She was the “queen of the mommy bloggers.” Then her life fell apart. | Vox
In the time that [blog creator Heather] Armstrong had been absent from her site, bloggers had been almost wholly replaced with social media stars who relied on Instagram to gain a following. The word “influencer” had taken over, and quickly. Bloggers had risen to fame thanks to deeply personal posts; Instagram personalities operated in a much more visual medium, relying on photos of cute kids and beautiful homes for likes.
“The biggest stars of the mommy Internet now are no longer confessional bloggers. They’re curators of life. They’re influencers,” the Washington Post wrote in 2018. “They’re pitchwomen. And with all the photos of minimalist kitchens and the explosion of affiliate links, we’ve lost a source of support and community, a place to share vulnerability and find like-minded women, and a forum for female expertise and wisdom.”
The “mommy” sphere isn’t one I’ve ever been interested in, but the trend described here has prevailed in all types of blogging. Long-form personal writing has largely been supplanted by short-form text, and text in general has given way to pictures and video.
The key difference is that, in writing, your life can really only be as interesting as you are. You can’t enhance it with a high quality camera, the right angles, or a nice filter. You can’t pass off affluence, aesthetic, or a symmetrical face for a personality. Writing immerses people in your perspective--your inner, lived experience--whereas visual media are all about the optics of your life relative to an observer.
Writing is an interpretation of what is, and can help you relate your reality to someone else’s. Instagram photos and YouTube videos often present an idealized reality that leads to negative self-comparison, which creates an aspiration, which in turn encourages spending to rectify the sense of inadequacy.
It’s not surprising that one is conducive to community-building while the other amounts to a lot of advertising. In the past, banner ads might have accompanied content. Now the content is the advertising. An “influencer’s” job, after all, is to influence people toward a certain lifestyle, generally through the acquisition of certain products. Their online life is seamlessly integrated with sponsored posts, product placements, and affiliate links.
Of course, no medium is ever all good or all bad, and old-school blogging and modern social media are not polar opposites. Like today’s influencers, some bloggers did make lucrative careers out of converting their lived experience to online content. And like anything created for consumption by an audience, blogging could act as a form of personal branding. My own writing today couldn’t be further from spontaneous; if it’s worth writing, it’s worth obsessively editing. That’s my motto. I see my writing as authentic (another word I can’t use now without cringing), but it is a highly crafted form of self-expression.
Today’s social media can be as confessional and cathartic as early blogs; people still find solace and support in other people’s content. They can still develop a sense of friendship with people whose content they regularly engage with. (Often expressed in the same disturbing sense of ownership over the details of creators’ lives, and the same sense of entitlement to new content. One-sided friendship is an illusion, and people sometimes forget that.) Communities still form around content creators, and subscribers can still find real-life friends through mutual fandom. (Though again, there is a difference between someone you consider yourself a fan of and someone you think of as a peer. A person who peddles merch constantly and charges you money in exchange for access and proximity to them is not your friend.)
The act of observing inevitably changes that which is being observed, and this applies to anything posted online, past and present. Old and new forms of social media share a lot of the same benefits and drawbacks, so maybe it’s all a wash in the end. But I really miss LiveJournal sometimes.
I had heard of Dooce before reading this article because of the blog’s place in early Internet history: “A year after she started the blog, in 2002, Armstrong was fired after coworkers found out she was writing about them on her blog. “Dooce” became internet slang for getting fired for doing something online.”
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