the mortifying ordeal of letting people know you know them (or at least perceive them)
a recomMONDAYtion
Dear friend—
A few years ago, I took a class on literary magazine publishing, and one of the assignments was to write “charming notes” to authors we admired.
I don’t quite remember the specifics of the assignment—how many notes? why exactly? (I think it had something to do with how reading and publishing in literary magazines is about community)—but a few weeks ago I was organizing my email folders and came across the charming notes that I wrote that semester.
A charming note, in case you haven’t heard of them, is simply a message that you send to an artist whose work you admire. You can thank them for their work, tell them your favorite parts, explain why it meant so much to you. No asks, no ulterior motives—just good vibes.
I Facebook Message’d and DM’d some charming notes, even mailed two or three, but mostly, I emailed. And I received a surprising amount of responses.
Finding them again, and the authors’ responses, was a little mortifying, I’m not going to lie. Was I really that earnest? Did I really say such personal and/or effusive things to a complete stranger? Did they really mean the kind things they said back, or were they just appeasing the random student who barged into their inbox?
I’m trying not to think this way, because intellectually, I know there is a much greater possibility that the notes really were appreciated; that they really did make their day.
I remember back when I used to post my writing and art more freely on the internet. If I got a comment from a stranger—especially one telling me exactly what they loved about the piece—I would think about it for days.
And I’m coming to realize that perhaps I would find the internet a better place if I were less of a passive spectator, and more of an active participant. If I actually told that artist on Twitter exactly why I loved their work enough to retweet it; if I commented on someone’s YouTube video; if I reached out to that author and let them know I am still thinking about their article three weeks after reading it.
After all, the whole point of the internet is not only to see and be seen, but to connect.
I’m thinking now about a post from Cory Doctorow about how internet platforms always seem to take a turn for the worst, because they stop fostering community and stop letting those communities grow.
The goal of the platform changes from “How can we get eyeballs on X thing users want to see,” to “How can we get eyeballs on Y thing we, the platform want them to see.”
Doctorow calls this process “enshittification,” in which the desires of the users are replaced by those of the platform, and the desires of the platform are usually to make money (i.e. advertise).
writes of a different kind of death of the internet platform—the overtaking of the platform by explicitly malicious actors (corporate overlords, authoritarian governments, idiots with too much money). This has happened again and again, from MySpace, to LiveJournal, to Tumblr, and now to Twitter, back to plenty of other internet spaces that reached their peak before I was sentient.
What Doctorow and Valente’s posts—and current events—impress upon me is that happiness on the internet is fleeting and could crumble at any moment. There are political and social ways to combat this, but this is where we are at the moment—precarity for communities and artists that thrive on these platforms, perhaps thrive there as they thrive nowhere else.
So I am going to do what I can to make the experience on these little corners of the internet just a little bit better; to make sure that these artists, risking so much by carving out space for themselves here, have one more person cheering them on, earnestly and effusively. Self-imposed cringe be damned.
Thanks for reading, take care,
—mia xx