2010s Internet Gothic
Jan. 15th, 2016 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingThis morning, after a particularly disastrous staff meeting, I posted something personal to Tumblr.
Tumblr is not the sort of discursive space that facilitates reflection, and I felt as though I was outing myself by saying how old I am, even though I'm the median age of registered Tumblr users. I don't expect to get any response, as I don't have anything even remotely resembling a following, so the act of writing and publishing the post was something resembling a dress rehearsal of identity performance.
In my professional life, I have been repeatedly discouraged from revealing too much of myself online. To give an example, the (extremely successful) blog I launched in grad school triggered a public seminar in which a panel of professors delivered scathing diatribes about how putting things on the internet can damage a young professional's reputation.
This is also the reason I started writing fic under the username "rynling" - I was deathly afraid that people would somehow connect "rynling" with "pocketseizure" and then connect "pocketseizure" with me. I'm not afraid of that anymore (I don't think anyone cares enough about me to undertake that degree of internet legwork), but I'm still hesitant to make myself vulnerable by presenting aspects of my identity that aren't limited to what is strictly necessary to maintaining a functional relationship with whatever community I happen to be operating in. What this means is that I feel a strong internal pushback against crossing the streams of my professional life and my fandom life. As a result, I feel like I'm always in the closet.
There is so much going on here with "the hidden" and "the repressed" that I'm surprised someone hasn't written a novel about this exact situation already.
ETA: I deleted the post. Fuck that and fuck me, Tumblr is indeed not the place for baring one's soul, and what I wrote was pretentious anyway. Let's pretend this never happened.
Tumblr is not the sort of discursive space that facilitates reflection, and I felt as though I was outing myself by saying how old I am, even though I'm the median age of registered Tumblr users. I don't expect to get any response, as I don't have anything even remotely resembling a following, so the act of writing and publishing the post was something resembling a dress rehearsal of identity performance.
In my professional life, I have been repeatedly discouraged from revealing too much of myself online. To give an example, the (extremely successful) blog I launched in grad school triggered a public seminar in which a panel of professors delivered scathing diatribes about how putting things on the internet can damage a young professional's reputation.
This is also the reason I started writing fic under the username "rynling" - I was deathly afraid that people would somehow connect "rynling" with "pocketseizure" and then connect "pocketseizure" with me. I'm not afraid of that anymore (I don't think anyone cares enough about me to undertake that degree of internet legwork), but I'm still hesitant to make myself vulnerable by presenting aspects of my identity that aren't limited to what is strictly necessary to maintaining a functional relationship with whatever community I happen to be operating in. What this means is that I feel a strong internal pushback against crossing the streams of my professional life and my fandom life. As a result, I feel like I'm always in the closet.
There is so much going on here with "the hidden" and "the repressed" that I'm surprised someone hasn't written a novel about this exact situation already.
ETA: I deleted the post. Fuck that and fuck me, Tumblr is indeed not the place for baring one's soul, and what I wrote was pretentious anyway. Let's pretend this never happened.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-16 12:46 pm (UTC)I think part of the challenge is it's a transitional generation, people born in the early 80's could have had access to the Internet at a relatively tender age but would still remember using rotary phones, cassettes, VHS... There's a huge fundamental leap in consumer-grade technology during their formative years. And you get that weird gap, like you said, between jealously safeguarding one's identity online because the Internet was 'a wild online frontier' in the beginning versus now, where it's commonplace and accepted people will publish all manner of personal information online.
The transition from car phones to pagers to early cell phones to smart phones alone is kinda crazy. I had to rewrite a near-future novel because payphones were a thing when I wrote the first draft, but were obsolete a few years later when I returned to it.
Anyway, my suggestion for a name is Net Gen. The Internet went from a somewhat obscure thing to being completely integrated into daily life.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-16 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-16 02:52 pm (UTC)Closets aren't so bad, to be honest. At least you can close the door after you and sit there by yourself in peace.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-17 10:33 pm (UTC)Regarding generations: I don't know what to make of giant catchall generation terms. I tend to see people born in the early to mid 80s are having more in common with so-called "gen x" than with the people born from ... idk ... say 1988 onward? who are clearly counted as "millennials." That said, I have seen the start and end dates "defining" gen x shift so many times I put little stock in all of this. Very little of the Official Word on these so called generations matches what I have seen in other people (or myself) unless all of this generation talk drops the marketing or HR speak and instead just goes for broad brush similarities based on major events that shaped a cohort's childhood. FWIW, right before I left academia (exactly one year ago), I noticed a MASSIVE shift in values, expectations, attitudes, and assumptions moving through the undergrads, and it was the first time I felt a "generation gap" between myself and people younger than me. If anything, my experiences make me wonder if the generational "shift" (whatever that means" happened around 1990-1992, dividing those born before vs those born after as different generational cohorts. *GIANT SHRUG OF IDK*
Closets: professional life in general (where "professional" is a code word for a well-paid "expert" on some process or area), and academic professional life in specific (where well-paid is traded for the myth of academic freedom ;) is a strange beast regarding what one is allowed to do or not do among the "riff raff" on the internet. Best of all: you can officially study the activities of the digital riff raff and write peer reviewed academic papers about them BUT GOD FORBID YOU ACTUALLY ARE ONE OF THEM. Oh no. Oh no no no.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-21 12:50 am (UTC)Congratulations on escaping academia!
I think that's the appropriate response. If not, my apologies.
No but really, I have friends on Facebook who quit academia, and it's as if they've found religion or something. They're all like, I NEVER KNEW I COULD BE SO HAPPY, and their intense euphoria almost makes me feel that it's worth getting into academia just to be able to leave. Again, my apologies if I'm totally off the mark here.
I'd be interested to hear more about "a MASSIVE shift in values, expectations, attitudes, and assumptions moving through the undergrads." My own (admittedly limited) impression of people in that age cohort is that they've become more politically polarized, although I suppose one could say the same of the broader population in general. I also hear my adjunct and assistant professor friends complaining about undergraduate "entitlement." Part of me wonders if we're just getting old, but I also remember belonging to a student culture in which instructors were legitimately feared, even if they were adjuncts or grad students (not that we had any idea what that meant).
I also wanted to say...
Best of all: you can officially study the activities of the digital riff raff and write peer reviewed academic papers about them BUT GOD FORBID YOU ACTUALLY ARE ONE OF THEM.
...I get the feeling that, like all things, this is more than a little gendered. People writing about male-dominated online spaces (such as 4chan and competitive gaming) seem to be respected and given lucrative publishing contracts, while "acafans" writing about female-dominated online spaces (primarily fanfiction) are marginalized and have to publish in essay collections put out by second- and third-tier academic presses.
I could be wrong, and in fact I hope I am wrong, but from what I've seen of it academia seems ridiculously sexist.
Edited because I don't know how to English.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-21 03:57 am (UTC)That said, I know far Far FAR MORE people who have no good options post academia and in-academia is full of suck for the vast majority. I ... never experienced the suck (and it isn't like I am old either). I guess that puts me some rare unicorn status... :/
Anyhoo.
My own (admittedly limited) impression of people in that age cohort is that they've become more politically polarized, although I suppose one could say the same of the broader population in general.
I don't think entitlement is the right word either.
Polarized and politically different. This cohort is the leading edge of a massive tip toward a majority minority flip in american demographics. They're also acutely aware that the economic policies of the past 35 years have issues but they are divided on what those issues are. So, yes, polarized like the nation but different. Most people under 20 think it a standard custom to state one's preferred pronoun which, I guess, is just a shift in gender consciousness, but there are other differences that are hard for me to put my finger on other than politics, expectations, and sense of future are DIFFERENT. It's like an axis tilting. The compass used to point left-vs-right and now it points communitarian-vs-individualism with everything rotated such that not much maps the way it used to.
I don't think it is a bad thing. It's a necessary evolution. It's just a thing.
...I get the feeling that, like all things, this is more than a little gendered. People writing about male-dominated online spaces (such as 4chan and competitive gaming) seem to be respected and given lucrative publishing contracts, while "acafans" writing about female-dominated online spaces (primarily fanfiction) are marginalized and have to publish in essay collections put out by second- and third-tier academic presses.
Not sure about that. I know guys who did work in these areas and were marginalized in the academic presses, etc. There are a few women who are somewhat successful in these areas. All that said, even 10+ years ago I knew to stay FAR FAR FAR away else career ruined.
That said, there is a stench of sexism that permeates academic research in areas that touch on social interactions. Based on where I have been and what I have seen, much of the sexism goes hand in hand with what is considered "transformational research" (aka, fundable with an NSF grant or equiv) and what is considered a "technology transfer" opportunity (aka, something that can be patented, spinned off as a company/start-up, etc.). Really, it is just a mirror of society's sexism rather than something specific to academia, methinks.