Reading Robert Fitterman’s Now We Are Friends Through the Lens of Ten Media Theoretical Terms
Robert Fitterman's 2011 Now We Are Friends is a powerful index of the rapid evolution of social media, as well as of the terminology we use to describe social media and its effects. (The book is available as a free download here). Now We Are Friends appropriates the social media posts of an aspirant Philadelphia microcelebrity, Ben Kessler, as well as the posts of Kessler's friends. The term "microcelebrity," like the other nine terms I organize this essay around, did not exist before the rise of social media over the past decade. Drawing upon social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, blogs and message boards, Fitterman presents a kind of collective portrait of how social media has influenced notions of friendship, information sharing and personal privacy.
Now We Are Friends explicitly places itself in the "creep lit" tradition of works that reveal details of the private lives of others. Works such as Vito Acconci's "Following Piece" (in which Acconci engaged in stalker-like behavior and recorded the movements of people on the street) or Sophie Calle's The Address Book (in which Calle tracked down contacts from a stranger's address book) deliberately violate the privacy of anonymous subjects.1 Now We Are Friends begins with an epigraph from "Following Piece," and ends with a coda in which Fitterman's own privacy is invaded by his friend and fellow poet Steve Zultanski. In the pre-digital era, works such as Acconci's and Calle's required the physical proximity of either those under surveillance or of their physical records. Fitterman, by contrast, follows the online data trail of an explicitly named person he has never met.
"Blogger extraordinaire" Ben Kessler is a humble example of a MICROCELEBRITY.2 Kessler uses social media to promote himself and to promote his blog "Unbreaded," "an online publication that explores the craft of fine sandwiches." Kessler is candid about being unemployed: "Right now I'm hustling, trying to find a job.... I'm a geek 100% of the time so I'm constantly reading, writing blog posts, and surfing through my Google Reader" (18). Kessler's description of himself makes him a near-perfect example of Alice Marwick's definition of microcelebrity:
Micro-celebrity is a state of being famous to a niche group of people, but it is also a behavior: the presentation of oneself as a celebrity regardless of who is paying attention.... Becoming a micro-celebrity requires creating a persona, producing content, and strategically appealing to online fans by being 'authentic.' Authenticity in this context is a quality that takes many forms, from direct interaction with admirers to the public discussion of deeply personal information..."3
In effect, Kessler is a human brand aggregator, who believes in the rationality of himself as a consumer. "I strongly believe that a brand must have complete transparency, an authentic and friendly personality and image to compete in the current marketplace" (11), he writes. Aspirant microcelebrities attempt to use platforms such as Twitter to enhance their social status as well as their income—but according to Marwick there is rarely a correlation between microcelebrity status and increased income. Microcelebrities often burn out after a brief period of intense online sharing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kessler's "Unbreaded" Twitter feed has not been updated since 2011. The feed still has 1,897 followers.
Now We Are Friends tracks Kessler and others over multiple online platforms, and thus offers an important window onto contemporary TRANSMEDIATION practices. Originally coined to describe "transmedia storytelling," or the creation of fictional narratives across media platforms, the term transmedia can also refer to the self-constructed narratives facilitated by cross-posting on platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram.4 Remediation, or "the representation of one medium in another medium," was typically used to describe the movement from one medium to another (i.e. film to television), whereas transmediation suggests the simultaneous deployment of content across multiple media platforms.5 Complicated framing decisions are often involved in remediation and transmediation: in Now We Are Friends, for instance, typically only the text (and not the graphics) of Kessler's posts are preserved. Others who have printed Twitter posts in book form have chosen to print screen shots and to include graphics.6
Now We Are Friends draws its material largely from NONYMOUS sources. To oversimplify a bit, Web 1.0 message boards and chatrooms were often considered anonymous environments where, in the words of the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon caption, "On the Internet no one knows you're a dog." Nonymous usage conditions, by contrast, are required by the Terms of Service of most social media sites in the post-Web 2.0 era.7 Famously, Mark Zuckerberg, the Chairman and CEO of Facebook, remarked that "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."8 Or as Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, put it: "You can't be on Facebook without being your authentic self" (210).9
Now We Are Friends simulates the experience of EGOSURFING, or Googling one's own name. Ben Kessler is a "real" person, but so are the other Ben Kesslers that Fitterman draws upon. The book's second section, "Other Ben Kesslers," begins with another Ben Kessler (a self-described "music teacher") disambiguating himself from other Ben Kesslers, including "Kessler on Twitter." Ben Kessler the music teacher begins his post: "Are you tired of being confused with other Ben Kesslers? Are we really all just the same person?" As Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin note in the context of Mónica de la Torre's "Doubles" [a poem which draws on sources from women with the same name], "identical names are a problem for database parsing and the very practical mathematics of constrained clustering and distance metrics."10 Identical names force us to compare ourselves to others with the same name; they also draw attention to the ways in which our names are used to identify us as subjects of targeted marketing. While Ben Kessler may have been a name chosen at random, it is perhaps not a coincidence that he [the primary Kessler] is a student of marketing.
Kessler is something of a techno-utopian, and his positive outlook on the web would seem to extend even to a brief foray into IDENTITY TOURISM:
Beyond race
religion
geography
class
I AM
WHATEVER
I SAY I AM
ON THE INTERNET
MILLIONS ARE TELLING
THEIR STORIES11
Lisa Nakamura coined the term "identity tourism" to describe assuming online identities other than one's own. According to Nakamura, "users often engaged in online minstrelsy in which they used reductive racial and ethnic identity traits to attach exoticism to themselves..."12 The classic example she offered was from a 1997 MCI TV commercial, which claimed: "There is no race. There is no gender. There is no age. There are no infirmaries. There are only minds. Utopia? No, the Internet." Kessler nearly paraphrases this view that through anonymous web environments that one might escape their physical bodily identity. In reality, Web 2.0 nonymous environments made identity tourism more difficult, and revealed that personal identity remains closely tied to traditional markers of race and gender. Kessler, it should be noted, does not partake of identity tourism in the racial masquerade sense outlined by Nakamura, but nonetheless we might infer that he views his online identity from something of a libertarian universalist perspective, which allows him, in effect, to give his generic (i.e. white) personal brand a broad appeal.
In order to create interest in himself, Ben Kessler employs CROWDSOURCING techniques, continually asking his followers for advice, and in return delivering advice of his own. The term "crowdsourcing" was only coined in 2006, but the idea of user-generated content and mass product reviews is by now omnipresent. Yelp, founded in 2004, is a restaurant review platform that would presumably overlap (or compete) with Kessler's "Unbreaded." Kessler even reviews Yelp favorably for a "My 10 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2008" post, making no mention of it as a competitor for "Unbreaded." One imagines that posting a top ten iPhone apps list would have been an excellent way to generate "hits" in 2008; once again Kessler uses multiple media platforms to generate interest in himself. The majority of Kessler's posts have to do with his personal tastes, which are continually conveyed to his audience: "I enjoy checking out the amazing restaurant scene in this city, drinking microbrews, photography, biking, etc... I'm constantly reading, writing blog posts, and surfing..." (18).
Kessler's self-deprecatory geek status allows him to maintain a sense of approachability while LIFESTREAMING. In Alice Marwick's definition, "Lifestreaming is the ongoing sharing of personal information to a networked audience, the creation of a digital portrait of one's actions and thoughts" (208). As Marwick notes, "the lifestream is not a direct reflection of a person, but a strategic, edited simulacrum, one specifically designed to be viewed by an audience" (211). Kessler is, in Derek Beaulieu's terms, a "digital everyman," and Twitter is his preferred medium.13 The top app on his list is TwitterFon [a now-obsolete Twitter app], and a particular point of pride for Kessler is his claim to have written the first review of TweetDeck, even though the review was never published. "Some say I tweet too much," he writes in his review of the Twitter app.14 A curious feature of Kessler's reviews is that they are almost always favorable towards the products and restaurants under review. Perhaps negative reviews would risk the loss of followers. Kessler also seems reticent to post about politics or other controversial topics.15
Kessler's interactions with others on social media demonstrate a seemingly earnest attempt to find and to foster AMBIENT INTIMACY online. Coined by Leisa Reichelt in 2007 specifically to describe the experience of using Twitter, ambient intimacy is about being "able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn't usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible."16 Fitterman's most recent book No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself explores the dark side of ambient intimacy by appropriating online expressions of loneliness and despair. A few quotes suffice to reveal social media's paradoxically anti-social effects:
...I'm pretty sure that a lot
of loneliness today is a result of
Modern technology. 17
In the modern world, where
technology connects us to people we will never meet,
Who may not even exist, it's easy to feel alone. (46)
All these methods of communication and yet
nobody's communicating with me. (49)
If Ben Kessler feels such isolation, there is no indication in his posts. Unlike Now We Are Friends, No, Wait is culled from anonymous sources.
Now We Are Friends forces us to rethink the nature of friendship in an era where it has become common "TO FRIEND" [as a transitive verb] those we barely know. The book is structured like an onion, or like Circles on Google Plus, moving outward from Ben to "Other Ben Kesslers" to "Ben's Friends" and then to "Ben's Friends' Friends." One of Ben's friends, Rich Sedmak, even opines that "Facebook is...a graph of people you know, whereas Twitter is a group of people you know and people you wish you knew..."18 What is the nature of the friendship between Kessler and Sedmak? Who friended whom? Does social media strengthen or dilute friendships? In the aggregate, the posts of Kessler and friends would seem to reveal friendship networks that are primarily based on shared tastes. There never seems to be any friction or disagreement between Kessler and his friends.
Kessler could be said to be performing AFFECTIVE LABOR on behalf not only of Philadelphia-area sandwich shops, but also on behalf of private data monopolies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Google.19 In the terms of Kessler's friend Rich Sedmak, "Facebook's underlying assumption is that social proof (items that your friends have 'liked' or purchased) will make you more likely to purchase a particular item."20 Kessler seems to assume that posting his tastes will allow him to share in the symbolic world of ambient intimacy as well as, in some cases, to share in literal returns generated by his personal preferences. Kessler lays bare the precarious economics of such arrangements:
Disclosure: the iTunes links are affiliate links, and I will receive 5% of the sale price if you buy an album from Preview.fm. So buy a $9.99 album and I'll get 50 glorious cents. Buy 20 of them and I can buy my own album! It's like those terrible "Get 10 CDs free!" music clubs from middle school, but only in reverse. (Some of my 10 free CDs in middle school: Trio, White Town, Erasure. Remember any of yours?) (29)
Kessler moves seamlessly back and forth between self-deprecation and nostalgia, once again operating as a taste aggregator. He is, in effect, providing the "social proof" described by Sedmark, as an unpaid (or poorly paid) reviewer of anything and everything. Kessler himself seems to be aware of the futility and circularity of his tastemaking. The final quote of the first section of the book offers the following ironic wisdom: "I don't want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers. I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever" (39). Seemingly, by collaging and reframing Kessler's words, Fitterman has provided Kessler with unsolicited "editorial oversight."
Perhaps we are "a nation of bloggers," although blogs maintained by individuals have already waned in popularity.21 Given Twitter's growing political and cultural influence, we are at the very least increasingly a nation of microbloggers, continually sharing tastes, aspirations and feelings one unique user-generated tweet at a time. Whether social media users are oversharing or underediting may largely be a matter of perspective: Are we now friends? Or are we merely followers?
Paul Stephens is the author of The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). He edits the journal Convolution and lives in New York City.
- Vito Acconci, "Following Piece" (Mixed-media installation, 1970). Sophie Calle, The Address Book, trans. Pauline Baggio (Los Angeles: Siglio Press, 2012).[⤒]
- Robert Fitterman, Now We Are Friends (New York: Truck Books, 2011), 17.[⤒]
- Alice Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (New Haven: Yale UP, 2013), 114.[⤒]
- For more on transmedia storytelling see Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2006). My use of transmedia in this context is also influenced by Darren Wershler's article "Conceptual Writing as Fanfic," in Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, ed. Anne Jamison (Dallas: Smartpop Books, 2013) 363-371.[⤒]
- Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 45. As W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen note, this definition is "itself, fundamentally, a remediation of McLuhan" and his claim that "the 'content' of any medium is always another medium." Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010), xiv.[⤒]
- The YOLO Pages (Brunswick, ME: Boost House, 2014), an anthology of new poetry, draws extensively on screen shots of Twitter and Facebook.[⤒]
- For more, see "Social Network Sites" in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, eds. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014): 455-462.[⤒]
- Qtd. in David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 199.[⤒]
- Under pressure from lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who use pseudonyms, Facebook has recently relaxed its policies on real names. See Vindu Goel, "Facebook to Ease Policies on Using Real Names for Accounts." New York Times, October 1, 2014, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/facebook-agrees-to-ease-rules-on-real-names/[⤒]
- Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2011), 177.[⤒]
- Now We Are Friends 24.[⤒]
- Kim Knight, "Race and Ethnicity." The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, eds. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014): 413-417, 414. See also Lisa Nakamura, "Race in/for Cyberspace," in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 2000): 712-720.[⤒]
- Derek Beaulieu, "An Endless Polyglot Failure Party: A Review of Rob Fitterman's Now We Are Friends." Jacket2. June 26, 2012, http://jacket2.org/reviews/endless-polyglot-failure-party[⤒]
- Now We Are Friends 37.[⤒]
- According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, social media tends not to "provide new forums for those who might otherwise remain silent to express their opinions and debate issues." See Maria Dwyer et al., "Social Media and the 'Spiral of Silence.'" Accessed September 20, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/26/social-media-and-the-spiral-of-silence
Leisa Reichelt, "Ambient Intimacy." Accessed November 24, 2014[⤒]
- Leisa Reichelt, "Ambient Intimacy." Accessed November 24, 2014, http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/)) Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together, has argued that although social media and ubiquitous computing allow us to be in constant contact with more people than ever before, they also foster anxiety and isolation.((Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Book, 2011). [⤒]
- Robert Fitterman, No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), 20.[⤒]
- Now We Are Friends 57.[⤒]
- For more on affective labor, see Michael Hardt, "Affective Labor." boundary 2 26.2 (Summer 1999): 89-100, and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke UP, 2011). See also especially Marwick 194-207.[⤒]
- Now We Are Friends 56.[⤒]
- According to The Pew Research Center, blogging has declined in recent years, particularly among younger Internet users. See Kathryn Zickhur, "Generations 2010," accessed November 24, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP_Generations_and_Tech10.pdf. See also Verne G. Kopytoff, "Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter," New York Times, February 20, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/technology/internet/21blog.html. In his 2011 "Death of a Kingmaker: A Critical Evaluation of Silliman's Blog," Kenneth Goldsmith offers a hostile account of Ron Silliman's blog, and gestures toward the obsolescence of the blog format. Accessed November 24, 2014, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/death-of-a-kingmaker/[⤒]