unpacking my complicated relationship with the internet
i don't care!!! but also i do!!!
The third summer I spent in London was a hot one. It was the kind of ‘hot’ where going outside isn’t really an option, but staying inside means shutting all three blinds, taking intermittent cold showers, and inserting ice packs into the blue and white plastic desk fan that cost £75 on Amazon Prime, and thinking, “Is this really what I waited 9 months for?” and “I wish London had A.C.” Admittedly, I lived in a studio flat the size comparable to that of a shoebox which meant that the heat was contained to a space far too small for my liking, but it also meant that I could sing as loud as I wanted to in the shower, I could Deliveroo tiramisu from Eataly at 9pm feeling little to no shame walking to and from the front door in my slippers, and I could film videos without getting nervous that someone might overhear me – or worse – walk into the room mid-fit-check. During the third summer I spent in London I was melting into a puddle of cold brew and isolation, but at the very least, I was free.
On one of 2023’s summer days, where the 32 degree heat was just about bearable enough to walk down Broadway Market and purchase an “iced oat latte” before it melted into a lukewarm, espresso-ey cocktail, I decided to post a TikTok. I had recently started documenting my outfits online (something I still do to this day), and on this particular afternoon I sported a loose, white button up shirt, a pair of dark brown, striped boxer shorts, white crew socks, a pair of tennis shoes, sunglasses, and a black crossbody bag. Without much thought, I quickly scribbled text on top of the video declaring myself as having a “Boxer Girl Summer,” thinking, “What’s not to love about a pair of high-waisted dark brown shorts with an elastic waistband made of breathable fabric?” In part, I added the text because that’s sort of the thing you do on TikTok — overlay a block of niche words on top of an otherwise mundane video — and in doing so I discovered that, apparently, there is A Lot That Is Not To Love about a pair of boxers. Rather than circulating throughout my side of the internet — the side that understands boxers as a cute summer clothing piece — my TikTok wound up on the FYP’s of those who disagree that boxer-style shorts are an acceptable form of clothing, no matter the season. There was one hate comment, and suddenly, there were many hate comments.
I am so grossed out. Boxers are underwear and not shorts. Ahh yes, so we’re adding to the list of “things people are wearing that they definitely would’ve bullied other girls for 10 years ago” cool cool. Looks ridiculous. “Is it a fit or is she just skinny” (there were a lot of body comments which was just greaaat).
I will never forget the commenter who pointed out that my shoes sucked too, aptly followed by the tennis shoe emoji 👟, which hurt the most, because I, for one, love my New Balances. Their brown colour-way matched my boxers and my glasses – ever heard of the sandwich method? When boxer shorts ended up trending the following summer, I resisted the urge to respond to the commenters asking if they had anything they would like to say to me.
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Before and after what my friends and I have since coined as “Boxers-Gate” I have posted several other viral-ish videos resulting in negative comments*, even – and especially – when they have absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter of the video itself. Like the time I posted a video about working in the music industry, where I had recorded myself while walking down the street and added a block of text explaining that an album I worked on had been released, and someone commented “Ok slew foot.” (I still laugh about this one but also if I don’t laugh I’ll cry. Platform loafers are heavy, okay?!) Or the latest iteration of Boxers-Gate, Scanner-Gate, where I posted a video of a scanner that I got for Christmas. It got over 15 million views, and I received so many hate comments I decided to turn off commenting. No amount of engagement is worth any amount of anxiety. I instead followed up with an educational video explaining what a scanner is for the few whose pea-sized brains had the capacity to watch a video for longer than 10 seconds, and how I use scanners in the art that I create, and, naturally, I used the PR as an opportunity to advertise my new zine.
I have posted enough things on the internet to learn to disassociate from the hate of it all. When I worked as a TikTok creator for VICE (and wrote a few bylines for their website) I very quickly understood the importance of ignoring negative commenters and that perhaps journalism is not my calling. Recently, however, I have found myself worrying that people can be so mean, that we feel scared to be authentically ourselves online, whether we are sharing a summer outfit, a reflection on our office job, or a unique Christmas present.
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*Note: there were also lots of lovely comments on these videos, too, and they did not (and do not) go unnoticed. Thank you to anyone and everyone who leaves nice comments online (and in real life), the world needs more positivity! A special shout out to the girl at the shop last week, who told me my outfit was cute and that I looked like a Pinterest Girl. That morning I was *not* feeling cute and her words made my day :’)
These days, with doting eyes, I look back to the time where the internet was a place that only existed within the khaki-coloured, cardboard box of a computer tucked into the corner of my parent’s bedroom. The world-wide web was a placed you logged in to and out of (as identified by a green, red, or yellow dot next to your name), a place where the “Google” search eventually ended and then you would press the power button on the back left of the wheezing monitor and go outside and bike around the neighbourhood with your friends, unbothered by the potential of being recorded and posted online, the idea of being labelled as the internet’s new victim of the week nonexistent. Bullies were only to be found in the hallways at school, or in the shows on the television, and I know this is a morbid observation but cyber-bullying was not yet conceived as an idea, at least not in my early experience of being online. I think about when I first downloaded Instagram when I was 13 years old; my first photo, shared on December 29, 2011 was of four socks being used as Christmas stockings with the Valencia filter slapped on top. The caption read “pretty quality christmas stockings..” and my posts that followed were much of the same: random objects around the house with a random filter added, memes reposted from 9gag.com, or screenshots of text that read “Like for a truth is (:”. These were the years shortly before the white borders and the “#SelfieSunday” and the Facetune-ification of it all: the days where we shared what we wanted to share, and it meant nothing more or less than that.
*I know, I know, there were also viruses and scammers and objectively bad people taking advantage of the internet during its early days. This is my best attempt at painting the picture of using the internet as a small Tatum.
I grew up in the early 2000s, so I am old enough that I remember having “computer time” in elementary school, where we painted rainbows on KidPix (iykyk) on the the blue and pink and green and orange iMac computers built with translucent plastic, but I suppose I am young enough that I did not have a MySpace or MSN Messenger account. While I was not picking out a Fall Out Boy or Paramore song to pin to a profile, I did play the mini-games on the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon websites, I was posting YouTube videos when video responses, 5 star ratings, the sidebar, and private messages still existed on the platform, my friends and I chatted on G-Chat to organise our Club Penguin hang outs, we video-called via Skype and Oovoo, and I created — or rather, coded — websites with glittery HTML stickers on weebly.com. As both a young woman in S.T.E.M. and a 1998 child self-identifying as a “Zillennial,” I caught the tail-end of the “millennial optimism” that has found its way into recent video-essayist discourse. I, too, was belting positivity into the air, like “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas and “Tonight” by F.U.N. and “Firework” by Katy Perry, I, too was wearing neon green, wing-armed blouses from Forever 21 accessorised with a silver owl pendant necklace and a slouchy beanie that fought for its life on the back of my head, and I was punching the shades out of the 3D glasses from the cinema, taking selfies on Photobooth at the Apple Store with my friends and uploading them to Facebook, and I was returning home and using iMovie to create music videos to sped up songs before editing photos on Piknik and sending 20 character texts to my friends on my Motorola Karma.
And then I grew up, and the internet grew up, and things changed. I stopped logging out.
Before I critique the very thing that is responsible for my identity and much of my existence as a whole, I will once again acknowledge that the internet is a place where I have met some of my best friends, learned my creative hobbies, found an audience of crafty, fashionable, like minded girls (my follower demographic is 95% women and 5% men, and thank goodness for that) and it is even the place where I met my partner, who I have been with for nearly three years. I have the internet to thank for just about everything.
I guess when I write “the internet” what I am really referring to is social media. At some point between when I was dancing to “Super Bass” in the Apple Store in my 3D glasses sans-lenses and posting a TikTok of my boxer shorts in a hot and tiny London flat, “friends” became “followers,” “favourites” became “likes,” “pictures” became “content,” “people” became “creators,” “timelines” became ultra-customised “for you pages,” going “viral” became commonplace, content became monetisable, and the lines between the internet and real life blurred into an inescapable hyperreal haze.
I have been sharing things online since 2009. Do not fault my parents for this; they didn’t know better, and neither did I. My childlike wonder brought me to YouTube, of all places, and my first ever video was recorded directly on the site via my iMac’s webcam: a 47 second, 240p masterpiece where I said “HAPPY 11TH BIRTHDAY!” to my friend Natasha, as The Veronicas sang “Untouched” at far too high of a volume to hear anything else. At Natasha’s birthday party, I proudly presented my magnum opus on their family computer, and everyone was amazed that I was standing next to them, but I was also inside of a screen. My second upload was a violin tutorial on how to play none other than the introductory solo of “Our Song” by Taylor Swift. I was wearing Fred (yes, Figglehorn) merch and my violin-playing was subpar and screechy and off-key, yet somehow, I managed to receive 1,000 views.
I shared my first YouTube video with Natasha, and Natasha is the only person whom I intended to have it viewed by. I shared my violin tutorial with, presumably, people who wanted to learn how to play “Our Song” by Taylor Swift on the violin, and all of these years later, I seem to have developed a fictional “you” in my head not only when I am posting things online, but also throughout my day to day existence.
I anxiously turn the pages of a book on the tube, wondering if people will sneak a photograph and deem myself as TikTok’s latest performative reader, or if I appear artsy and mysterious, like the girls on Tumblr I wanted to be when I was 14. Last month I cried on an airplane because that’s just how grief is sometimes, and part of me imagined this as one of the melancholic scenes of my life’s movie. Whenever it starts raining while I’m on the bus, I look outside the window longingly, as if I am the star of a melodramatic early 2000’s music video. Last night I started dancing to music in my bedroom, and then stopped when I realised someone might see me through the window.
Is it possible to exist without performing? To write a Substack piece without an audience in mind? To begin a TikTok voiceover without the words Hey guys? To work from home without feeling the need to wear makeup and curl my hair? To post a story without rewatching it multiple times? To become less aware of my own debilitating self-surveillance? I don’t know. The first Substack essay I ever read was Rayne Fisher Quann’s “standing on the shoulders of complex female characters” — an excellent observation of internet and media commodification and its affect on the identities of young women online. When I read the closing line, I started to spiral:
we consume so much, now, that perhaps we don’t know what it means to exist as something unsellable. i had to give up journalling because i couldn’t stop writing for the people who would read it after i was dead.
Over the last year or so, I have been re-evaluating my relationship with social media, and part of that involves dismantling the voice in my head telling me that I need to receive a certain amount of engagement for whatever it is that I’m sharing to be “worthy” content. Suddenly, a “like” from a friend isn’t enough. 1 like becomes 10, 10 becomes 100, 100 becomes 1000, and nothing ever feels adequate, especially scrolling through endless timelines that lead to inevitable self-doubt. And then when a video goes viral and you have thousands of people telling you your art sucks and your boxers aren’t cute, you wonder why you even shared your art or your boxers to begin with. This morning, I put on an outfit that made me feel happy: a polka dot skirt, a green, lace-trimmed long sleeve top, and biker boots. Then, I went outside and got cat-called twice within the span of five minutes, and wish I hadn’t worn my outfit at all.
When you work as a social media manager, your success is predominantly measured by numbers: How many views did they get? How many people are making TikToks using their song? Can we start a trend? Why hasn’t their follower count risen? Why aren’t we getting more clicks? WE NEED TO SELL TICKETS! If a video is a success, you get a fleeting “congrats" and if a video flops, you don’t get much at all. The first time a video hits a million views, you feel proud, but when the subsequent ten hardly hit 100,000, you wonder what you are doing wrong. You forget that behind the number there is a fan enjoying whatever piece of content it is and no matter how many of them there are, hardly does it ever feel satisfactory. The thing is, no one is doing anything wrong — that’s just how algorithms work — it’s an addicting game of dopamine and doubt. I think that we – or at the very least, I – have been primed to believe that an audience is necessary to exist online. Without our “notifications” button to click on every time we open an app, who are we?
Be honest, how would you feel if you posted something, somewhere and no one liked it, viewed it, or commented on it? Maybe to few, refreshing, but to most it would probably feel like being in a group conversation, saying something, and no one acknowledging you. Not even that one friend who always makes sure that you feel included in social settings. Much of my Substack notes timeline is littered with memes about receiving a like on Instagram versus a like on Substack, or being thankful to have hit X amount of subscribers and Y amount of likes, and I’ll admit – I relate, and I have contributed to these types of posts on many occasions – but I cannot stress the importance of recognising the very real person behind the number. I feel absolutely honoured when someone takes the time to read one of my Substack posts and I am in disbelief that you liked my writing enough to subscribe to this newsletter and read this far along, and I am grateful when someone reaches out after flipping through one of my zines, or comments on something else I posted, but I try my very best to share things because I want to share things; not because I want to feel the attention that comes with sharing things. The internet feels like an endless, chaotic void, and I cannot blame anyone for wanting to feel seen and heard within it — I certainly do. I’m shadow banned on TikTok right now and it feels like the universe is watching me type this article and telling me, “Okay, then show us you’ll live without people seeing your content!”
Bo Burnham’s 2016 Netflix special, Make Happy, which feels (oddly enough) ahead of its time, concludes with:
“What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”
Recently, I was eating dinner alone with my thoughts and I whipped out my Notes app and typed: “New substack - I wish the TikTok ban actually happened.” And I say this as someone who creates content online*. So much of trend journalism and video essayist discourse relies on the newest TikTok topic – I cannot tell you how many 20-30 minute videos I have watched about the Stanley Cup craze, the lack of third spaces, trad wives and the rise of conservatism, Gen Z and clubbing (or the lack thereof), overconsumption-core, dark academia and cottage core and the aestheticisation and TikTokification and blank-ification of everything ever – and while this is not intended to slander video essayists*, because video essays observe and critique culture and much of cultural conversation is intertwined with the online space, but when TikTok was banned, I was curious to see how it would affect journalism, and more generally, our ability to truly think independently of one another. What topics would people make video essays about? What clothes would I buy, and how would I style them? What type of art would I create, and where would I find inspiration? What would I really think of a new album, or a new film? How would I form my own opinions about the world around me?
*Video essayists, I love you, I promise!
Anyways, after being banned for a duration shorter than my first situationship the TikTok app started working again and I was greeted by a message that the President had helped, and following this I made an executive decision of my own to stop scrolling on the app. I watched the recent seasons of Severance and The White Lotus without using TikTok, and while I did watch a handful of long-form YouTube videos posted by cinephile channels discussing each show, it was freeing to form my own theories on what was to happen next between episodes. My friend and I waited an hour in line together at a sample sale, and we spent the entire time discussing Severance. Each Tuesday for two months straight, my coworkers and I sat together at lunch to debrief The White Lotus. I managed to find ways to engage in the conversation free from the FYP. I still use the app to post videos, and I will watch whatever my friends send me, but I am on a journey to detach my phone from my hand, my brain from my algorithm, and the need for validation and the compulsion to scroll and compare myself to others.
*Worth noting that I create content online, but I do not make income from creating content online. Adobe, if you’re seeing this… my inbox is open
Everything is ironic now, and I kind of hate it. Hear me out: irony has become a mask for vulnerability. Or maybe it always has been, and I am only now just realising it. Probably the latter. In college, I remember watching the Netflix original The Kissing Booth (and the second and third iterations that followed), and making sure people knew “it’s so bad, but so fun to hate watch” when it came up in conversation. I justified my decision by saying that Jacob Elordi was in The Kissing Booth, so therefore it wasn’t absolutely unwatchable because he’s Jacob Elordi. He’s in Euphoria. He’s Elvis! I tuned into YouTube reaction channels – like Cody Ko and Noel Miller’s “That’s Cringe” and Kurtis Conner and his friend Dean reacting to a Cosmopolitan series, “Bestie Picks Bae” – feeling at ease watching otherwise “cringe” content through the guise of someone else poking fun at it. I have watched every season of Love Is Blind, most seasons of Below Deck, and I even dedicated an entire summer to keeping up with a season of Love Island. This begs the question: at what point do I just admit that I like watching reality TV, and I like pop music, and – actually – I am planning on watching the fourth season of You, not in an ironic way, but because maybe it is good, and maybe I actually enjoy it? At what point do we let a guilty pleasure exist as, simply, a pleasure?
It is springtime in London right now, which means that yellow roses are peeking out of every corner, and all of the trees are casting pink and purple shadows, and as a result, my camera roll is akin to that of a botanical garden’s Instagram page. One of my friends shared a ten-slide carousel post of ten different pink trees. It made me smile. I shared an Instagram story of pink tree petals on the ground contrasted by my yellow maryjane shoes. The next day I shared another story of the pink tree outside my office, one of its branches dangling behind a bright red phone booth, a sight which stopped me in my tracks and served as a reminder that I am lucky to live in such a whimsical city. Then, later, I reposted this meme. It feels as if I was using the meme as a self-reflexive defence to those scrolling past my stories – probably one of many Londoners sharing a pink tree to their Instagram – hey, I know you just clicked through another story of a pink tree, so here’s a meme about posting photos of pink trees just so you’re aware that I’m aware that everyone else is sharing photos of pink trees. It’s ironic!
In a now-deleted Tumblr post about the irony epidemic, Ethel Cain writes:
I miss genuine passion. As an autistic individual, when I'm alone, sometimes I cannot contain myself with how things make me feel. The music I listen to, the video games I play, the books I read. I almost feel the need to run through the house and scream in everyone's face how I'm feeling. It feels good to love intensely. Now, I won't pretend like autistic people haven't been bullied for this since the dawn of time, but there is surely a noticeable lack of passion in everything these days. Everyone can feel it, everyone is talking about it. Everything now is "cringe", or "doing too much", or "not that serious". Actually, it is that serious.
I am an advocate in posting the things that make you happy, which, in most of my cases happens to be photos of flowers or videos of my outfits or carousels edited to look like a digital scrapbook – but this does not spare me from feeling the need to downplay my genuine hobbies and interests and creations to others. It was not until recently that I decided to look back on my days of being a fangirl-wannabe-Youtuber without prefacing it with “It’s so embarrassing, but I used to…”
It isn’t embarrassing to like what you like, and it especially isn’t embarrassing to do so unapologetically. In 2013, I discovered the mutually exclusive wonders of fandom, Twitter, and Tumblr, and now I work in the music industry. Last year, I got to interview one of my favourite artists about one of my favourite albums of the year, for a music magazine that I created. I got my job as a social media manager at a record label partially because in my interview I mentioned that I used to run a fan account when I was younger. I know how to edit photos and videos because I wanted to be a YouTuber back in its heyday. So, no, it’s not embarrassing that I went to Vidcon and that I probably have a photo with your favorite YouTuber from 2013, because it was a period of my life where I found a community online, and in doing so, inadvertently built the skillset and knowledge of the internet required to do my job and engage in my hobbies today. It can be easy to see an adult at Disneyland wearing Mickey Mouse ears, or a Marvel fan cosplaying as a superhero at Comicon, or someone filming a TikTok dance in public, and deem ourselves as superior. I mean, really, what’s the difference between dressing up as Batman versus painting your face and body to go to a football match and sing chants with your mates versus dressing up in cowboy boots and a fringe-lined turquoise dress for a Swiftogeddon club night? Let’s let each other live a little bit, okay?
Maturing is turning 27 and realising that it is actually a very admirable thing to be a “try hard.” I remember, in middle school and high school, the “try hards” made themselves particularly known in P.E. — they were the people who actually wore running shoes and ran fast and tried at the sports we had to play. Meanwhile, myself and others did the mile run in Vans and Converse, trying our best to stand somewhere in the middle with blistered feet and un-tied hair and sweaty necks, because when I was 16, nothing was more embarrassing than trying. My mission was to fit in, and if that meant pretending like I didn’t care, then so be it. One of the try hards [complimentary] ended up going to Harvard to run track and field. I went to the park last weekend and ran two miles, and I am still sore. So there’s that!
The bottom line is: putting effort into something you care about is inspiring. The last two years have been an absolute treat for music lovers; I am wholeheartedly convinced that the positive reception to artists like Chappell Roan, Doechii, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx, and Tyler, the Creator has proven the importance of trying. These artists are not just releasing songs, they are carefully curating entire worlds. They are bringing back the concept of eras. They don’t play shows, they create experiences. They are — and have been, for the last decade or so — try hards, and finally, they are receiving their flowers for caring so deeply about their craft. I had to wait nearly three gruelling years to watch the second season of Severance, and holy shit were those ten hours worth every second of the wait. Severance made me realise just how much I enjoy and value quality television and throughout the season, part of me wished I was still in film school so I had an excuse to talk about it more. When Timothée Chalamet accepted his recent SAG award for Best Actor, he said, "I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight.” And I know referencing some of the most popular artists and television shows probably aren’t the best examples for the point I am trying to make, but all I am saying is that maybe we should all try to try a little bit harder. We should all strive to be great.
Before I moved to London, I was living at home, and it was also the pandemic. I was healing from heartbreak and found comfort through the discovery of one of my now favourite YouTubers, writers, and visual artists: Shayna Klee. She released a poetry book, I purchased a copy, and I found myself particularly drawn to her poem “Make Bad Art & Take Up Space,” and this is what I will leave you with:
We need to stop apologising for existing, especially on the internet. Shout about the art you are proud of creating and share the photos and videos and words you want to share because you want to share them. Resist the urge to discredit and downplay yourself, prefacing statements with the words “silly” and “little” because if it means a lot to you then it is not silly, and I am sure it is far from little. It is serious and big! People online can be cruel (trust me, I get it), but it is so important to say and like and do and watch and wear the things that fill your soul with joy. You might even find some likeminded people along the way. If you like your boxers and want to share a video of them, then go for it. If you want to write a 5,000 word Substack piece unpacking your complicated relationship with social media, then write it. Maybe someone will read it and find a piece of themselves within your prose, or maybe the piece will exit their inbox just as quickly as it entered, but you took your time to create something out of nothing — editing during your lunch breaks and staying up past your bedtime and proofreading again and again and again — for no reason other than you wanted to, and that is pretty cool in and of itself.
You are allowed to — and should — take up space.
⋆. 𐙚₊˚⊹ ᡣ𐭩 a note from tum ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹ ᡣ𐭩
hello ! once again, i am spiralling about social media! in some ways this feels like a part 2 to ‘it’s just a number, after all (isn’t it?)’. i’ve been reading and watching lots of discourse surrounding social media, returning to analog hobbies, and the art of trying, and i felt compelled to write about it as someone who enjoys creating content online, but equally recognises and feels the unwanted nerves and anxiety it brings. at the end of the day (at least for me) it’s a hobby. and hobbies shouldn’t stress you out! i like to edit photos and i like to make videos of my outfits and i like to make zines and i shall continue to do so in a way that is healthy for my brain :’)
thank you for reading if you managed to make it this far !!! <3
xx tum
also i decided to commit to UK english for this piece. to my american friends who will roast me for this choice i am so srry
media that inspired me to write this:
Tiffany Ferg’s “romanticizing ‘millennial optimism’ & the 2010’s hipster lifestyle??”
Mina Le’s “why is social media not fun anymore?”
Anna Howard’s “How to Be An Artist Without Selling Your Soul on the Internet”
Kurtis Conner’s “Why is Everything So Boring Now?”
Shayna Klee’s “Make Bad Art & Take Up Space”
As a silent reader of substacks and youtube videos... this inspired me to try to connect more & tell my fave creators and artists that I DO read their pieces, I DO watch their videos and I DO like them!! This was a very wholesome read and as a 00 baby I fully resonate with it 🥹 sending hugs!
this is so precious i love it