Ongoing audience surveillance generates anxiety in online performers

Evidence

Several informants confessed that negative comments or e-mail “flames” from audience members had upset them or even made them cry. Even people who claimed that negative comments didn’t affect them had developed coping mechanisms. Adam Jackson said: “I announced after that I’m going to start tagging negative comments and I’m going to turn it into a blog one day. So I did a hash tag, ‘#Dick.’ So from now on, when I get just a really asinine comment I’ll re-tweet it and hash tag it ‘#Dick.’ So now when someone says, ‘why are you so bitter over Twitter?’ I’ll just send them that to that hash tag and they can see all of that negative crap I get.” Ariel Waldman turned to her friends who had gone through similar things to ask for help. … People also found ongoing self-surveillance to be anxiety provoking, because they were engaged in a continuous loop of measuring themselves against an audience. As Glenda Bautista said, “A lot of my own anxieties have been developed by online judgments.” — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 511

Categorization

• CANDY: Adam Jackson’s ‘#Dick’ hashtag for trolling negative comments is a light, fun micro-anecdote about a creative coping mechanism.
• SEED: Could seed an essay on how creators routinize and gamify online harassment into brand-adjacent content (‘turning hate comments into memes’) as a coping strategy.
• XREF: connects to: Living publicly online normalizes constant scrutiny of one’s actions — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 382; People now self-censor offline behavior out of fear of online audiences — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1505; Relentless negative online attention can be psychologically debilitating for micro-celebrities — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 395 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Relentless negative online attention can be psychologically debilitating for micro-celebrities #corroborates (0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 395
• People now self-censor offline behavior out of fear of online audiences #complicates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1505
• Uncertainty about being watched suffices to make surveillance effective #expands (0.72) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 303