On Why "Awkward" Has It Wrong

I have a dirty little secret.  I watch MTV.  Specifically, I watch Girl Code and Awkward.  That's right: my media consumption is not limited to BBC News, CNN, the NY Times and Wall Street Journal, HBO, and the internet.  Shocking, I know.  MTV's Awkward endeavors to present the life of a socially-awkward American blogger in high school.

But MTV has it wrong.  Not that this really surprises me, since MTV also gets Skins, the people who go "down the shore," and a lot of other things wrong.  But as much as I love Awkward, it is in no way because it accurately portrays the life of a blogger.

The show treats blogging like a tell-all confessional diary on the internet.  And for some bloggers, this is probably the case -- especially if those bloggers are, say, 13, which I assume is the market MTV is shooting for with this show.  But for most bloggers late into high school and into college, the posts are typically less about which boy is fighting for your attention and more about how you see the world.

Do I post life updates on my blog?  Absolutely.  Because they help contextualize the things I have to say, and also because they make for useful excuses when I've been bad about regularly updating, not because I fool myself into thinking my readers actually care about my exam schedule.

People still keep diaries, and some people are silly enough to make their deepest, darkest secrets open to the internet viewing public.  But that's not what most awkward teenage/twenty-something bloggers are doing with their blogs.  They're trying to change minds, spread awareness of issues, comment on social change and new media, not complain about the fact that their ex and their current boyfriend are fighting over them.

Also, that's not even awkward.  But it does make for interesting television.

The fact remains, though, that when this is how bloggers are represented in traditional media (kind of like how the movie Hackers presents hackers, which is not at all like what hacking actually is or what hacktivists do), it delegitimizes the medium.  Most bloggers see themselves as the voices of new media, their work taking the place of traditional Op-Eds in a world where print media is dying out.  Positing the work of bloggers through the lens of a girl who uses the internet to work out her petty relationship problems takes away from the legitimacy of bloggers, teenage girls, and the internet generation.

Don't get me wrong, though -- I would pay good money for Tamara's wardrobe and vocabulary, and Jenna Hamilton's life is ceaselessly amusing.  Just don't confuse what she does with what most bloggers are trying to do.

Unapologetically yours,
Rachel Leigh

On Perspective 2 (or Fighting Real Problems Instead of Making Up New Ones)

This post might very well lose me friends.  But I just calls 'em like I sees 'em, and this isn't something I take lightly.

I have never backed down from the idea that I am a feminist -- I'm kind of one of those people of the belief that if you or someone you care about identifies as a woman, than you have no right or sense to not support things that would help make the lives of women everywhere better.

But maybe I haven't been clear on my views towards those people who calls themselves activists who are, in reality, looking for something to complain about.  I came across this tumblog that literally blasted everything from meat eaters to a child abuse awareness campaign.  The campaign in question won the Gold Lion award at Cannes and depicts the cycle of child abuse, showing each child being abused and eventually growing into their abuser.  Actually, you can see them here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/powerful-child-abuse-ads.  And why was she targeting this campaign?  Because the verbal abuse image depicts a woman yelling at her children.

She said the campaign disgusted her -- not the acts portrayed as a part of it -- but the fact that it only depicted a woman yelling, which she thought fueled the "nagging" stereotypes about women.  Statistically, it might have made sense to make the abusers in all three images men (each image represented a form of domestic abuse -- sexual, physical, and verbal) because an overwhelming percentage of abuse is male-dominated, but doing so would have been unfair to both men and women because, due to the structure of the campaign, it would eliminate the possibility of women as perpetrators or victims, and they do, in fact, fill both roles, more often than we'd like to believe.  And, unfortunately, women are far more likely to perpetrate verbal abuse than any other kind of domestic abuse -- and would it really have been better for the global image of women to have the only woman in the campaign be a sexual predator or a violent monster?  Or simply to put a woman as a passive victim?

This is just one case, among many, I'm afraid, where people get so caught up in the politics of activism that they forget what's actually important.  This campaign should disgust you, but not for it's content.  What it depicts, and the fact that child abuse is still a prevalent issue in America, one that's still not talked about because it's taboo, which creates a self-perpetuating cycle of violence as children who feel mistreated grow up to mistreat others.  Your need to be confrontational, to take an issue with everyone just so you have something to say -- has made you blind to the real issue, which makes you unable to do anything to stop it.

So until you start complaining about the real issues and stop letting the small details distract you from the problem at hand, I am still going to take issue with the way you handle things like this.  Your loss of perspective is terrifying.

(infinitesimally) yours,
Rachel Leigh

100!

Darlings, I do believe I promised you a 100th post extravaganza!

Well...I don't really have anything extravaganza-worthy to say.

So, we got our crack team of graphic designers to whip up a celebratory graphic for the occasion.

I'm thinking maybe we should fire our so-called "crack team of graphic designers."  That is an infuriating gif.  Off with their heads!

I came up with an awesome idea for a post today at work, and then I totally forgot to write it down and now I have no idea what I had intended to say in the first place.

Anyway, I never thought, two and a half years ago, that I would still be blogging today, let alone at the 100 post mark (and most of them actually quality posts and not just crap!  I know, I'm just as surprised as you are!)

Here's to many more years and many more posts to come.

Here's a better gif for you.

Yours, most sincerely and forever,
Rachel Leigh

On Words and Unfinished Projects

So a few months ago, I began a post that I never published.

It started a little something like this:

This topic leaves little room to snark, but I was thinking the other day and I got curious, started exploring this grand little series of tubes we call the internet, and found something.

It all began in class the other day:

The title of this post was "On Linguistic Universals" and what I had intended it to be about was the way certain words are nearly universal cognates. I had been thinking about "mom" and how nearly every language's word for mother, or at least its shortened version, is incredibly similar. Mom, ma, mama, mami, mutter, madre...

I started talking to my professor about it, and he mentioned that there's a very similar trend with pa/fa in reference to fathers in other languages. He also pointed out that these universal words are part of the proof generally used to support to idea of a universal grammar.

But the discussion of this idea is less important to this post than why that post never got published. I had been initially fascinated by the topic, but in trying to research my post, I ended up losing steam and so this idea for a post simply sat in limbo for months.

I am disappointed to say that I may never finish that post, but it lends itself to a problem I have always had with this blog. I often come up with an idea for a post and then abandon it before it reaches full development.

Hopefully, at some point, I will be able to go back and flesh out several of my aborted posts in the future, because some of them were actually pretty decent ideas that might help to legitimize my blogging a bit more.

Until then, though, I'll be stuck writing posts explaining why I don't write better posts.

That's kinda metablog-y.

Loving you,
Rachel Leigh

On Metablogging (Again)/On Elitists

People who complain about facebook on facebook irritate me. If it really annoys you that people post about their lives on facebook, then what possibly justifies your posting to complain about it? I recognize that you might find the constant status updates annoying. You might be annoyed that I posted a facebook event to try and convince people to come play in the rain with me. You might find it all a bit trite and obnoxious. I respect that.

But if you are annoyed that people post their every thought on the internet and on facebook for you to read, then do not complain about it by posting on the internet for every person you know to read. That makes you look like an elitist, a hypocrite, and just straight up like a bitch. We give as little of a crap about your not giving a crap as you do about the things you're complaining about. I get it. You don't care about my life. So delete your facebook or remove me as a friend so you don't have to read about it. That is of no concern to me. But do not bitch to the world at large about the fact that you don't like to read the bitchings of everyone around you. We are as entitled to post on the internet as you are.

You don't understand why the internet has become a vehicle for everyone to talk about their lives and get attention for it? Aren't you inherently using the internet as a vehicle to get attention for YOUR life and for your elitist viewpoint? Screw you and everyone like you. You are the reason people hate hipsters.

Fuming,
Rachel Leigh

Metablogging

This is what I shall call "metablogging." It consists of any time that I blog about blogging.

I find it really funny, blogging. Just the word is funny. But more than that, I think the concept is funny. The fact that thousands of people around the planet convince themselves that enough people are interested in hearing their opinions that they end up posting their innermost thoughts and feelings on the internet. It's really quite funny.

Unless you're a celebrity or the things you say are particularly insightful, the rest of the world probably doesn't care about what you did today, or your reflections about a cup of coffee.

Of course, I lump myself in with this sillyness. I, of course, post every day and frequently wonder what people think of the things I'm saying. The fact of the matter, though, is that most of the world really just doesn't care that much. Sure, a few of my close friends will probably read this when I post a link to the latest entry on facebook, and maybe it will come up if colleges or future employers decide to Google me as the internet safety lectures try and convince me will happen. But aside from that, the likelihood that this blog will be noticed by anyone, and therefore be read by anyone, is fairly small.

So I shall continue my blogging and my metablogging, but really...why?

Meta-love,
Rachel Leigh