YouTube can learn from old-school blogging culture: share (and cheat) at your own risk

As someone who had not just one blog, but several in the late ’90s and early ’90s – and as someone who originally came to NPR to write one about pop culture – I found it fascinating to watch blogs explode, then collapse, then be reinvented as newsletters essentially indistinguishable from blog posts. “Here are some writings, here are some links, here are some information.” It was also a blog’s mission statement, especially in the more “journaling” incarnation, as opposed to the “rolling succession of tiny posts that were really just links” incarnation.

Seeing the blogging culture in Substack and other newsletter platforms isn’t difficult. It was the culture of a quick take, a chance to see a writer’s new thoughts on a weekly (or more frequent) basis, and it was independence from traditional publishing. At one place I worked, the phrase “paste it in a blog” was used as a sort of searing acknowledgment that if you have so much to say about something, go make space for it.

But this week’s drama about YouTube crew The Try Guys’ Ned Fulmer lost his gig after he admitted to cheating on his wife (catch up with this helpful explainer if you must) also highlighted how YouTube contains elements of 2003-ish blog culture and journaling. Fulmer is what people call a “Wife Guy,” a guy whose public image is very centered around his romantic relationship with his wife. So obviously this revelation about cheating was a problem.

Let’s travel in time for a moment

In early blogs and online journals, pseudonyms were very common for the people in your life, and even for yourself. For example, a blogger might write as LucyBear (I’m making this up, so don’t try to google that person), with a husband called El Hubbo (people have done stuff like that, I’m really sorry) and kids called Floofy and The Crasher. You would have really, really started to feel like you knew all of these people by hearing the stories of their travels and their home repairs and their struggles with parenthood or whatever. A lot of people have made a name for themselves as online writers with this stuff.

Just like the bachelors who wrote diaries, almost Carrie Bradshaw style, about this and that, jobs and dating and so on. And one of the first things they learned was that when you thrive as a storyteller of your own life, people start to feel empowered to know everything.

I can’t tell you how many times it’s happened that someone I know has been talking about El Hubbo for years, and then all of a sudden: no El Hubbo. Where was El Hubbo? Sick? Were they separated? Something happened? Where are Floofy and The Crasher? Do they live with you? And people were starting to leave it in the comments: Where’s El Hubbo? They would become more aggressive and more intrusive: are you and El Hubbo still married? Why wasn’t it in your vacation story?

It was even harder, I think, for people who were dating. Someone would write about a boyfriend called Blue Eyes for months and then nothing. The respectful thing for a reader to do, of course, would be to let it go, to understand that people separate, and if the person wanted to write about it, they would. This is usually not what happened. At some point, after enough prying, people would end up writing a pretty opaque explanation of “Blue Eyes and I broke up.”

Readers feel entitled to “know how it ends”

What is part of your personality, people feel entitled to express their opinion. These are the “parasocial relationships” you hear about, sort of, but they’re also the result of building a narrative about yourself in an effort to promote whatever you create and connect with your audience. . This story becomes like a book, and people have the right to hear how it ends. And when uncomfortable truths creep into that narrative, it falls apart.

Maybe you’ve had the experience of following, say, a horse’s Instagram account. And you follow the horse, and you see pictures of the horse and the married couple who owns it and rides it, and you see one of them hugging the horse and the other one hugging the horse, and you just have a good moment to follow Hank the horse. And then people get divorced. It can be a very weird feeling, because the reality of living humans that exist in real time has intruded into the fiction of the self as a character with a shaped story.

I’m not sure you lost your YouTube job because you cheated on your wife, exactly. And I’m not even sure the real problem is that your sympathy is damaged, although that’s probably part of it. I think you lose your job on YouTube when you shatter the illusion that you’re a character defined by your content – ​​and I apologize to those of you who hate that word. When you remind people that in fact you are a person defined and limited by your mess, a person people might or might not like if they knew you. You’ve blurred the line between your true self and your personality so much that now seeing your real life explode is like Jim Carrey bumping into the wall in The Truman Show.

Finding the right balance means setting boundaries

What came out of that moment in blogging culture, for many people I knew, was a renewed commitment to controlling what they talked about and what they didn’t. The ultimate skill in navigating a social media presence, to a large extent, seems to talk about everything without talking about anything at all. There are many people who will show you their dog, but not their children. They won’t tell you charming stories about their husbands or wives or boyfriends or girlfriends every day, because they don’t want you to feel entitled to know where someone has been or gone. he’s in the hospital, or you’re struggling. And if they’re really good at it, you don’t notice.

Just as Substack and other platforms have brought back the blog and its freely associative and differently disciplined writing practices, personality-driven outlets like YouTube and TikTok and Instagram have brought back the need to weigh the risks of a boundary also porous between you who you really are and the you you share with everyone. Not in the sense of dishonesty – there is nothing dishonest about selectivity or confidentiality. Just in the sense of balance. What is part of your brand will always be subject to the capricious and exclusive impulses of many other people. The more of it your wife is, the more people will feel empowered to comment on your infidelity. And unlike a faceless husband referred to by an alias, now maybe people have seen your wife, seen your husband, seen you interact. They saw that person’s smiling face. They even feel After as if they knew you together.

So maybe the next thing to bring back, for all the people learning all this from YouTube and TikTok instead of Blogspot and LiveJournal, is encouragement to wall off the parts of your life that you don’t want to have to explain. The closer you stand, the less everyone can hold on.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To learn more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Copyright(c) 2022, NPR