Angels of Our Digital Heaven
Shift
I don't have a plan for (not) writing on my blog and I don't strategise about publicly addressing this messy thing called life. I undulate between exposure and hiding. These are some facts: blogs died a long time ago, kinda. Now they are an active yet historical node in the digital atmosphere. This online address is a little formless: not just a songwriter blog nor an illness blog and it is definitely not a mommy blog. Still, it is all of these and more. Over time accumulation shapes the archive. In my manner of upkeep, it is not a reflection I like, but a sedimental creation and I am the author. It's out of my control. It's a thing I want to leave and a thing I come back to. I am also a researcher of blogs, digital mothering discourse, and illness narratives. This place is almost most obvious for my existence. Yet, I have never fully committed. My digital participation over all is a little too porous to create the desired sticky effect.
Last week a watershed moment occurred for marking digital/material time. It is not a platform thing or a code or an app thing. It is a human thing. I am talking about the death of Heather B. Armstrong/Hamilton @dooce on May 9th, 2023. She was in many ways the creator, originator of the online self-narration that we now take for granted. She was the OG "mommy blogger" or just BLOGGER with Dooce. She was also the first "influencer" and while she was popular and successful, she was also much hated online. What ever our feeling about her, Armstrong/Hamilton was one of the very first to blog about her experience of life in the mess of it unfolding; mental illness, alcoholism, postpartum depression, divorce and so on. Specifically, she addressed these issues while discussing mothering as her situated experience. It was infectious writing predicated on self-exposure. A creation of a vulnerable digital self that is entangled with her followers. Reading Dooce often feels like trespassing, like I should be shielding myself from taking in her words, because they leak.
Whether I enjoyed reading Dooce is beside the point. In digital networked reality, she was one of the people who epitomised a particular variant of gendered online culture. Her death draws attention to the limits of what is achievable via giving every bit online or creating and sustaining oneself via digital means of publishing. Digital life writing or online superstardom do not shield anyone from loneliness. In fact they may compound loneliness as the experience of a sharp split between the embodied and the virtual. In the days following Armstrong/Hamilton's death, online communities have also dedicated time and effort in expressing their hatred for her. This makes me wonder, how much online hatred in all its forms compounds material struggles such as mental health and isolation. Hatred, like love is easy to dish out online, but receiving it is a different kind of experience.
Vulnerability is a digital asset. We have cultivated the idea that by self-exposure we can avoid or lessen damage to self and others. This tenet has entangled itself to countless social media cultures from wellness to human rights and anti-racism. Its long shadow is the anonymous hatred online. Under the sentence "sharing is caring", we are invited to tweet and story our most shameful and painful moments with a promise of... what? Maybe, we have believed that by posting, following, commenting, reading and discussing we cultivate communities and hold people and culture accountable. Or that at least, our existence is known. We have imagined digital life writing and social media as an affront to suffering alone. Simply put, the logic is: the more likes, the less alone I must be. But accessing digital vulnerability, while it may generate actual money and amplify the theoretical possibility of (dis)connection, doesn't often materialize as hoped. Heather B Armstrong/Hamilton's death is a crack in the faultline.
Exposure
My ability to publish about personal suffering does not make it go away.
My exposure isn't met with just kindness.
The fault is not just in how we perceive the digital, but reaches into all kinds of media and expressions of the self. Vulnerability is a prerequisite in art and to some extend a necessary part of being alive. There is a lot of interest in the therapeutic value of creativity especially when works address adverse experience or trauma. The assumption is that the author is helped/healed/therapised in the process of life writing (see definition of life writing here). Simultaneously, critical perspectives view art made about experience in the category of "therapeutic" and therefore less valuable. This is despite the fact that nearly all art in any form throughout history has some personal motivation of experientiality in the background. It is impossible to come to formulate questions and topics without a self as a sieve. While writing a blog as much as a poem can become an essential part of someone's survival in the moment, the creative act is not in itself a way of healing or a port where others wait. Something hungry and perverse awaits in this medicine instead: the audience is there for your demise.
Writing social media updates about relapses or books about experimental depression cures, penning songs about the fear of death and performing them to an audience doesn't cure cancer or suicidal ideation, nor does it ease the pain of side-effects or pre-empt the loss of those who remain. In fact, it is just a way of making products out of the experience. Sometimes, it is this fact that the so-called trolls wish to point out.
Conversely, at other times, the depicted process of writing and publishing does appear to give meaning to hardship. Publishing, visibility and fame are balm to the wounded whose fundamental belief about themselves is nobody loves me. But most people are not influencers. Most people's content is seen by no one because it gets buried by the algorithm. The internet isn't a democracy and it doesn't love you! It wants to mine your data and point out how wrong you are.
Years ago for a brief interval there was traffic on this site. People came to read about me scrambling with metastatic cancer. Diagnosis was a moment of shock through which I wanted to write. Writing was a familiar method. Yet, I was torn. Publishing unnerved me. In fact, large amounts of readers made me feel exposed instead of supported. I felt like I owed something to the invisible audience. I owed them access to a story. What's more, yellow papers wrote articles based on my blog posts and published my Instagram pictures without my permission. Headline: tragedy approaching! What was established felt counterintuitive to what I was attempting in the moment. Now, four years after publishing my memoir Viimeinen kirjani: kirjoituksia elämästä, the book has become a strange measuring tool against which to examine my life. often, I feel like I am unfaithful to my own narrative just by being alive.
In writing this blog and the memoir, I needed to be visible in the hesitation. I yearned to exist despite the grip of the unknown. A sense of marginality mixed with urgency is the basic soup of the feminine trying to leave her mark anywhere. Sometimes I think that we reach for the easiest method available to us and pretend it works.
Heart Emoji
Reading online comment threads is like deciphering a cacophony of misdirected intimacies and declarations of grand public proportions. I am rarely in the mood. If the online audience is there to wait for the other shoe to drop, are they really there when it does? It seems not. I think that in those moments of life (and the event of death) the digital world splits sharply from material existence. And at some point, when such a real and time-cutting experience as someone's death is made public, the most common response on social media is a red heart emoji. No words, just love from strangers in the form of a heart. What a reduction of complexity. Such an insufficient expression in the face of a mysterious void. The other thing that quickly occurs are arguments within comments: just hours after Armstrong/Hamilton's death announcement on Insta, some people wrote on the comments that she had it coming. Others told those people where to go. Some wished well for the family grieving their loved-one. Others commented on their comments that a woman this ill should never have been allowed to procreate, let alone publish a blog. On it goes as if the commentators are unaware of the public nature of their condolences and criticisms. On it goes, as if other people are merely a fiction in the digital atmosphere.
Death of the Author
It's time to admit that digital platforms are ill-equipped to produce human care that leads to easing of suffering and material connection. At least it is an unreliable way of producing any of these. Instead, the digital produces an avalanche of performative care, forms of affectual performance and commercial success/failure. Keeping affects circling is not enough.
The last post published on Dooce ends like this:
Here at 18 months sober, I salute my 18-year-old frog baby, she who taught me how to love.
It is a love letter to the author's children. It is also a riveting check-up on the challenges of sobriety. Now, it almost reads like a goodbye.
Death is the ultimate raw-flesh frontier of digital life writing. I don't know what the difference is between reading the blog of someone's clinical depression and suicidal ideation or the posts of someone who knows they will not heal from their terminal cancer. Is it a degree of posturing in relation to the inevitability of death? Should death always be a surprise or never be a surprise? What should be the feeling of those left behind? How should it be expressed? How do we grieve for those we have "followed"?
Last year's deaths of famous "cancer influencers" Nalie Agustin in Canada and Dame Deborah James in the UK (women who published online regarding their lives with metastatic cancers and gained huge audiences in multiple media) brought me to think about dying and the digital. I will be writing about it in my new research, but want to mention two things here:
a) Not just embodied suffering but death itself is a commodity online. Dying can be tied to products sold for profit as narrative but also as almost anything material: t-shirts, mugs, books, clothes, flowers to name a few things. For example: a woman stuck in her hospital bed in the last months of her life can be sent make-up and clothing by brands that she will then––as a kind thank you––feature in her stories that are watched by millions of people. In the face of helplessness, we like to buy things. And in grieving our own approaching death, we may engage in the activity of buying and selling.
b) Grief of the dying is a complex concoction of emotions and cultures. It is packed full of everyday-ness and interruptions, crying fits, desolation, depression, longing and love, whip cream and candy wrapping, dance clips and champagne on empty stomach. What constitutes grief in this? Is it the tears, just the whip cream or the goo they make together? What about the grief of the followers? Is it real, or jut virtual? While "consuming content" online are we accessing grieves of our own?
Archival Annexation
Before I publish and this post becomes another cut in my own time (one I may regret later), I want to think about the archive as a location or a collection that is supposed to contain us and translate our existence. We have all become archivists. Should we continue this way? The digital is imbued with a yearning to become a ghost. One programmed to elongate a self's presence through non-presence. Conjuring up generational bonds, we exclaim on book dedications and blog summits and academic presentations that it's all for the kids.
But is the exclamation "I am leaving this for my children," actually bullshit? Is it really going to be good for my children that when I die, they can turn to my memoir or my songs, research or diaries? Am I conflating the obvious traces of my published and unpublished efforts with an offering because it justifies my choice to spend life this way? Are we really writing and publishing to get closer to the beasts that share our homes on daily basis and who depend on us for safety and nurture while being intimately familiar with our faults? When exactly is the moment that I want my 20-something child to spend a weekend with my most popular work? When should they uncover my diary from 1995? What should they make of my secrets and spelling mistakes? Should they read the reviews and the nasty comments too? It would take a life-time to weed through the archive. I don't what them to do that.
For the first time, I have seen that my children's lives are their narratives. Entirely their own. Already happening. Already full. When I catch a glimpse of their lives, as they present them and allow me to see, I cry.
Real AF
I am not calling for the end of anything. I am not predicting doom. I am asking for you to consider that your digital participation is as real as can be. I am asking you to pace your existence online as you do otherwise. I am asking us to be responsible in our (non)participation.PS. Olin maaliskuussa vieraana Ylen ohjelmassa Flinkkilä & Kellomäki. Ohjelman voit katsoa täältä.
