Pivoting to video
on twitter, tiktok, and the dream of logging off for good
Won’t it be wild, my fellow millennials, to get to grow old (universe willing) and become some of the last people left on earth who remember life before the internet?
I do, though just barely. I grew up online. I think often about the wild west of early Web 2.0, when, at ages 11 and 12, I was happily revealing my actual A/S/L to thousands of strangers on AOL message boards. Nothing bad ever happened. Soon afterward I logged onto MySpace for the first time because my friends and I wanted to be able to message the singer Teddy Geiger, who I had a proto-lesbian crush on. We never reached Teddy but we did find our first internet community of other heartsick emo kids, including a couple of well-meaning catfishers posing as members of our favorite bands.
When I was spilling my guts onto MySpace bulletins and blogs, or fighting or flirting with strangers in their comment sections, there were very few people I actually knew in real life reading any of it. Later, on Facebook, the IRL audience for my unhinged divulgations expanded into the few hundred kids at my high school, plus some of their prying parents; an anonymous tipster once mailed my mother a letter warning that I’d posted a note (remember those?) about being a “shameless exhibitionist.” But my antics never spread beyond my own actual community. It was impossible, for example, to suddenly find myself the subject of tens of thousands of strangers’ scorn. Even on Tumblr, my internet home in college, going viral could get you a lot of attention, whether positive or negative or somewhere in between, but never to the extent that those posts made waves beyond the relatively insular world of Tumblr itself.
Tumblr, in other words, was not Twitter. The first time I remember some random person on the internet getting in trouble in a big, public way was when a PR exec named Justine Sacco lost her job for tweeting, infamously, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding, I’m white!” It was 2013 and I was a college senior without the remotest interest in Twitter. I spent most of my online time then enjoying the very end of the golden age of blogging, reading Autowin and everything on the Awl network, especially the Hairpin. My internet had a cozy, comfortable feeling to it that I haven’t really felt since.
Almost a decade after begrudgingly and belatedly getting on Twitter for my “career,” I’m surprised to find myself mourning yet another social media site where I’ve spent so many dozens of hours of my one wild and precious life. Most of my friends aren’t even on Twitter anymore, having abandoned the Bad Feelings Site long before Elon Musk started royally fucking it up. I’m not very active anymore either, at least as a poster; I mostly retweet smarter people than me, and videos of animals. Jokes, if I see them, though they seem rarer these days, which is a pity; my favorite part of Twitter has always been the jokes.
I wouldn’t have worked at BuzzFeed without Twitter. In late 2014 I saw the hiring manager for a position I desperately wanted, as Deputy LGBT Editor, tweeting complaints that a bunch of unqualified straight guys were applying, adding that women and other marginalized candidates shouldn’t self-screen themselves out of the running. I hadn’t thought I was at all qualified, but I was languishing in editorial event-planning at Atlantic Media, and those tweets encouraged me to shoot my shot. I was 23 years old. I got the job.
One of the things required of me in that role was to be a “thought leader” in the LGBTQ space. From the moment I was verified on Twitter with my now-meaningless blue check, my mentions were flooded almost daily with screeds from angry gay people. (The homophobes mostly stuck to email.) Early in my career it devastated me, that no matter what I wrote and shared I’d be accosted by members of my own “community” for, say, using “queer” as a catchall word. My devastation lessened significantly when I realized most of my haters were idiot TERFs who think trans people existing is lesbophobic. Still, it wasn’t fun. And as much as Twitter has been invaluable to me as a journalist in terms of finding stories and sources, my fear of its power to reward bad faith readers has often made me a worse writer: one who’s over-reliant on mealy-mouthed qualifiers, defensive and self-conscious.
If Twitter goes down, my work will probably be the better for it. On a craft level, at least. But it’s also the place on the internet where I’ve grown the largest audience for my writing, and I’m more reliant on any and all marketing channels than ever now that I’m freelancing. I’m worried for everyone who relies on Twitter for their livelihoods. But I also hope something better is built in its wake as a true public good. As Benjamin Kunkel argued in N+1 nearly a decade ago, social media should be socialized.
In the meantime, however, I haven’t yet figured out how to do what I do for a living without shilling myself on various websites owned and exploited by evil billionaires.
When I started my jewelry business at the beginning of the pandemic, Instagram had just started pushing Reels in a blatant attempt to compete with TikTok, which, having surpassed more than 3.5 billion downloads this year, is currently the most popular app on the planet. In order for small business owners on Instagram to have any hope of reaching new audiences after the algorithm began viciously deprioritizing plain old photo posts, we were all forced to become content creators and video producers seemingly overnight. I was spending just as much if not more time on my stupid videos than I was on actually making the art I loved and wanted to share with others.
I did have fun with it sometimes—there’s something very addictive (obviously) about learning new formats and trying to game the system. And I do enjoy editing, even though it takes way too long. My filmmaking classes in college coming in handy at last!! But for every semi-viral victory on my art account, there were many more videos I’d spent countless hours on that never topped a paltry couple hundred views. Humiliating.
Facebook/Meta going all in on Reels just a few years after their first failed “pivot to video”—when they were accused of egregiously overstating the time users spent watching videos by as much as 900%, costing hundreds of journalists their jobs, including BuzzFeed’s entire LGBTQ team (I was the lone survivor)—is going about as well as you’d expect. A study from over the summer found that Instagram engagement has dropped an astonishing 44% since 2019. I know multiple artists who’ve decided in recent months that doing gig labor for Instagram in exchange for inconsistent attention from the algorithm isn’t paying off, and some who have shut down their online sites entirely in favor of focusing on wholesale and in-person markets. My own shop is on hiatus right now until I can scrounge up studio space here in England. As soon as I’m back in business again, I plan to share highlights on social media, but no longer run myself ragged producing multiple videos a week just to see my growth stall out when Zuckerberg has some new hair-brained idea.
Unsurprisingly, Zuck hasn’t come close to besting the shortform video app by destroying the beloved photo app for photos. TikTok has never been more popular.
I’ve been resisting it for years. I knew that, if I really cared about my job as a culture writer, I should probably be spending my time online where most of internet culture actually happens now. But I couldn’t do it. Every couple months or so I’d fire up the app for a few annoying minutes before inevitably retreating to the familiar hellscapes of Instagram or Twitter. I knew I just had to stick with TikTok until the algorithm learned that I was interested in weird humor, interspecies animal friendships, plus size fashion and DIY, but I didn’t have the patience to scroll through straight couples, boring skinny women, and people explaining things to me. That’s probably the main thing keeping me from becoming a full-on TikTok adopter: I do not want to talk into a front-facing camera, and I don’t want to listen to anyone talking into a front-facing camera. Maybe I don’t have the attention span. If you have something to tell me, I’d rather read it! I love the written word!
For visuals, though—how to make things, what people are wearing—I can get on board with TikTok. As soon as it looked like Musk’s Twitter deal would go through after all, I forced myself to spend more time on the clock app. I’ve endured enough terrible videos for the algorithm to learn that I’m fat, fashionable and gay, so I’m starting to have a good time. I’m trying to embrace sharing the occasional outfit video, too, even though I no longer have the excuse of trying to sell jewelry to justify shameless influencer-wannabe behavior. Whatever.
This past month I made a couple TikToks about my wedding, which almost instantly became the most popular videos I’ve ever published to social media. A lot of people in the comments remembered the BuzzFeed story I wrote about meeting Lynette and were happy to see that were were still together, which was sweet. But I continue to feel weird about exploiting our relationship for social media clout. I’ve written about this before, how uncomfortable I am with the increasingly indistinguishable line between artist and influencer. It’s a weird time to be a writer, especially of personal essays, when the internet has made confessional writers of us all. But I’m hoping to sell a book in 2023, and BookTok is increasingly powerful. Might as well give the people what they want.
There’s a part of me that wants to start doing criticism on TikTok, too, if only because I see so many gay 22-year-olds on there saying the wildest, wrongest shit possible. But I don’t want to have to attach my face and body to my writing in order for people to care about it. I don’t want to have to be on social media for my writing work at all.
Ever since I read Jenny Odell’s incredible 2019 book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy, I’ve aspired to spend less time on social media without actually doing anything about it. In 2021 I wrote about people who decided to log off for good because they’d seen too much of their neighbors’ bad behavior during the pandemic, or because they’d regretted sharing too much of themselves, or because they just wanted to escape the “toxic energy.” In reporting that story I was looking for the reasoning and the courage to do the same.
I did delete Twitter for a few weeks after reading Max Read’s “Going Postal” in Book Forum, a 2020 book review of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine and a “psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive.” What social media like Twitter offers its users, Read writes, “is not death, precisely, but oblivion—an escape from consciousness into numb atemporality, a trance-like ‘dead zone’ of indistinguishably urgent stimulus.” He quotes Seymour comparing the technoplatforms’ products to chronophage, “a monster that eats time.” Suffice to say, Read is no longer on Twitter.
The time-eating monster terrified me. I had to quit.
But I went crawling back soon enough. I was living by myself, isolated by the pandemic, depressed and lonely. Sometimes going on Twitter was the closest thing I felt to being a part of the world, just letting all that noise wash over me.
In a recent edition of his very good newsletter, about about what the media will do without Twitter, Read notes that media workers tend to “treat [Twitter] like a battlefield map, or one of the Situation Rooms in a Bourne movie: a way of representing reality, and locating yourself within it.” He explains further: “You learn about things that are happening, ideas people are passionate about, types of guy that exist, but also and just as importantly you (consciously or not) come to locate and even define yourself within the networks of dispute and agreement.” In describing the role that Twitter serves for a lot of journalists — “what is essentially a ‘reality mediation + self-understanding’ function” — I realized he was talking about me. Yikes!
I don’t want any websites, especially ones owned by people like Elon Musk, mediating my sense of reality and selfhood. Now that I live thousands of miles away from most of my friends and family, though, it’ll be really tempting to treat social media as an essential gateway to the wider world.
Odell, the author of How to Do Nothing, stays grounded in her present by birdwatching. I’m not advanced enough to know many of their names, but lately I’ve become a bird lover too. The pandemic has only made it clearer to me how important, how essential, time in nature is to my wellbeing, and I’m so grateful to now live a stone’s throw from a big, beautiful park where I walk every day with my wife and my dog, where I hope to get to know the birds. This morning we lapped the Japanese garden before getting coffee at the charming little cafe one of our neighbors runs out of his garage. Gus bumped into some old friends, a dog and human, who he hadn’t seen in over a year, and he cried with happiness. Is there anything better?
Hope you’re able to ~stay present~ this weekend.
xxSK
