The Year I Stopped Tweeting
Here’s what I learned in my first five years in the workforce: Being a social media manager, or editor, or whatever, is the worst job in media.
In most newsrooms, it’s the one position where you are simultaneously an ally and enemy of your coworkers, valued for your ‘understanding’ of the Internet and despised for the existential threat you pose to editorial traditions, structures and processes that existed long before your first day on the job. In larger, Big Picture meetings, you are both the most and least important person in the room, the person who can magically make stories “go viral” (you’d be surprised how often people still list this as a business objective and not just one metric of editorial success) despite the fact that your newsroom likely thinks you have no idea what you’re doing. Frankly, nobody really gives a sembelance of a shit about your journalistic aspirations (a few former Al Jazeera coworkers expressed surprise that I could produce something longer than 140 characters, which, well, I just can’t even), and finding editorial mentors, for me at least, proved difficult. The rest of the newsroom makes the bullets: In most cases, you’re just the gun.
I’ve done that jobs for years and it was existentially, mind-numbingly exhausting. There is nothing more satisfying than making sure a good piece gets the readership it deserves, but working a social media job often leaves you on the margins of the creative or editorial process, an afterthought despite the thousands of slides in corporate decks highlighting social media as integral to their strategy. Unless you’re in the right newsroom, with the right people, your job often breaks down into a day-to-day push and pull of content and ephemeral status updates that barely anyone will read and virtually no one will remember and your commenters and readers will instinctively hate. You wake up, put on your hardhat, and clock into the content mines.
Anyway, I hated it, so after I left Al Jazeera America in the midst of a round of layoffs, I decided that I wasn’t going to settle for another bullshit mind-numbing look-at-Tweetdeck-all-day shithole, no matter how much money or “strategic vision” some company had. I’d been writing more for places like Pacific Standard (thanks Nick!) and had published some stories I was really proud of (this oral history of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival) during my, er, forced vacations from Bloomberg and Al Jazeera. I like to write; I feel good after I do, like I actually produced something, and it’s what I’m good at, even though it’s not what I can make a lot of money doing.
If we’re friends (or I’ve tried to hire you in the past six months), you’ll recognize my common refrain about my time at Mic so far: It’s the first time I’ve woken up excited to go into work every day in years, since at least my time at The Atlantic. I still tweet, but I’m not really *on Twitter* anymore, glued to it like a dog leering at a washing machine. I spend all day editing and writing and occasionally writing longer things that aren’t pegged to the news. For the first time in years I can watch the Twitter-breaking-news scrum afar and not feel that anxiety creeping up my spine. I’ve read a lot of thinkpieces about “digital sabbaths” and “quitting the Internet,” and it strikes me that those are mainly written by people like me, occupationally obligated to live and breathe the daily churn of Internet awful. Some people live on that adrenaline rush; I’ve realized that I’ve never actually been one of those people.
Now, on the verge of 2015, I’m free of it. I didn’t stop tweeting, but it’s not my center of gravity anymore — and this is all I’ve ever wanted for years. Now I just really wish people would stop copying and pasting my tweets.
Anyway, here’s some stuff I published this year that especially I’m proud of.
The Tortured Rise of the All-American Bro
Is it possible to be a bro and not be a complete asshole? I argued in Pacific Standard that the misogynist portrait of modern American masculinity may be a historical accident — and there’s a way to fix it.
The Multiverse Is a Flat Circle
I reviewed Wesleyan University religion professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s deep, nuanced intellectual history of many-world cosmologies for the Los Angeles Review of Books. I took a philosophy of religion class with Rubenstein back in 2007 and she was one of the most enthralling, accessible theologians and scholars I’ve ever encountered. I managed to weave in a reference to True Detective and Star Trek doppleganger goatees in here too, so I count that as a success.
A Mysterious Sound Is Driving People Insane — And Nobody Knows What’s Causing It
I wrote a big fat feature about a mysterious phenomenon that’s been driving people insane for years for Mic. “The Hum” is characterized by a persistent and invasive low-frequency rumbling or droning noise often accompanied by vibrations. While reports of “unidentified humming sounds” pop up in scientific literature dating back to the 1830s, modern manifestations of the contemporary hum have been widely reported by national media in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia since the early 1970s. This is one of the most insane things I’ve ever heard of.
