“You don’t have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won’t hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.” ~ Elizabeth Bibesco
It’s not as though bad journalism is surprising enough to raise an eyebrow toward these days, but there are times when certain articles drive a spike into the limits of patience and good taste. As such, the piece “America’s Tweethearts” by Vanessa Grigoriadis (contributing editor of Vanity Fair) managed to offend me on so many levels that I actually had to blog about it, even after a good night’s sleep.
I became aware of the article via Felicia Day’s twitter feed (I follow Felicia for a few reasons, mostly involving her creative enterprises). In the process of rushing out the door, FD took a passing glance at the article she’d been asked to participate in and made the sort of mistake many of us would be guilty of — she saw she was in focus and photographed well amongst her peers and assumed the content below the photo was equal in sophistication. She then tweeted a link and went about the day. It was some time later when she found out how painfully egregious the article was and managed to sum up her own feelings in a blog post.
Her dismay is understandable; Grigoriadis’ article manages to offend on so many levels. For myself, I find it ridiculously offensive across the board: as a modern feminist, an internet-age geek, a writer, and a person who uses interactive social media. In short, there is so much to loathe about the piece, it’s hard to know what to start with. I suppose we’ll just go down the list.
Backbiting masqueraded as intellectualism and feminism.
If you looked at Grigoriadis’ profile page on vanityfair.com, you’d conclude that she was a young woman with some understanding of how traits like appearance and attitude can contribute toward being successful. You might, for example, note that she doesn’t have any problem wearing a light blouse that takes a naughty v dip down into the cleavage area. Her long hair is nicely styled, her face punctuated by a decent (if heavy-on-the-blush) make-up job. The photo she chooses to place beside her list of credentials would indicate that she knows a nuanced acceptance of how attractiveness and sexuality can lend an edge in competitive media. You wouldn’t expect her to have that sort of photo and then paint other women as lipstick feminists. Because that would make her, you know, a hypocrite (and how can anyone with those apple cheeks be a hypocrite?).
Yet, in the article Grigoriadis takes so many pot shots at the attractiveness and gregariousness of her subjects that it comes off with robust pettiness. Let’s look at the most glaring quote from the article in this voice:
It so happens that they are nice girls—the Internet’s equivalent of a telephone chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders—and it’s all free. Any tweep who wants to talk to them will likely get a reply to his tweets (“u r so funny!”).
Setting aside the fact that I personally don’t see anything wrong with a chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders, likening successful, established, technology-pioneering young women to such stereotype is deeply disingenuous. The language here is sinister and icky both above and below the surface. The use of “girls” to set tone, the anything but subtle use of chatspeak to imply a lack of intelligence, the use of creep “tweep” and “his tweets” to characterize the only people being interacted with as trolling male leisure suit larrys trying to get their tweet on with these oh-so-accommodating “girls.” It’s all a fluffy way of saying “whore.” Apparently, this is because the women in question are polite, engaging, interactive, attractive and nice. It makes you wonder which of those qualities could trigger such insecurity in the writer. You can also bet your bobby socks that had the profiled women been less than attractive that would have been held against them as well.
It’s not at though women backstabbing other women is a new concept, and it’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen this inflated sense of “I’m more feminist than you because you’re pretty and nice” in the wielding of the knife. What is confusing about this example is that if the writer is going to call another woman (or group of women) tarty, you’d think she’d have the brain cells to replace her own tarty profile photo with something that would lend her something touching credibility. It’s difficult to take her seriously about these so-called extroverted twitterers being bubble-headed “cheerleaders” simply because they’re nice and pretty when the author herself is practically wagging her own pom poms in her own photo. I mean, honestly, if you’re going to be a superior bitch on the feminist ladder, then be a bitch with some consistency. Otherwise you risk looking like an opportunistic whore trying to score some cheap readership points by taking pot shots at other women. Oh. Wait.
Interwebs people are stupid and will ruin your relationships and infect you, even though they’re not real.
The fear of social media demonstrated in this article makes you want to hand Grigoriasdis a rape doll and ask her to show you where the mean technology touched her. Her tone takes on an edge of ludditism that could only be reserved for someone writing to please those terrified by the imminent death of traditional media like *cough* print magazines *cough*. What 1950′s health video cliches does Grigoriasdis fall back on for her article?
A. The internets will make you stupid. Sure we all cringe a little at chatspeak, but she uses more of it in her article than I can recall seeing in any of my twitterfeeds over the last several months. The implication, of course, is that we internet peoples aren’t so good with that English-speakin’ stuff (including those of us who majored in it, one presumes). I’d love to put Grigoriadis in a room with a someone like Stephen Fry and ask her to defend the attitude that Twitter is comprised of “…a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver” which she later likens to the language skills of Laguna High freshmen. The notion that otherwise literate people might simply take easy or innovative shortcuts to accommodate the limits of a new fast-paced medium completely eludes her. One has to wonder if Grigoriasdis has ever had to use a post-it note and if she adheres to perfect Blue Book grammar and punctuation when doing so. Of course, the fear of Twitter is completely justified and something to fear because as we all know, internet technology is going to render us all illegitimate illiterate and eat up all the books until the only thing left of the written word is a handful of Cliff’s Notes and Sarah Palin’s biography. Look, I don’t like the fact that the liner notes to Purple Rain have become a legitimate form of communication either, but unabridged Shakespeare is available freely on the web for those who want to read it. They sky isn’t falling, it’s just easier to reach.
B. Geek is the new gay and the interwebs will turn you interwebish. For this, Grigoriasdis not only falls back on how technology will ruin your relationship:
Real-world friends, and even spouses, can be left in the cold. Michaels’s [sic] husband, a real-estate appraiser with horn-rims and a crew cut—a “normy”—calls himself “the Twidower.” “My wife found Twitter and dropped me,” he says. “I basically lost my wife.” Then he sighs. “Sometimes, during dinner, it gets to be too much.”
Of course the husband was completely serious, I’m sure. Note the use of “he says” instead of “he jokes.” Sometimes leaving out certain things is just as sinister as adding others.
Grigoriasdis also goes that extra step and infers that using Twitter will turn you…Twittery. When describing Julia Roy as “New York social strategist turned twilebrity” the message is clear: you can’t possibly be both popular in a social media platform and accomplished in business. Forget that Joy is currently Senior Manager of New Media at her current employer, she’s popular on Twitter and should be considered infected with something Grigoriasdis would put in quotes and refer to as “twaids” or, maybe, “twyphilis.”
C. Internet people are not real people. Those of us who have been on the web for any length of time are familiar with the soap-opera antics that can happen on the internet (or, at least become the thing of internet urban legend). We all know someone with a story about that girl who turned out to be a guy, or the one who pretended to be dead/raped/robbed/abducted by aliens, or the romance that ended in tragedy when the real-life spouses found out about “cybercheating.” All of these are used as examples of how nothing and no one on the internet can ever be taken as legitimate. Forget the fact that you could point to a million people on Jerry Springer or Judge Judy and simply note that some human beings are prone to bad behavior and drama no matter their location. Anonymity on the internet is different than anonymity at some huge frat party in college or that bar where people stop over when traveling on business. Anonymity on the internet defines the reality of the internet, or, rather, the lack of reality of the internet. Grigoriasdis reminds us of this when she makes sure to note that attention and celebrity gained from social media is not “real fame…but a special, new category of fame” of consequence only to the other 55 million make-believe users who spend their days in a “digital rumpus room.” And, just in case you didn’t understand that, she makes sure to drive the point home two paragraphs later when she explains how “…Twitter uses simple technology, it’s a utilitarian vehicle for ambitious extroverts, without any previous distinction, to become digital superstars.” Those she profiles that had “no previous distinction” include (by her own reporting) a new media actress/writer/director, the aforementioned New York social strategist, a travel writer, a publicist, and a marketing executive whose clients include high profile athletes like Shaquille O’Neal. I guess those careers and accomplishments lack the distinction of being a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and are, thus, disposable footnotes of mere chatline cheerleaders.
Bad Writing
While most of the above examples can be explained away as a writer who is simply content to sell out other women or score some petty points against an emerging medium that obviously intimidates her, the sloppy journalism and bad writing in the article cannot be excused as mere lack of self awareness. If the distinctions on Grigoriasdis’ profile page are to be taken at their word then this was just a lazy effort at a topic she didn’t want to try and communicate with or about.
You cannot ignore how she uses ridiculous jargon placed in quotation marks — reminiscent of the way 90′s local news stations would put “cyber” in front of everything to make it sound gimmicky. To see this kind of tactic still being employed in 2010 would be amusing if Grigoriasdis didn’t take herself so seriously and new media so lightly. The buffoonery ranges from the usual ridiculous terms that no one uses (Twitter users do not call each other “tweeple” because we are not pod people and do not put “tw” before ordinary words in some effort to take over the world with new and improved forms of pig Latin) to phrases that would only require quotation marks if you had no understanding of social media norms (the use of “real-time Web” as though the term were some odd new concept coined just for her little article).
I would have to say, however, that it’s the lack of any hint of consistency that makes this article utter tosh and its author appear intellectually dishonest. On one hand, she acknowledges that Twitter has 55 million users, but then the tone she takes is more like someone skimming the surface of a creepy subculture novelty. She notes her subjects’ impressive careers and then dismisses them in lieu of calling them fake celebrities and likening them to chat line cheerleaders. She lists a handful of distinguished high profile users, but then cannot resist snarking about how most of them likely use ghost-tweeters and proxies (it’s not like any of them would ever use assistants when setting up relations with other varieties of media outlets). She tosses out positives to create the illusion of balance such as the article’s opening line:
Whether you consider Twitter a worldwide experiment in extreme narcissism or a nifty tool for real-time reporting—a plane ditches in the Hudson, millions take to the streets in Tehran—it may not yet have dawned on your text-saturated brain that it’s also a path to becoming famous.
But anyone with even a passing sense of reading comprehension can see where the slant tilts heaviest. Not that you’d expect objective journalism from Vanity Fair, but you like to hope the snark will have some intellectual honesty or even a hint of wit. Instead, we’re simply left to hope that Grigoriadis doesn’t quit her day job.
Oh. Wait.
