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Entry tags:
2010s Internet Gothic
This 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.
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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.
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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.
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