The Wonderful Unsaying
How Upworthy cheapens everything
“Watch this woman bring a theater full of people to tears with her jaw-dropping revelation.” So beckons the internet lately. Like the swell of a film score, social media calls with cloying, tear-jerky headlines meant to induce rabid clicking. “What did she do?” I need to know. These headlines greedily invite action with exuberant, urgent invocations to participate in a social media groundswell of quaking revelation!
Nothing strikes me as more disingenuous or worthy of mockery. For this reason I’ve stubbornly forgone clicking. I don’t know what female troubles made Dustin Hoffman cry, or what the proposal of the year was. Or what this husband did for his wife before she died. I didn’t even pay much mind to Batkid. OK, so he was pretty cute. But I definitely did not pay attention to the breathless clickbait headlines advertising his heroic exploits.
What gives with the internet lately?
I’d like to think that in the age of ‘Alone Together’, people are tired of feeling like nodes in an expansive and lonely digital landscape that demands ever more of our time. We want to feel plugged in to a surge of intense emotion, and the idea that Things Are Happening — real connections between people, life-changing moments-in-time that don’t slur together like so many commutes, or trips to the supermarket. Hence the success of such content.
As a cynic, I suspect that such ‘things that matter’, as Upworthy (the guiltiest of gratuitously manipulative social media headlines) deems them, are really just about sheer numbers. Getting people to click, share, and feed hungry eyeballs is the MO. They’d like to differentiate themselves from sites dedicated to sharing stupid pranks and pratfalls by promising ‘no empty calories.’ But content is shaped by context. And hyperbolic emotion and coyly inviting headlines cheapen even the most moving YouTube video. In the same turn, a ‘guy surfing off of his roof’ recontextualized, can become art. Creating a mass-market website with wide, viral appeal is a fine and admirable accomplishment, but doing so under the cloak of activism and social change feels flimsy and false; it does a disservice to the real, tangible moments of connection it serves to spread.
There is a wealth of content online that might become fodder for Facebook, and might not, but either way requires no breathless, anxiety-inducing introduction: Ariel Levy’s brilliant, heartbreaking essay about her miscarriage . Radiolab’s segment on Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan’s cosmic romance, Stuart Schuffman’s love letter to San Francisco. This photo montage of a whale hunt in Alaska. The 16-year-old in me still wants to rip the virtual pages from the magazine and pin them to my bedroom walls to re-read and pine over. Instead there’s social media. So be it.
There, too, are small moments in everyday life that as yet resist documentation. I think of the impassive faces of bored bus riders as a disturbed passenger launches into a particularly eloquent rant. A gentleman at the 19th street station in Oakland stomping and singing the blues. The spooky dusk light on Euclid Avenue after a recent rain. They make up a landscape of mundane wonder, which is not, in fact, an oxymoron. They are glints of grace in the grey asphalt of cotidian life. The tools exist aplenty to document them, but perhaps they go better off unpictured and unsaid.
