During the late age of the paperbound book, say somewhere between 1990 and today, it was common to wonder if the skyrocketing number of published memoirs was the product of a narcissistic culture overrun by popular psychology. The boom seemed to reflect the growing dominance of therapeutic discourse treating our psychic lives as problems to be solved in the constant quest for something like happiness.[1] Rotten with every variety of personal writing, social media culture has been faulted in similar terms: self-obsessed narcissists preening for the public, nursing wounds, and hungry for approval that is somehow never enough for them. People who share personal stories via social media are living private life in public! They are too fixated on being seen by others and being constantly acknowledged as important, funny, talented, beautiful, valuable! “Like this post if you love me,” you have perhaps read—a bold assertion of a lurking common desire?
Yet as a social media form, personal storytelling is uniquely enmeshed in a particular system of value exchange. Different from a product like a book sold directly to a consumer, it is a point of engagement in a social media network that generates profit in other ways. It is not hard to see the truth in Jason E. Smith’s words when he writes, echoing Nick Srnicek, that social media platforms “represent in economic terms little other than extremely refined advertising delivery systems that reach billions of users.”[2] Their users are assets, and their success depends entirely upon “the myriad connections that form between them, and the capture of the information their exchanges generates.”[3] This explains why we can be offered access to so much content for free, why we are all often encouraged to proliferate and maximize connections, to keep adding friends and keep gaining followers, to never deactivate, and to post across platforms in a style designed to capture more “views” within this potentially expanding network: “the more numerous the users who use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for everyone else,” Srnicek writes.[4] I wonder what all this means for how we should understand social media memoir, conceived here simply as the narration of one’s life for an online audience, whether serialized as tweets or synthesized on Substack. How is social media memoir a product and driver of the network effects that exist to support data capture in the age of capitalism’s long crisis?
My first answer is entirely obvious: users can read personal narratives via social media for free. Social media production and consumption take advantage of materials that are always at hand, given the commonality of one’s day-to-day reliance on digital devices for work and leisure. What explains the decline in leisure reading of serious longform literary materials, and growth instead in smartphone reading of shorter snippets of free material online, pulled from among that seemingly endless stream of what Aarthi Vadde aptly describes as “undifferentiated content subject to human and machine intermediaries”?[5] Among other things, it is the spreading conditions of harried, indebted life and fitful work, moving from gig to gig and unsure of future opportunities. There is a lot to read for free online, little sense in sinking money into something you might not enjoy, and no guilt about that heady tome that has been gathering dust on your bedside table for months. Something similar can be said about the production of memoir as a genre: it involves you and your experiences; it is the very stuff of your life (which is, it so happens, often the stuff of engagement with social media), requiring no resources to produce and often little research to deepen or substantiate. The self is the site and source of its own complexity and nuance, its own problems, drives, needs, from the most mundane to the most transformative. Everything you need is right there. Technical cost of entry: zero.
Next, social media memoir is one of the forms of online performance uniquely conducive to the expansion of networks. Consider Cassey Ho, who runs a fitness company called Blogilates. Her videos were among the first to appear when I started to search YouTube for workouts to do at home. She offers free content, sells an array of her own branded products, and partners with companies such as Trader Joe’s to promote their brands via her account. She posts a lot about her personal experiences. She grew up the child of immigrants to the US who had relatively little money. She shares pictures of her modest childhood home as a way of grounding her success story of overcoming difficult circumstances to make it as an entrepreneur. Most characteristic, however, are frequent returns to what she refers to as her “body issues.” This is content that is conveniently controversial and taps into an experience that is familiar to many. She talks about feeling shamed by followers when she was not thin enough, and then shamed yet again when she was too thin in some people’s eyes. She talks about her journey to transform not just her body but her ways of thinking about herself, so that she has reached “health” on her own authentic terms and is not as driven by what other people want from her.
As a content creator Cassey uses personal writing to curate a saleable identity based on the material of her own psychic lives and self-development—material she can return to again and again, noting new forms of struggle with key issues and new ways of thinking about oneself. There is also a reliable cycle of negative feedback that she can access and draw upon, with no dearth of users who feel compelled to say something negative about Cassey’s appearance or her content. Every negative comment mobilizes an army of supporters who defend her, and Cassey herself is masterful at turning negativity into an occasion to return to narratives of past harms. She emphasizes how trolling comments wound her, but also revisits her tradermark history of struggle with a negative self-image and her commitment to progress toward self-realization and transcendence of social pressures. Cassey’s online identity is firmly based in this cyclical assertion of renewed commitment to self-improvement and interlinked physical and mental health.
Cassey’s company depends upon this stable but dynamic narrative, drawing more and more users into the network. Once memoirists wrote books to earn money; now the magnetism of creators’ personal storytelling is what makes them valuable to social media companies. Is this not what many people now read for leisure? I wonder what percentage of her followers ever purchase a sports bra or yoga mat, or what number of people complete one of her posted workouts. Surely there are just as many of us there only for the compelling pictures and videos and the personal story. Nor does it matter to Instagram, of course; it will busily post other ads to catch my attention, occasionally offering products that will tempt me. Cassey is selling merchandise, but she is also compensated by several companies for her ability to collect and command a social media audience, regardless of how well her own branded products sell.
Suffering psyches have become key narrative subjects. In her study of the popularity of Oprah Winfrey’s trauma-focused television show and book club, Eva Illouz writes that within modern life, narrative suffering is “central to the formation of identity because it is the departure point for a process of self-reflection and self-understanding… to lead pain-free lives, we are summoned to understand ourselves through the categories of pain and biographical trauma.”[6] While “it enjoins us to excise suffering from our lives,” therapeutic discourse also “uses the category of ‘psychic pain’ as the key narrative device to make sense of the self.”[7] For many influencers and miscellaneous users alike, suffering and its overcoming are similarly central to storytelling. Yet because of the link between identity and brand value within a network, expressions of self-understanding exist to generate engagement from users and can thus rarely reach full resolution. While I’m drawn to these memoirists for their changing expressions of identity over time, the longer I follow them, the more I notice a core that doesn’t budge: the social media memoir, unbound, is continuous, serial, and repetitive—it must be, if the account wants to continue to draw users and engagement. The key moments of one’s personal expression turn into repetition of characteristic details that are the nexus of consumer engagement and affective connection.
Cassey Ho willingly collapses her personal content into her actual business: conceptually at least, there appears to be little distinction for her. In a recent post she advises people who are interested in being social media entrepreneurs to “think of something you love doing, that you would do even if you didn’t get paid. Something that will help people in their lives. Then don’t hold back. Offer that to them.” Do what you love, in other words, and worry later about figuring out how to monetize it. Make your inner passion into the social media memoir that propels your brand. Sales will hopefully follow down the line, but in the meantime, focus on gathering people together around your hub in the network by promoting your unique story. This seems to be a powerful pedagogy. Indeed it is, perhaps specifically because the most popular personalities doing the teaching (much like trending memes) shape the behavior of those with just a handful of online connections, as social media memoir put out by the top accounts has the power to inform what everyone does online. Or is it instead that top producers are rewarded more lavishly for doing and thinking in ways that are already mundane within networked platform capitalism?
Turning to more amateur creators, the message of doing something out of love and a desire for connection is clearly resonant for online memoir work at all levels, from extensive personal blogging right down to the daily activity of self-constructing lifestyle curation in posts and tweets.[8] Not everyone plans to make much money via online life-writing, for instance by self-publishing personal writing via Wattpad or Kindle Direct Publishing; others might do it out of a desire to share in and be part of a community, perhaps hoping for likes and for some engagement in the form of affirming commentary by readers. They participate in a network of readers and writers outside of the mainstream publishing world, using platforms that are free or cost very little, with an interest more in networked sociality than in building a brand, even as they inadvertently create value for the platforms. As Mitch Therieau argues elsewhere in this dossier, the privilege of expressing yourself is meant to serve as some compensation even if you never get paid. The emotional work of self-expression, highlighting one’s own formative tendencies and experiences, belongs to the “reified realm of the qualitative,” where earning an income is desirable but not expected.
To better understand Wattpad in particular, I uploaded my own bit of personal writing. Wattpad has a division that allows them to pay some writers for their work; they charge readers small amounts for access to that content, while selling aspiring writers on the idea that they might make it big. Still, the company remains predominantly devoted to functioning like most social media in offering a free platform, with payment an option available to those who want and can afford a more premium experience. Wattpad makes its real money by using readership data to find out what content is the most popular and then optioning it for TV and film production. In the process it is gathering what it calls “over 1 billion data events” each day, about what readers like and what they don’t—what they engage with, where they pause to underline, where they insert comments. A 2016 corporate plan states that they will “leverage our data, technology, and community to revolutionize how content is created and how people are entertained.”[9] They have hewed close to these words.
My short piece is about going with a best friend to say goodbye to his mother, who was on life support after suffering a massive stroke and organ failure. We sat in my car and drank shots of vodka out of plastic kid cups before going into the hospital. We wept a lot and made desperate jokes about things like the state of her abandoned refrigerator and who will inherit the contents of her junk food cupboard. Writing it was half typing and half crying. I uploaded this content pseudonymously and will never be paid for producing it. But that doesn’t mean no one benefits materially from its existence. It circulates now on Wattpad as something people can (humor me) read, share, and engage with. It is an occasion for the company to gather more data about reading behaviors that can be useful now and in the future. Wattpad speculates possible uses: Will it pay people to write to order based on models derived from existing successful titles? Will it convince more publishers to work with them as partners, promising to feed them the most commented upon and beloved manuscripts, with the work of substantive editing done for free by engaged readers and much of the marketing also in hand given the existing fan base? All monetization of course depends upon Wattpad having secured my investment in the basic activity of writing free content, via my predictable immersion in the world of network effects—my interest in the immaterial rewards of online sociality. Even though I wrote it largely as participatory research, to understand how Wattpad works, I want the writing to be read, liked, shared, and want it to mean something to people. Still waiting for it to blow up.
As a genre of published book, the memoir has been said to offer its readers counsel in how to understand, imagine, and plot out formative life moments like mine. Memoir’s readers learn how to prepare a narrative of the self that is cohesive and legible. To use Eva Illouz’s terms again, “biographical narrative selects and connects the ‘significant events’ in a life, thus giving that life a meaning, direction, and purpose.” These narratives are not only individual, of course. Instead, they “draw upon [and reinforce, I would add] broader, collective narratives, values, scripts that imbue these personal stories with socially significant meanings.”[10] Readers caught up in the memoir boom maybe learned to conceive of a life as a series of problems to be overcome, with the psyche as a puzzle awaiting its solution on the path to some progressive development. How is social media memoir structuring how we experience ourselves now, inseparable as it is from the pursuit of network effects, with users drawn into habitually producing and consuming content about the self? My thoughts here are largely speculative. Instead of narrative closure, perhaps one finds more shareable moments of partial enlightenment, moments designed to elicit readers’ responses in the form of comments and likes, while promising to remain the unresolved wellspring of future posts. Instead of finished stories, one finds provisional articulations that spark feedback and conversation. Instead of a permanent record of some epiphanic moment of personal evolution, one finds disappearing images, snippets of confession, big events, and mundane details, all of it delivered between advertising content. Instead of a cohesive developmentalist life narrative, one has a series of captioned selfies: “tired today”; “looked cute, might delete”; “mood.”
These conditions of what Therieau calls “compelled self-disclosure” are increasingly familiar, and no doubt experienced most acutely by people materially compelled to self-promote. “Ours are emoji times, the time of the emoticon, in which we are constantly required—or invited—to indicate our emotional state,” Esther Leslie writes.[11] Just as the activity of reading itself has been assimilated to what Mark McGurl calls “a repertoire of habits of experiential optimization and self-care,”[12] social media memoir intersects powerfully with workplace wellness discourse and emotional management. In addition to its other lessons, engagement with social media memoir may acclimate us to the activity of constantly monitoring our emotional health as a way of managing what is happening so quickly, dizzyingly around us. Am I okay? What is my mood? Am I down? How down—like depressive episode, or mildly sad? Feeling good? Feeling … too good? Manic? Zany? Unhinged? “The conditions of work will continue to worsen,” HR tells me, “but we are committed to increasing our efforts to address your feelings about it!”
So say what you must about deepening narcissism, “neoliberal” emphasis on individual experience, neurotic obsession with living life online. Would it be better if people stopped talking about themselves, “to cause the worker to disappear entirely from the scene of her own labor,” as Grace Lavery asks? Social media companies are structured as desperate drivers of consumption in conditions of broader economic turbulence and decline. I have tried to suggest that it is this basic fact that shapes how personal writing appears and is consumed online—its indistinguishability from branding, serial repetitions and compulsions, fragments and ephemera, and networked sociality. Forms of cultural expression do not emerge in a vacuum. For explanation we need to look at contemporary capitalism’s changing patterns of work and leisure: harried, indebted, and anxious life in and out of casualized employment. And firmly enmeshed in those patterns, we find the corporations that cultivate our dependence on digital devices for access to cultural expression and experience.
← Memoir Dossier
Notes:
[1] For survey and dissection of these accounts see Julie Rak, Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), 12-16.
[2] Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 43.
[3] Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work, 51.
[4] Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 30.
[5] Aarthi Vadde, “Platform or Publisher,” PMLA 136.3 (2021): 460.
[6] Eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 111.
[7] Illouz, Oprah Winfrey, 118.
[8] Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back (Bold Type Books, 2021) is a standout recent study of the way “labor of love” talk asks people to accept worsening working conditions, not least by inviting them to fixate on their future loveable job rather than on organizing to improve their real workplaces.
[9] Wattpad, “The Master Plan”: https://company.wattpad.com/blog/2016/11/30/the-master-plan
[10] Illouz, Oprah Winfrey, 85.
[11] Esther Leslie, “This other atmosphere: against human resources, emoji and devices,” Journal of Visual Culture 18.1 (2019): 15.
[12] Mark McGurl, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (London: Verso, 2021), 20.