The personal essay boom was driven by page-view monetization and journalist downsizing

Evidence

Social media platforms impart the habitus of voice-honing and property-maintaining, a literary weigh station between micro-memoir and book contract, which sanctifies itself in the skyrocketing mode of the personal essay. Enthusing social media as feminist immediacy, the writer Natalie Beach articulates this destination: social profiles are “busting open the form of non-fiction. Instagram is memoir in real time. It’s memoir without the act of remembering. It’s collapsing the distance between writer and reader and critic, which is why it’s true feminist storytelling.” Beach’s little turn of immediacy theory (form-busting, real-time, distance-collapsing) comes in a personal essay—a genre of writing with a very long history, and a specifically mass media history since the turn of the twentieth century, that has nonetheless developed differently in the twenty-first, thanks to a convergence of social media apps and publishing industry down-sizing. New Yorker staff writer and editor Jia Tolentino refers to a “personal essay boom” she sources to 2008, offering an economic analysis: where blogs of the early new millennium had habituated people to unpaid content generating of personal documentary, new forms of page-view monetizing arose before and during the Great Recession, at the same time that journalists and professionally compensated columnists were downsized. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 162

Categorization

• XREF: This economic explanation of immediacy as compressed capital circulation time directly manifests Jameson’s late-capitalism cultural logic thesis — useful for judging Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson.