rachelhills.net

Published in The Walkley Magazine, August/September 2008. Copyright Rachel Hills 2008.

As I write this, certain corners of the internet are abuzz with talk of 27-year-old New York dating columnist, blogger and self-confessed “publicity whore”, Julia Allison.

Ostensibly, Allison is a journalist: she’s written for high profile magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health and, until recently, was employed by celebrity gossip magazine Star as a television talking head. Today is a big one in her career — she’s just launched her new web venture, NonSociety.com, and landed on the cover of tech magazine Wired in one fell swoop.

But buzz-wise, it’s an anomaly. Most of the time, it’s not Allison’s work that attracts eyeballs — it’s Julia Allison, the person and brand. There was the tutu constructed from condoms she wore to an industry Halloween party, and the college relationship with a member of congress. Then there was the MacBook Air her web entrepreneur former boyfriend Jakob Lodwick failed to deliver when their relationship ended shortly before Christmas last year.

How, you might wonder, do I know all this? Allison is what’s known as an “oversharer” — a person whose stock in trade is Too Much Information. Visit her blog (julia.nonsociety.com) and you’ll find her thoughts on sex (she’s “as sexually repressed as [Sex and The City’s] Charlotte York”), her parents’ attitudes towards her self-promotion (they‘re not happy about it), and image after image of Allison at parties, in her apartment, or hanging out with her best friends Meghan and Mary, also bloggers.

If that’s not enough to satiate your interest, you can visit her Twitter (www.twitter.com/juliaallison), for regular, short-form updates on her day. At Flickr (www.flickr.com/photos/juliaallison/), you’ll find model-style photos, alongside casual snapshots. On Vimeo (www.vimeo.com/juliaallison), the site founded by Lodwick, it’s “lip dubs”, choreographed videos of Allison and her friends lip-synching to their favourite songs.

Why does she do it? Partly, it’s for the eyeballs, yes (“attention is my drug,” she allegedly told former Gawker blogger and fellow oversharer Emily Gould), but mostly, Allison claims it’s for her work. “I looked around, and I saw that the people who were getting assignments and getting paid really nicely for it were names,” she told the New York Observer last year. “Ultimately, you’re replaceable if you’re not a brand.” More recently, in the aftermath of the Wired cover, Allison published on her blog an email to the magazine’s editor, Chris Anderson, stating that: “the true goal [of her self-promotion] was never ‘fame’ at all. I wanted two things: 1) editors to publish my work, 2) people to read [it].”

Her means of achieving this are multi-media (“there is no such thing as existing in too many places on the Internet,” she advised in a recent Time Out New York article) and strategic: she told Wired that she thinks of herself as “the subject of a magazine profile, with every blog post or Twitter update adding dimension to her as a character.”

Perhaps the height (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) of Allison’s oversharing came in the final months of 2007, when she and then boyfriend Jakob Lodwick launched a shared website writing about their relationship: JakobandJulia.com. The concept sounds cheesy, but in practice, the real source of embarrassment was not the cheddar (of which there was little), but the vulnerability to which it condemned Allison and Lodwick.

Although Allison’s recent writing might suggest otherwise (“keep the story going through continual stunts,” she advises in the Time Out article), at the time, she insisted that the pair had created the site in the name of transparency. Of course they valued privacy, she said — it’s just that they valued openness more.

And for a while, as their relationship flourished and their fame grew, it looked as if they might be right. Maybe the fears that most of us continue to hold about putting our lives online were unfounded. Perhaps online success — and success generally — lay instead in the Jakob-and-Julia formula of hyper-transparency.

But the honeymoon didn’t last. By December, both the relationship and the website were finished. In January, Allison agreed to participate in a live chat with the readers of US media gossip blog Gawker, which ended badly when she revealed details of Lodwick‘s mental health history. When an email Allison sent Lodwick asking if he would buy the MacBook Air he’d promised for Christmas — pre-break-up — for her birthday instead was leaked in March, the Gawker commenters pounced, and Allison retreated (briefly) from her blog in shame.

Tired of anonymous people on the internet calling him a “douche bag”, Lodwick too dropped out of the social media scene in June (to date, he has not returned). Transparency, it seems, is only worth pursuing until it bites you on the arse.

It’s easy to stick your nose up at Allison and Lodwick — or at Allison’s sometime friend Emily Gould, who parlayed her own tendency to overshare into a New York Times Magazine cover story and lucrative book deal — but to some degree, they just embodiments of issues that increasingly we all face, with few more mistakes or complexities than anyone else. They’re just doing it more publicly, and on a bigger scale than most of us.

Until recently, only those who worked in the public sphere — politicians, celebrities, artists, journalists — had to regularly make decisions about which information was and was not appropriate to share with the world. But digital media has ripped the public sphere open, allowing anyone with the inclination (and an internet connection) to participate.

And because the internet has become so much a part of daily life for teens and twenty-somethings in particular, it’s easy to forget how public communication that takes place online really is: that anything we write about another person will likely be read by that person — with consequences for them and for us, that what we reveal about our own lives may implicate others and, most importantly, that we can’t know or control who views what we put out there — or what they do with it.

These issues are infiltrating popular culture in new and sophisticated ways. In quarterlife, an online TV show about a group of arty friends in their mid-twenties, lead character Dylan’s musings about flatmate Lisa in her video blog is a key early episode plot point. Gossip Girl’s teenaged characters are under constant surveillance from their peers; their every indiscretion “spotted”, snapped and reported to the mysterious entity the show is named after, who distributes that information back to the peer network instantaneously via their mobile phones and the web.

It goes without saying that most people don’t have amateur paparazzi in their social circles, poised to snap them unawares and upload it to the internet. But you don’t need to dig deep to see the parallels. Even if you, like Lodwick, choose not to have a social media presence, chances are someone will write about you on their blog, or upload party snaps with you in them to Facebook. By opting out, you can limit the information they have to draw upon, but you also lose your own voice in the process.

All this would indicate that the sensible thing to do is to err towards caution, and evidence suggests that — in some respects at least — that’s exactly what young people are doing.

Sure, they may photograph, video and/or write about what seems like their every move, but they also carefully craft what they put online to cultivate an appropriate image for the people viewing — even if it’s not in quite as calculated a manner as Allison (and even if it’s more than most people over the age of 30 would feel comfortable revealing).

This has left some wondering if, just as shows like Big Brother, The Real World and The Hills present their subjects as stock characters rather than fleshed out human beings, young people are beginning of view themselves in the same way. Branding, after all, is a term usually associated with products, not people, and the impulse towards celebrity, as musician Kanye West hinted at recently (“You spend half your life trying to become larger than life and the other half trying to just live a real life again”), is at least partly about escaping one’s humanity.

Such concerns are valid, but for the most part they’re not particularly new. Young people trying to figure out their identities have long been attracted to stereotypes like the athlete, the popular girl, the stoner and so on, even as they’ve rebelled against them. Equally importantly, they neglect to realise that just as no one expects Kanye West the celebrity to exactly mirror the Kanye West his mother knows, nor should we expect a MySpace profile that can be accessed by several hundred people (or more) to offer the same experience of a person as actually spending time with them.

Which isn’t to dismiss social networking as useless or inauthentic: the benefits of cultivating the kind of network a Facebook profile or blog provides, go beyond illusions of celebrity (and very few of those who do use them to cultivate their own celebrity succeed). And to access them, it pays to let go of the carefully managed digital footprint a little.

Used judiciously, websites like Facebook or MySpace can be a great way to get to know professional contacts as whole people, in a casual, low-pressure setting; blogging can connect you to like minds the world over. It’s true that few people would feel comfortable calling every one of their Facebook friends in a crisis, but there’s a lot to be said for strengthening our looser ties, and online — just like offline — exchanging information is the means by which we develop trust and intimacy.

For media professionals, perhaps this is where the lesson lies. There is a growing subset of people who want to feel as if they “know” the people they’re sourcing their information from, beyond seeing their face on the television every night or even having the option to call them at the radio station: it’s a large part of the appeal of people not just like Julia Allison, but like The Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas, Lavartus Prodeo’s Mark Bahnisch, Feministing’s Jessica Valenti or Reasons You Will Hate Me’s Marieke Hardy, all of whom have used the platform of their blogs to make an impact on the mainstream media.

But while the desire to connect is growing, the challenge is not particularly new: how to harness this personal energy and appeal without making the story all about the person telling it. And that’s a challenge that doesn’t just apply to new media.