an attempt to be more confident on the internet

“Circling” - a collage from the little collages I started posting on my instagram - my other project. I’m a person of constant and many little projects. most of which are very temporary.

I suffer from several interconnected brain blocks to writing personally on the internet.

The first is that I am deeply uncomfortable with earnest expressions of feeling or emotion online, likely because I came up online at the height of sometimes silly and often sardonic humor. I was a Gawker millenial, not a Buzzfeed millenial. I’m also my father’s daughter. My dad’s side of the family is almost pathologically incapable of remaining serious for any long period of time.

I roll my eyes when people post tributes to dead celebrities. I ironically caption instagram photos. I am morbidly fascinated by LinkedIn, a place where I don’t belive a joke has ever been made. I stopped posting on FB with any regularity years ago. That’s mostly because I can’t stand the barrage of AI generated images and junk ads. Twitter was my happy place because I could just post stuff about my academic writing (which is, you may not be surprised to learn, comedy) and retweet jokes. But now, it’s gone (basically).

The second reason I’m bad at writing personally on the internet is because I’m deeply lacking in confidence about my own expertise. Academic writing suits me well because it requires research and citation and argument. I have to take careful steps to illustrate my knowledge on a topic before it goes through editorial and peer review. By the time it hits people’s eyes, it has been deeply vetted. I’m in awe of those who can post hot takes, advice, quick analysis, or brand themselves as experts online. Again, obsessed with LinkedIn where people post paragraphs long confident advice about topics that I am sure do not actually have correct answers.

I have a PhD in media and frequetly scroll through videos of 22-year olds posting media analyses that are as confident as they are wrong about topics I’ve studied for over a decade. Yet, I can’t imagine stitching a video to even gently correct them. Can you imagine? What if I got a fact wrong.

While I hold deep convictions; I’m never done learning about topics. It makes me a great teacher and researcher, but terrible at whatever the hell it is we’re all supposed to be doing on the internet now. I don’t want to brand myself or hold court. I just want to talk to people in little enclaves like I used to do on the Yahoo X-Files Shipper message board of which I was a key member from 1998-2000. I don’t wait to post takes, I want to work through ideas that I’m not totally confident in.

Isn’t that something I could do in my diary in my drawer? Probably. But I also have a brainworm that for some reason makes writing on the Internet, even for the two people who will likely read this, feel more ‘productive’ than writing in my diary. To be fair, I also would like to produce writing for a broader audience than academic journal readers, and am trying to get less scared to do that.

Also I really miss my Livejournal - when I was so unafraid of the internet that I confidently posted a bunch of marching band fraternity drama that very much should not have been on the internet (in fact, we got written up for ‘unbrotherly conduct’).

So this blog will likely not be full of earnest, confident analyses but a working through of my own writing demons. As I’m about to turn (ugh) 40 (sorry, I know, aging is a gift) - I’m feeling creatively restless and like I want to take stock of why it is I’m feeling creatively restless.