I have written so many articles in my life as a journalist, often multiple ones in a day. I can’t honestly say I’m proud of everything I’ve written—I don’t remember everything I’ve written—but I have very few regrets. One thing I do feel ambivalent about are all the tweet roundups I wrote.
At any Gawker site, traffic was the end all, be all of your career. I didn’t work at Kotaku during the time when bonuses, or even your employment, was determined by traffic, thank god. But even after that era, traffic was on the forefront of everyone’s mind. An article that did under 20,000 views was often considered a failure. It is strange to look back and realize that there was an expectation for me to, every day, attract enough people to the website to fill Madison Square Garden.
One of the easiest ways to do this was by writing tweet roundups, a format pioneered by Buzzfeed where a writer goes on Twitter, finds some tweets, and then puts them into an article. I first did this when I worked as the assistant editor of Paste Magazine’s comedy section, where every week I found tweets from comedians and took screenshots of them and put them in a slideshow. In the Gawker office, there was a big TV screen dedicated to showing the current traffic numbers for articles on the various websites. Whenever I would write an “internet reacts to…” blog full of tweets, I would reliably end up on the big board.
Sometimes I looked at this as a way of paying for my serious work—a hundred thousand views on a tweet roundup would offset the relatively lower traffic I got on pieces of criticism. The guilt I feel about these articles isn’t so much about exposing people to attention they weren’t ready for. Tweets are public, and I also tried to only post tweets that were popular, or came from accounts with a following. (We had a variety of conversations over the years about how many followers made an account fair game to use.) My guilt springs from a different source: writing these blogs revealed to me just how malleable reality is once it reaches the internet.
Seeing something intended for a specific audience leave that audience does suck shit every fucking time.
I have written so many “internet reacts” blogs that the entire experience blends together. I do have memories of the ways people would react to finding themselves in these blogs, both negative and positive. My favorite reaction was always people changing their display names to something vulgar, so that now all the visitors to Kotaku would have to read a brief sentence about gay sex or whatever; it seemed like the kind of impish prank I would pull.
Sometimes people would get really, really mad. Due to the frequent, careful conversations I had with editors about how to minimize potential harassment, most of the time I thought this was bullshit; once a tweet goes incredibly viral, it’s basically out of your hands. However, as someone who has experienced a lot of internet harassment over viral tweets, regardless of how this happens, seeing something intended for a specific audience leave that audience does suck shit every fucking time.
I struggled with all of this the entire time I wrote these kinds of pieces, even though I called dibs on Kotaku’s “internet reacts” posts every time there was even a possibility I could do them. When I look back on the 2010s, I find it bizarre that this was an accepted form of blogging for so long, even though it was everywhere. With every new album, video game, episode of television, or cultural event, sites across the internet would elevate the voices of random Twitter people. Sometimes it made me feel generous, like I was helping other people understand the value of talking with strangers on the internet, something that had given a lot to me. The internet has given me real and deep friendships, job opportunities—I met my husband in a Twitter group chat. But the internet has also made me sadder than anything else in the entire world. I didn’t want to ever be the source of a stranger’s sadness in that way.
But my feelings weren’t just about the harm I could potentially cause other people, even when adhering to the ethics that journalists rely on to minimize harm in all our different forms of reporting. These kinds of articles started to make me think that the internet is kind of just fake. Once I put a frame around something, I was giving it a sense of importance. I got to determine what the conversation was, what the tone was, who the players were. It was a lot of power that I felt uncomfortable wielding.
The internet and the way people use the internet fucks with everyone’s sense of scale.
In the pieces, none of that struggle is evident at all. But sometimes these social media roundups look like I’m describing a widespread phenomenon, when the nature of the internet makes it hard to ever really know how big or how widespread a certain conversation is. This demonstrates the inherent power involved in writing and reporting: Your readers trust you, and if you define the contours of a conversation, people will believe you. There are moments when something does truly sweep across the internet to become a global talking point, like The Dress, but often a tweet roundup is actually just a roundup of things that particular writer is seeing in their own small silo of the internet.
This is a challenge for all reporting—before something is news, it’s just something that some people are talking about. A journalist is a person who talks to those people and writes everything down, and one of the biggest parts of the profession is doing so in a way that creates trust with your audience. But the internet and the way people use the internet fucks with everyone’s sense of scale, including journalists’.
When I was studying cinema in college, we talked a lot about framing. People love to imagine that documentary is “truth,” but anyone who has dabbled in the form knows that there is always a tension between crafting a narrative and depicting what your camera has captured. The camera isn’t a tool designed to capture the world as we actually see it with our eyes, but to capture the world in the way that the person holding the camera wants to. Non-fiction writing of all kinds is the same kind of illusion; this is why journalists often push back on the idea of “objectivity.” I can only write from my perspective, with my biases, only find conversations that are accessible to me from my view of the internet. I wasn’t writing blogs about what “the internet” was reacting to—I was writing to describe what I see as “the internet.”
Increasingly, I don’t think there is such a thing as “internet culture,” or I don’t think it’s much different from regular culture.
It’s easy to see how this can become a problem: If you go on YouTube right now, there are dozens of incendiary videos from right wing grifter types who are trying to create a “phenomenon” out of maybe one or two tweets. It makes me feel gross to know that I participated in this kind of activity, the creation of a “moment” by putting a frame around a conversation. And to my disgust, people like Asmongold use the same reasoning I did when I was regularly writing “internet reacts” blogs: he has said that these posts are public and that if the people who wrote them get criticized, it’s not his fault. But I know that there is a difference between writing a cheeky tweet meant for one’s small Twitter audience and having that same post taken out of context and presented to a school of bloodthirsty piranhas.
My editor, Riley (of course), thinks that maybe these two things aren’t quite the same thing, but I don’t know if we’d see such a volume of bad faith influencer types taking tweets out of context if The Dress or Laurel or Yanny didn’t take off in the ways that they did. These were articles that took a conversation that was localized to Twitter and broadcast them to the world stage. Suddenly, these ephemeral moments of Twitter obsession became news segments for normal people. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how taking a bit of fun gossip, grabbing some posts, and then publishing it on a website that often gets traffic equivalent to the population of Albany, NY in a day would perpetuate a conversation, giving it more importance than it truly deserves. You can manufacture an entire news cycle this way, or manipulate the stock market, or create a conspiracy theory about a small video game consulting firm.
Looking at the way the form can be used maliciously, it makes me feel like maybe all of it—both the Buzzfeed tweet round ups and the reactionary grifter economy—is bullshit. Increasingly, I don’t think there is such a thing as “internet culture,” or I don’t think it’s much different from regular culture. People love gossip, and all of this is just a new way to find and experience gossip. But while gossip can be harmless fun, like trying to understand how a dress can look like different colors to different people, gossip can also be extremely painful, and our pursuit of it can come at the cost of both the subjects of our gossiping and ourselves.
