![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSomebody I know posted a 300-word screed on Facebook yesterday that began, When I was a boy, a female babysitter, who was three times my age forced me to have sex with her.
Ninety-seven people—including me—responded with emoji faces indicating “like”, “love,” or “weepy.”
We wrote comments, too. Amen! Way to represent! You are strong and brave beyond words! Thank you for contributing your story to the narrative!
I wrote: Sigh. Your story is not uncommon. Thanks for telling it.
I didn’t know what the fuck else to write.
I don’t know this guy very well, but I like him. If he needed reassurance and absolution through some impersonal social media channel that he had mistaken for the Universe, I was happy to provide him with it.
Still. I couldn’t help thinking how curious it was that instead of seeking out a close friend or a therapist to unburden himself to, he had chosen instead to make the Big Reveal to a hundred more-or-less random acquaintances on Facebook.
A sign of the times.
###
Many of us use Facebook—and I presume other social media, although FB is really the only social media I use personally—to reveal carefully curated glimpses of ourselves. We write and publish our own little personal People Magazine stories. I post about my cats! Sometimes, I post about my children.
Some of us—people with more charisma or maybe just better crowd-churning skills—have branched out into tabloids or reality show production. Thus, I know a helluva lot about Amarylis Baruna, once a certified Hot Babe, now a depressed housewife in the NYC suburbs who worries a lot about her weight. She still looks fine, by the way. Every time she uploads a picture or a video of herself post-spinning class, posing fetchingly in color-coordinated workout garb, she gets at least 50 responses from people, tripping over each other, to post, You look GREAT, girl!
Then there’s that person who texted me ghoulish pix at five in the morning several weeks ago who’s constantly posting about the ways that cruel people attempt to break her indomitable spirit! The pain, the anguish, punctuated by descriptions of all Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad things that happen to her. Each description grosses at least 15 emoticons right off the bat; more, if she plays to responders in the follow-up comments.
Such posters are not aficionados of the Big Reveal, of course. (Just as a sidebar: I know enough about the person who texted me ghoulish pix to recognize that the public image she’s grooming with such an elaborate pretense of openness is not the private reality. The really, really big deep, dark secrets are locked away in a safe.)
But such influencers set the stage for Big Reveals.
###
What is the Big Reveal?
Well. It’s what happens when you decide that Facebook is the place to Confess All.
It reminds me a bit of those Maoism-inspired criticism/self-criticism sessions I was forced to participate in back in the day when I was a volunteer medic at the Berkeley Women’s Health Collective.
It’s much more effective as a social policing device than the quaint Catholic custom of the confessional! The bad things you do or were done to you, after all, are not sins against some sort of hierarchical God; they’re transgressions against a consensus, and only the social collective can purge you of your taint by helping you launch a new narrative.
I’m not sure how it compares against the benefits of psychotherapy, but I imagine it’s right up there. After all, a therapist can only help you understand yourself. But the Big Reveal can make you imagine that the collective understands you!
Anyway, it’s a phenomenon I’m seeing more and more.
Ever the enlightened anthropologist from the planet Mars, I can’t say the Big Reveal disturbs me so much as bemuses me.
It’s amazing! In only five years, social media through such devices as the Big Reveal has done more to cement reactionary social norms than religion has managed to do since the Enlightenment.
Ninety-seven people—including me—responded with emoji faces indicating “like”, “love,” or “weepy.”
We wrote comments, too. Amen! Way to represent! You are strong and brave beyond words! Thank you for contributing your story to the narrative!
I wrote: Sigh. Your story is not uncommon. Thanks for telling it.
I didn’t know what the fuck else to write.
I don’t know this guy very well, but I like him. If he needed reassurance and absolution through some impersonal social media channel that he had mistaken for the Universe, I was happy to provide him with it.
Still. I couldn’t help thinking how curious it was that instead of seeking out a close friend or a therapist to unburden himself to, he had chosen instead to make the Big Reveal to a hundred more-or-less random acquaintances on Facebook.
A sign of the times.
###
Many of us use Facebook—and I presume other social media, although FB is really the only social media I use personally—to reveal carefully curated glimpses of ourselves. We write and publish our own little personal People Magazine stories. I post about my cats! Sometimes, I post about my children.
Some of us—people with more charisma or maybe just better crowd-churning skills—have branched out into tabloids or reality show production. Thus, I know a helluva lot about Amarylis Baruna, once a certified Hot Babe, now a depressed housewife in the NYC suburbs who worries a lot about her weight. She still looks fine, by the way. Every time she uploads a picture or a video of herself post-spinning class, posing fetchingly in color-coordinated workout garb, she gets at least 50 responses from people, tripping over each other, to post, You look GREAT, girl!
Then there’s that person who texted me ghoulish pix at five in the morning several weeks ago who’s constantly posting about the ways that cruel people attempt to break her indomitable spirit! The pain, the anguish, punctuated by descriptions of all Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad things that happen to her. Each description grosses at least 15 emoticons right off the bat; more, if she plays to responders in the follow-up comments.
Such posters are not aficionados of the Big Reveal, of course. (Just as a sidebar: I know enough about the person who texted me ghoulish pix to recognize that the public image she’s grooming with such an elaborate pretense of openness is not the private reality. The really, really big deep, dark secrets are locked away in a safe.)
But such influencers set the stage for Big Reveals.
###
What is the Big Reveal?
Well. It’s what happens when you decide that Facebook is the place to Confess All.
It reminds me a bit of those Maoism-inspired criticism/self-criticism sessions I was forced to participate in back in the day when I was a volunteer medic at the Berkeley Women’s Health Collective.
It’s much more effective as a social policing device than the quaint Catholic custom of the confessional! The bad things you do or were done to you, after all, are not sins against some sort of hierarchical God; they’re transgressions against a consensus, and only the social collective can purge you of your taint by helping you launch a new narrative.
I’m not sure how it compares against the benefits of psychotherapy, but I imagine it’s right up there. After all, a therapist can only help you understand yourself. But the Big Reveal can make you imagine that the collective understands you!
Anyway, it’s a phenomenon I’m seeing more and more.
Ever the enlightened anthropologist from the planet Mars, I can’t say the Big Reveal disturbs me so much as bemuses me.
It’s amazing! In only five years, social media through such devices as the Big Reveal has done more to cement reactionary social norms than religion has managed to do since the Enlightenment.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-27 05:01 am (UTC)I think talking about personal stuff to strangers **can** feel a whole lot better than talking about it with friends. Putting aside trolls (a big aside), people who comment on people's pages tend to be supportive. They have no access to disconfirming information; they know only what someone puts out there. Maybe a person always fails to return phone calls and never shows up for dates--and consequently loses lots of friends. They can complain online to relative strangers about how people always abandon them and cease to be their friends, conveniently leaving out their own behavior, and get lots of sympathy. I've made an overly simplistic example, but I think the principle applies.
So I can see how it would be easier. But as you become closer to people online--as they become real friends that you know more about and who know more about you, then you lose the ability to do that. What you gain (hopefully) are people who are more genuinely committed to you in a real way, who won't wander off if they get bored.
Long story short, those hits of online attention can be very addictive, and people can end up chasing after them. But they're not very sustaining.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-27 12:36 pm (UTC)Oh, I get the whole strangers-on-a-train scenario.
But I find this whole Social-Media-as-Confessional phenomenon deeply creepy.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-27 01:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-27 01:24 pm (UTC)Yeah. I think my early experiences with Synanon and various Marxist self-help health initiatives effectively inoculated me against all types of group-think.