When I was little, I was very insistent about the fact that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up—but not a journalist. An author, yes; a novelist, yes. As the fiercely independent daughter of a longtime newspaper editor, I wanted to follow my own dream, not just in his footsteps.
When I took a journalism class my freshman year in high school, I was turned off by all of its rules, the legality of it, and what I perceived to be the utter squashing of creativity. After a year writing journalism-style pieces for my high school's yearbook, I quit yearbook staff to help cull art and poetry for the literary magazine instead.
I spent my college years writing poetry and short stories, wrangling the nuances of the English language, honing the craft of storytelling. To my surprise, though, of all the writing workshops I took, my 300-level creative nonfiction workshop was my favorite. Family and friends asked me, But, what IS creative nonfiction? Isn't that an oxymoron? Or, Isn't that just journalism?
Well, for me, no. When I was 19, "creative nonfiction" was really just a glorified term for "writing therapy." In other words, I wrote a lot of either (1) angsty, teen memoir-style babble, or (2) David Sedaris-esque attempts to poke fun at my own experiences, my relationships, my family. Not that anything was wrong with those approaches; I was, after all, just writing what I knew at the time. I got plenty of practice fine-tuning my wordsmithing abilities through those writing projects. Above all, writing about my own experiences instead of others' seemed a good way to avoid becoming a journalist.
Fast forward to the past year of my life, during which I've found the books that most capture my attention are not the novels I used to so love, but rather, investigative nonfiction stories like Tom Kizzia's 'Pilgrim's Wilderness,' Nicholas Kristof's 'Half the Sky,' Laura Hillenbrand's 'Unbroken.' And, due to the nature of at least some of the writing projects I've tackled in my professional life, it seems that I have become a journalist after all.
In August, I ran the historic Leadville Trail 100 race, in anticipation of writing an upcoming feature story on it for Trail Runner. Aside from sharing a few anecdotes from my own experience, though, I am not all that interested in telling my own same-old, same-old ultramarathon narrative (i.e. I ran for a long time! It hurt a lot! I fell apart at mile 75 and thought I'd never make it to the finish line, but with the support of my amazing pacer and crew, I did!)
Rather, I am compelled to (attempt to) tell a much bigger, far-reaching story about Leadville, its history and what happened at this year's race—a situation that has already sparked widespread controversy throughout the blogosphere and injected some real ugliness in the greater trail-running community. I'm not interested in joining the personal jabs back and forth; what I want to do is uncover the truth.
But, what I've been reminded of over the past few months is that "the truth" is more subjective than we often think. I recently finished reading two very different feminist books. One is Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead"—essentially, a treatise encouraging women to "lean in" to their careers, combat lingering sexism in the workplace and ascend to more leadership positions in their companies. Sandberg interviews many highly educated, upper-middle-class women who've managed to balance full-time jobs with motherhood, and derive deep satisfaction from such.
The other book I just finished reading is Harvard graduate and writer Emily Matchar's "Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity"—which examines the opposite phenomenon among the same (perhaps slightly younger) demographic: highly educated, upper-middle-class women who've decided to "opt out" of the full-time, working world in exchange for pursuing a simpler, more DIY life at home. The Etsy generation, the urban homesteaders, the corporate-dropout-turned-organic-farmers, the lifestyle bloggers.
Both books were terrific, thought-provoking reads, full of women speaking their own personal truths. For many of those interviewed by Sandberg, their truth is, "Women are better off having rewarding careers outside of the home." For many of those interviewed by Matchar, their truth is, "Women are better off stepping outside the traditional full-time work paradigm." Is one more right than the other?
Interestingly, both books arrived at pretty much the same conclusion: Women should do whatever the hell they want with their lives. More specifically, women should not fall prey to societal expectations, whatever they may be, and instead heed their own intuition and pursue their personal dreams with rigor. Although both authors, Sandberg and Matchar, interspersed their books with their own personal experiences, I appreciated that neither presumed to know "the truth" about what's best for women. Rather, they allowed the stories and ideas of the women they interviewed to be heard. They listened.
For my Leadville article, I interviewed runners who loved this year's race, and I interviewed those who said it was the worst race of their life. I interviewed Leadville locals who think the race is the best thing that's ever happened to the town, and I interviewed those who feel it's a monster. Certainly, after running it this year, I had my own thoughts about Leadville, some of which I do express in my article—but thanks to invaluable input from my editor, I did my best to let those take a backseat to the diverse voices of those I interviewed.
As a journalist, you have incredible (terrifying) power in your hands to pick and choose the words, the quotes, the details you include, or exclude, in your story. It's all too easy to editorialize, to let your own biases creep in. When I was 19, I was interviewed by a newspaper journalist about hurricane relief work I'd done in New Orleans; her questions to me were deeply biased, interrogating, from the moment we got on the phone. I felt disappointed that my words were ultimately twisted to fit her agenda—a chastisement of young people traveling to volunteer, thereby abandoning needs in their home communities. It was a valuable idea worth exploring, but the fact that she approached our interview (and eventually, her readers) with the mentality of a prosecutor rather than a listener, seemed a reckless use of her power as a journalist.
In the age of instant Facebook and Twitter status updates, of blogs and comment threads that rapidly devolve from productive dialogues into personal attacks, we're all the more accustomed to flash-broadcasting our opinions in lieu of being patient enough to ask questions, to complicate our understanding by seeking out opposing ideas. Social media and the kind of inflammatory headlines that sites like Gawker and Jezebel thrive on encourage us all to react before anything else; we already have an opinion, a sense of outrage, before we've even read the article. Confirmation bias is rampant. Is listening to one another—particularly those we don't already agree with—becoming a lost art?
Taking the time to explore contradictions in what "the truth" is, rather than shuttling readers high-speed toward an uncomplicated conclusion, is at the heart of all good journalism. I wouldn't proclaim to be anywhere near mastering this yet, but it's a principle I'm grateful to be working on every day.
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Monday, February 11, 2013
Unplugging: Meditations on Breaking up with the Internet
 |
| Snowshoeing Coal Basin, across the street from home |
Among them was a discussion of the merits, or lack thereof,
of Facebook.
Who hasn’t fantasized about quitting Facebook? I know I
have. The wasted time scrolling glazed-eyed through my Newsfeed, the FOMO (Fear
Of Missing Out) or uncomfortable jealousy that can ensue when perusing evidence of others’ adventures,
the reality that while some posts can indeed introduce us to great ideas or
articles or images or quotes, the vast majority do not.
I once heard the analogy that comparing your life to someone
else’s based on Facebook is like comparing your own backstage to someone else’s
highlights reel. Most of us can probably relate to this—the occasional twinges
of inadequacy or insecurity when we look at other people’s lives from the
outsides. If I had a dime for every time one of my college classmates (or
really, any of my twentysomething friends) has posted on Facebook about what a
failure our fellow class of ‘08 Oberlin alum Lena Dunham has made them feel
like…well, I’d be a wealthy young lady indeed.
Most of us have probably contributed to this ourselves, too.
We don’t intend to—after all, we’re trying to paint a nice life as much for
ourselves as for the audience of our friends, family, and acquaintances. What
we choose to share on Facebook is not false, nor even necessarily an
exaggeration: people do get happily engaged, they take beautiful trips, they
have cute babies, they land dream jobs, they wake up and feel genuinely blessed
and grateful to be alive—and they absolutely deserve to be able to tell the
world about it.
But I think it’s important to stay aware of how the details
we broadcast about our lives are inevitably selective ones. As Steve
articulated so well on the road that night, those details are often different, more carefully chosen, than the ones we might share in a one-on-one chat with a close friend—just as
details were carefully chosen for mass email updates before there was Facebook,
the way Christmas letters were before mass emails, and the way grandmothers
were before Christmas letters.
It’s a fine line, though! Sharing our lives with each other
online can serve great purposes. We can inspire one other, build communities,
have dialogues about meaningful issues, stay current on the lives of friends we
might otherwise lose touch with.
Indeed, there are plenty of such legitimate things for which
I have enjoyed using Facebook. For one, getting my current job. I wouldn’t be
in Colorado now if Trail Runner hadn’t
posted on their Facebook page that they were looking for an assistant editor.
Two, being a part of the trail running community. I met 95% of my trail running
friends in Washington through the Seattle Mountain Running Facebook group. We
used Facebook to coordinate runs with each other—so even at 5 a.m. on a cold,
snowy Friday morning, I was able to find people to run up Mt. Si with me before
work. Our Facebook group helped me feel part of a team in what’s essentially an
individual sport, and fed me a steady stream of inspiration to hit the trails
and live life to the fullest. Three, Facebook has made me feel less far away
from my mom—who lives eight time zones away from me, across the Atlantic
Ocean—because she can stay up on my day-to-day life. She sees pictures of the
adventures I go on, gets notified when I update my blog, can trade comments
back and forth with the friends I’ve made in my adult life.
Every time I’ve ever entertained the thought of quitting
Facebook, my ego immediately protests: ‘That’s some crazy talk!’ I have fears:
the fear of disappearing from people’s radar screens, the fear of being lonely,
the fear of feeling out of touch, the fear that no one will read my blog if I
don’t let them know on Facebook when I’ve written something on it. Will I still
feel like a real person if I’m not on Facebook? It sounds ridiculous to ask
this, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind; someone tell me I’m
not the only one.
But after giving all my fears a little air to breathe…I feel
pangs of excitement. I consider how much negativity Facebook has brought into
my life. Ironically, it’s often made me feel farther away than ever from people
I love. I know for a fact it’s done the same to many of them, at least upon
occasion—I don’t have time to call or write a friend of mine across the country
(or world), but I have time to make a Facebook album? That doesn’t feel good
for anyone—and many of us are guilty of making someone in our life, at some
point, feel less important to us than Facebook.
I often lament that I’m not in as good of touch with
important people in my life as I’d like to be. You all know who you are; I
could be better. It’s not that I don’t have time to sit down for an hour and
write a long, meaningful letter to you; it’s that I’m throwing away that time
Liking things instead, telling myself that logging on to FB helps me “unwind.”
Where my mind came up with this propaganda, I have no idea.
Facebook doesn’t relax me; it makes me anxious. Like
Nicholas Carr wrote in The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, social media makes me feel like a rat running
around a maze, pressing little levers in hopes of triggering a moment of
pleasure—the fleeting high of someone commenting on a status or Liking a photo.
Facebook has made me virtually incapable of sitting still or taking a walk or
waking up in the morning without feeling tempted to pull out my iPhone and
check my Newsfeed, hope for those exhilarating little red numbers next to my
friend requests, my inbox, my notifications. I’ve checked Facebook in bed,
during dinner with friends, during work meetings, in the bathroom at bars, while in traffic (I’m
particularly ashamed to admit that one, but I’m being candid here), while
hiking in the woods, and plenty of other places I no longer want to interrupt with technology.
As Steve and I drove farther and farther away from the
bustle of the city, deeper into the quiet of the mountains, and the more we talked
about all this, the stronger my conviction: my life would be better off without
Facebook.
But, I’m not going to up and quit today. First of all, I’m
writing this blog entry from our new home in a tiny mountain town, where we
have no cell phone reception or Internet—so even if I wanted to quit Facebook
right here and right now, I couldn’t. This blog entry is being composed in archaic Microsoft Word, and will benefit from fresh eyes in the morning
before I drive into town for work and broadcast it to the world.
Second of all, my desire to let go of Facebook does not mean
I want to give the world a hasty, impulsive peace-out. I don’t want to
disconnect; if anything, I want to reconnect. I want to make my interactions
more meaningful, more personal, more…joyful, even. And that will take some planning.
Third of all, I actually use Facebook a fair amount in my
working life now—to help manage the Trail Runner Facebook page, to track down photos or contact information for
stories, to stay on top of buzz in the greater trail running community.
So while my fantasy of quitting Facebook altogether is
louder than ever, I’m still not sure it’s realistic (yet). What I do feel is
realistic, however, is drastically changing my habits with it—beginning with
the fact that Steve and I have no plans to get Internet in our home. If we want the Internet, we can pay six dollars (still roughly less than or at least equal to the cost of gas to drive into town) for a 24-hour block of it—which we plan to do perhaps once a week. It's more expensive than offering to chip in for and share our neighbors' wi-fi, but we figure we'll be more likely to succeed in unplugging if the temptation isn't omnipresent.
These disconnected evenings have been a fascinating
experiment indeed. After a few stubborn clues in Friday’s crossword had us
stumped, we might have been tempted to Google the answers we needed. Alas,
there was no Google to consult. So we took a walk and came back to it with
fresh eyes—and our brains, able to come up with many of the answers
that had previously eluded us, undoubtedly got a better workout because of it.
Is it necessary for everything in our lives to be so
instantaneous after all? Is the state of not knowing something knowable a state
we can learn to be patient with? I forget; I went for a snowy road run after
work one day last week, and reached for my laptop when I got back to map my run
online and calculate the distance I’d covered. But did it really matter that I didn’t know
exactly how many miles I’d run?
When I got home from my run to find an empty house, I wanted
to text Steve to see where he was, but of course, I couldn’t. Was it the end of
the world to not know where he was, or when he’d be home? Of course not; I
survived. And I thoroughly enjoyed the old-fashioned flutter of excitement in
my stomach every time I heard the crunch of car tires on the snow outside,
wondering if it might be him. I relished my eagerness to swap stories about
each other’s days—of which we knew nothing about, because we hadn’t called,
texted, emailed, or posted on Facebook all day long.
So, if my friends far away don’t see full albums of photos
of my day-to-day life, will we perhaps have more to talk about and more to
share with each other when we do catch up? I sure hope so. I will still write and share photos
occasionally on my blog, but I won’t use it as an excuse to not also write or
call those I love. I especially want to be more conscious of not painting slanted images of my life on my blog. At the risk of getting uncomfortably personal, I hope I can give a fair and balanced report of my life here.
A final note: the last thing I want this entry to be is a
high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou declaration of my rejection of social media and
the Internet. I don’t think either is evil, or that everyone would necessarily
be better off without them. But here, now, withdrawal from daily use of the Internet in my free time—and in
particular, of Facebook—feels like the right move. Drop me a line at yitkawinn@gmail.com with your phone
number, email address and/or home address, and a note on how you’d best like to
connect with me.
---
Bonus Reading
- On how perfect everyone else’s lives seem from the outside, and rejecting the pressure to seem perfect: http://www.danoah.com/2010/09/disease-called-perfection.html
- A 2008 piece from Nicholas Carr on whether Google (as a metaphor for the Internet) is making us stupid: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868
- Flickr founder and entrepreneur Caterina Fake's examination of FOMO (fear of missing out) and social media: http://caterina.net/2011/03/15/fomo-and-social-media
- Culture blogger Anil Dash's embrace of JOMO (joy of missing out), in response to Caterina's blog: http://dashes.com/anil/2012/07/jomo.html
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