Conversation

Just heard the phrase “trauma porn” on a tv show. Tv discourse is less than a year behind Twitter at this point. Show is Shrill, about an overweight magazine writer dealing with online trolls, among other things. Decent. Depictions of Very Online culture are slowly improving.
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Kinda interesting that Very Online world is now default source of Other for TV. 10y ago, bloggers were the bad guys. Now Starting a Blog is how the principled journalist breaks from evil boss, only to get job back. Very Online = underworld you descend to in search of redemption.
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This show is part of a hilarious genre of romantic shows about old media. Ugly Betty, Just Shoot Me. Also Emily in Paris. Often female leads. They’re as far from real old media as real opioid-crisis Trump towns are from Hallmark channel show towns.
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In Emily in Paris, Emily is a sort of bridge between bitchy old traditional French fashion marketer and Instagram influencer. Show frames her as underworld creature deserving of elevation to real world. She’s not like *other* Instagram influencers who are of course all grifters.
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In Contagion, there is a crazy blogger with conspiracy theories set up as the underworld Other to the good CDC people. In Covid we’ve actually seen the real story — Very Online is the source of both the best and worst thinking, while CDC is the somewhat corrupt mediocre.
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But so far I haven’t seen a single TV show where the Very Online world is anything but a dark corrupting underworld, where descending explorers from the Good world must be careful and find ways to stay grounded in “reality” which is the standard of goodness, even if flawed.
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The “tell” of good and bad markers is not Very Online skill but friendship. Even the super hacker or master influencer, if on good side, has all real friends in the form of a meatspace squad they hang with. They are masters of the Very Online world but have no real friends there.
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There is a technical problem of course — depicting Very Online life visually is hard. But even accounting for that, it’s kinda tiresome that almost 30 years after being Very Online became a real thing, it’s still villain-zoned in the old media storytelling imagination.
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If you have more real friends online than offline, you’re basically a villain by default for TV. This is one reason bluechecks are so hated around here. They’re old media types who “descend” to our level, usually bringing hordes of tv-programmed to bits online with them.
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Interestingly the protagonists of such shows are familiar types... the ones who really grind away at grifts in order to land the bluecheck jobs. If we wrote the shows, they’d totally be the villains and the old media orgs the underworld 🤣 Sellouts. Betraying our nice world.
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Memo to TV writers: we’re now the good guys 😇 The longer you ignore this fact, the more out of touch your shows will seem. It’s not “showing tweeting on TV” that’s the problem, it’s the unreconstructed instinct to make us the bad guys.
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1. A meta tv show about fans of a great canceled animated tv show coming together to raise a gofundme and write/produce/act it and make it a big hit.
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2. A discord group discredits a vast trove of really bad irreproducible papers paid for by oil lobby and enabled by an evil journal and a corrupt disciplinary org. Group takes the, down just as they’re about to pass Evil Legislation.
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3. Dark conspiracy shrouds a missing airliner. Subreddit gang wisdom-of-crowds it and uncovers the truth without ever meeting face to face. Heads roll at airline and airplane companies.
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4. Evil blogger invents horrible sort of clickbait tarnishing reputation of an entire lovely blog platform, and rides it to an oped gig at the Mew Bark Times. Platform destroyed in the process. The good people make new platform while evil blogger and MBT get themselves canceled.
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These ideas write themselves... Props to South Park btw. The only show with genuine affection for Very Online culture. Cartmaaaan braaaah.
south park cartman GIF
GIF
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5. Self-aware person in corrupt old meatspace org asks “are we the baddies?” Hijinks ensue as he tries ineptly to learn how to be Very Online, eventually succeeding when a nice group adopts him despite his being cringe.
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