In a recent piece for The Atlantic, the American writer Sarah Hepola wrote a lengthy personal story entitled “The Things I’m Afraid To Write” detailing how, as a journalist covering society and culture, she had become fearful of saying the “wrong” thing on topics relating to sex, gender, and politics – lest she receive a backlash on social media.
Hepola described “the long communal table of Twitter” and how saying something “unsavoury” could result in them “turning their guns” on her.
“The tragic result is a disturbed public forum where it often seems like no adults are in the room,” she wrote. “Prickly issues that deserve a full airing are being treated as settled law. A human life is morally complex, filled with ambivalence and uncertainty, and accepting the quickly assembled dogma of social-media feeds lets us bypass messier realities that we ignore at our own peril.”
Your eyes may be – rightly – rolling at the extreme melodrama of this article, as well as the implication from Hepola that she should be pitied for her position. But putting aside the woe-is-me tone, this piece touched on a pervasive tic infecting writing at the moment: the need to bend every opinion to accommodate a perceived online audience.
It is hard to get through a comment piece or personal story published today, particularly if it relates to a social issue, without finding several caveats about the writer’s privilege and a long explanation about how they understand their experience is not the only one within a major topic. As the cultural historian Isaac Butler put it: increasingly, “critics establish their right to have an opinion on something with their humility instead of their expertise.”
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This “check your privilege” tendency has led to writing, journalism, and more generally public debate that is self-consciously pre-empting the internet’s backlash, watering down arguments to create a one-size-fits-all statement that results in saying very little or, in many cases, obscuring the truth.
One example in recent weeks can be found in the abortion debate, following the overturning of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court in the United States. Arguments about why the ruling is dangerous for all women are often drowned out with paragraphs-long parentheticals that lay out the privileges some demographics will experience over others, even if they’re limited. In some cases they are entirely incorrect (such as the assertion that wealthy women or white women won’t have issues with abortion access).
This isn’t to say that those imbalances shouldn’t be acknowledged at all, but this type of writing prioritises these points, usually via the self-admonishments of someone who ostensibly fits into this “privileged” category, such as a wealthy white woman arguing that, though the ruling is bad for everyone, wealthy white women won’t be affected. But when talking about the many complex perils facing women as a whole, the benefits of lecturing on how some women will find it slightly less perilous are relatively minor.
While this instinct may be ruining strong arguments, as well as good writing, there is a reason people have developed this tic. Particularly since the pandemic – and in particular, in relation to the pandemic itself – it has become normal to expect backlash for failing to incorporate every person’s possible experiences into even the most mundane comments.
Hence a benign statement such as it’s tough to get Ubers these days, can be met with the response that you’re aiding in Uber’s exploitation of workers, ignoring women’s safety issues, and ultimately, could stop complaining and just walk. Conversely, making a point while accommodating every possible experience into your argument is rewarded with a rush of positivity online.
Writers who write for a social media audience – or avoid certain topics because of that audience – may say this potential positive reaction is a good reason to continue writing as they do, complete with caveats. However, is this really a valid argument for not using your considerable power to make nuanced points, as in the case with Hepola? The repercussions seem wildly exaggerated. And more importantly: what is lost when we constantly keep social media audiences at the forefront of our minds?
The problem this represents for progress isn’t just that good writing and journalism are stalled, and we end up with an even higher percentage of writing that is boring, staid, and simply bad. It’s that the arguments on some of the most important issues of our time – be it gender, race, or abortion access – get written by, for, and in response to social media (and a lot of the time, the nichest platform: Twitter).
Rather than making clear arguments rooted in reality, they either become convoluted, bogged down and weakened by over-explanation, or simply miss an important point crucial to advancing how we address complex topics.
This may sound like some right-wing, pro-culture war talking point – however, arguments built to appeal to a presumably left-wing social media audience can often feed into pre-existing structural barriers that prevent progress on certain issues.
One recent example can be found in the response to Gary Lineker’s recent comments about receiving racial abuse as a young footballer. Ostensibly woke social media users were quick to mock this statement, claiming he was “identifying as black” and calling Lineker out of touch and tone deaf for this statement, which was followed by the typical slew of comment pieces affirming this idea.
However, what Lineker was noting was a truth about racism in Britain: that it was, and is, so endemic that a ripple effect occurs, even impacting white people who might just look slightly darker skinned or vaguely “foreign” (as Lineker appeared when he was younger). Writing for the Guardian, the writer Jason Okundaye noted how in “the arena of social media reaction and reduction” a real opportunity was missed to interrogate this country’s relationship with race.
“Whether or not you actually belong to the identity group you are being perceived to belong to is irrelevant: racists don’t ask for ancestry tests results before determining whether you should taste the ground or not,” he wrote. “Observing that there is collateral damage in racism, homophobia and transmisogyny does not take away or distract from the reality of this discrimination that reaches the ‘correct’ target.”
Social media has done many positive things for advancing our knowledge of social justice issues and can sometimes get it right when reacting aggressively to an idea that is dangerous or offensive. But whether or not it reacts appropriately is not only subjective, it is also more often than not a coincidence.
Whatever the perceived “line” is on TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram does not correlate to what is helpful or even what is true. It is only that: one person’s perception. If we continue to operate as though what these platforms spout is gospel – or even powerful enough to be worth bending to – we not only kill good writing, we kill progress in the process.
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2022-07-08 06:00:00Z
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