What I Choose Is My Voice
May 23rd, 2008 |
Emily Gould (of Gawker fame) has a cover story appearing in this Sunday’s New York Times magazine.
A manic-depressive romp through panic attacks, wrecked romantic relationships, and schizophrenic seclusion, it traces her rise and fall as an Internet celebrity. Simultaneously rewarded and reviled—psychologically, financially, socially, even romantically—for being herself, she became invested in the idea that meeting her needs was dependent upon a public self-absorption that became increasingly dissonant and detrimental.
Needless to say, hers is a contentious narrative, as evidenced by her former employer’s catty coverage, or New York Magazine’s deprecating eye rolls here and here.
I’m not interested in evaluating the truth of her personal epic. But I find the venom directed toward her fascinating.
The assertion that “Emily Gould has made a writing career of her personal life and built a personal life around her writing career” doesn’t appear to be in dispute. She admits as much in her account.
Rather, the majority of the negative comments is preoccupied with arguing that her perception of the attention she deserves is incompatible with the actual attention she deserves (examples here, here, and here). If I’m at heart as vapid, self-absorbed, and unfulfilled as you, they sneer, at least I have the sense to keep it to myself.
This is, at heart, an argument over a social norm. Classicists studying ancient Athens call it a “performance culture.” Erving Goffman, in his 1959 work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, called it “impression management.” It refers to our (frequent) attempts to impress upon others the perceptions we want them to have of us.
Both classicists and sociologists use the analogy of theater to illuminate how this process works. The ancient Athenian citizen, it is argued, inspired by the annual Dionysian festivals with tragic and comic plays, was always performing—in the agora, in his political duties, and in front of the gods. Plato called it “the great stage of life.” Goffman’s interpretation became known as the dramaturgical perspective. “All the world is not, of course, a stage,” he wrote, “but the crucial ways in which it isn’t aren’t easy to specify.”
It may seem odd that something as basic as juggling social roles and impressions could be a social norm. But these behaviors are taught to children at an early age and aggressively enforced in our society. In realms such as school, work, or even dating, we rely on the expectation that those we interact with will actively seek to manage other people’s impressions of them. We make decisions about our own behavior based on this expectation.
Sometimes, it’s impossible to extricate impression management from other social norms or values. Conveying a desire to have someone else think highly of you, for example, is often interpreted as a sign of respect. Partly for this reason, we get offended, frustrated, or angry when we interact with people who don’t seem to care what we think of them.
The Internet, in the process of challenging traditional notions of privacy, is also challenging the norm of impression management, and with it other associated mores such as respect. It’s not surprising, then, that those who splay their lives open like a dissected frog are attacked with unusual viciousness as prostitutes of their inner soul. The slanders of narcissism and attention-seeking are rooted in the expectation that we’re supposed to be sweeping our unsavory qualities under the rug and at least trying to make everyone love and respect us. To address them publicly (or worse, to profit socially and financially from them) is to betray an inflated opinion of oneself, an insolent opinion of others, a loin-quivering ache for attention, or all of the above.
It’s beyond my capability to judge whether impression management is “good” or “bad,” or specifically whether Emily’s reasons for eschewing/pretending to eschew it were appropriate or not. Ultimately, though, impression management is just a social construction. We can conform or not. If we don’t, however, we face real social consequences.
Appropriately, I was listening to Disarm by the Smashing Pumpkins as I read her story, specifically the part when she describes how the casual savagery she used to dispense in the name of “being herself” is turned on her. It’s a poignant reminder of how intolerant many of us are when confronted with social deviance—whether deviance from our own personal code or deviance from social constructions we’ve internalized and embraced.
Over the next couple of weeks, I sat on the sidelines and watched as the commenters — on Gawker, on other blogs and even on Emily Magazine — talked about me the same way they once talked about the targets I’d proffered for them to aim at. Many of them explicitly pointed out that this drubbing was my karmic comeuppance — after all, I’d punished other people this way. Now it was my turn. It was only fair.
(The killer in me is the killer in you.)
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