty place for as long as I can remember, and I wonder if it's actually impossible for us to ever adopt a certain Internet etiquette that would make this online rudeness obsolete rather than the norm.
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