A sex columnist and a children’s book writer went out on a first date. The conversation flowed, the chemistry was palpable…but ultimately the children’s book writer decided there couldn’t be a second date. He was afraid his dating a sex columnist wouldn’t work for his career. True story.
I thought of this story again when I read Penelope Trunk’s recent post about being honest about who you are at work, in the context of Jason Collins’ coming out story in Sports Illustrated: “The more you hide, the harder it is to find a job that’s right for you.”
I think a lot about the post I wrote about the distinctions of public, personal, and private, especially when I’m talking to people about social media strategy. Because in order to be genuine, in order to connect with people in a deeper way, it’s often necessary to share some of the personal. But figuring out what’s personal and what’s private isn’t easy. And when the career you love and your private life (or alternate for-money career, as is the case for many artists) don’t quite mesh together, it’s hard to reconcile. Hence the children’s book writer making the tough decision not to date a woman in whom he was interested in order to avoid a later dilemma.
Our society is in the middle of a shift involving the availability of information and the level of connectedness between us. I met a book editor last month who complained about how often his writer Facebook friends posted about their politics and how much this bothered him. A decade ago, this wasn’t an issue. It’s so much easier to avoid talking much politics when you’re going out for drinks with your editor than it is to avoid posting about anything remotely politically every day. And even if you talked about politics over those drinks, that conversation has a different contextual place for both you and the editor than it does in a social media feed.
So we find ourselves wrestling with two related problems: having less control overall over the information the world can access about us, and having more of a platform from which to release our own information about ourselves, which means we have to decide what to say (and what not to say). In addition, we have to deal with the implications of all this information floating around (or the potential of it to be released) to our careers, to our loved ones, to our complicated social landscapes, and in terms of ethics.
These issues are exacerbated for artists because of our society’s collective difficulty in considering works of art as something apart from their creators. This is when we begin to see parents objecting to a children’s book because its author is not seen to be of sufficient moral character. I also know people who don’t want to go see the Ender’s Game movie this fall not because they object to any of the material they think they’ll see but because they don’t want to give money to Orson Scott Card. Certainly as content consumers we have every right to decide what art we will and won’t consume, but it is interesting watching the trends towards making that decision based on the creator instead of the work. Why is this change taking place? Because more information about these artists is generally available (both from themselves and from outside sources).
As privacy becomes less possible and we have less control over accessible personal information, it will become increasingly important to use our platforms to tell our own stories about ourselves. As Justine Musk says, “If you don’t tell your story, someone else tells it for you.”
It is going to become harder and harder to hide. Sometimes we might be able to make decisions like that children’s book writer and keep things simpler for ourselves. But other times, what’s at stake will be too important. And perhaps it’s at that point when having the platform and ability to communicate in your own way becomes the most important.
The Practical Free Spirit 
So many things from this post Amy! First, I admire the guy who thought long and hard before jumping into a relationship. That takes some foresight. It probably also takes some sort of clear understanding of their “brand”.
In connection with Flox’s post, I remember thinking that the argument about keeping the author of anything for children as pure as possible as only applying to America (maybe England as well). Just Google “Xuxa” and see the difference. the same across all Latin countries. So there is less of this Puritanical separation in other places. But…here we are – so no point in pretending we are somewhere else.
I love your threefold distinction between public/personal/private but the difficulty is that it is very very blurry what falls in each. Most of the times we do not know, and only categorize them after the fact…(danah boyd did a great post on it just recently: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/05/05/digital-labor.html)
So perhaps the best we can do is to be vigilant and diligent in protecting the platforms by which we tell our stories – i.e. govt. censorship or govt. intrusion – to ensure a chance at a fair hearing?
Oh yes, I agree that in an age of ever decreasing privacy, it is extremely important to maintain and ease access to communication networks for everyone. At least that way there is some kind of balance.
I think a lot about how to identify the three kinds of information, but the first barrier I always run into is that the edges of each will be different for everybody. Some people feel perfectly fine sharing every single detail of their lives, while other people don’t. Some people are okay arguing about politics, while other people don’t like to do so. Etc. etc. As a personal blogger, I try my best to identify BEFORE the fact, but of course there’s only so much I can do.
it IS hard to distinguish public/personal/private & even harder to imagine where our info might end up
I assume my information could end up anywhere. Better to be pleasantly surprised. 🙂
I love love LOVE how much control we all have in getting ourselves out there, and how we can own it – we’re not longer limited by agents or press junkets or media interviews. I love also that I can read Neil Gaiman’s twitter feed or Joe Haldeman’s diary and get a sense of who they are beyond their books. So much of what we know about authors of the past come from a few second-hand stories or an imagining of them via their fiction. A nice look, but there’s so much more to be had reading their own words outside the craft.
There is a lot to be said about dividing the private from the personal, but I love that it’s my choice (or an author’s choice) now instead of anyone else’s.
I enjoy the more direct access as well, and my ability to exercise choice as to which content creators I engage with on more levels and which ones I don’t. One thing I love about Kickstarter is the extremely chatty style of many of the updates that gives me a closer look at the process.
I also think that works of art can be read both in context to the outer world (the author’s life, works, and views, the time period and its anxieties, mores, and culture, contemporary authors, etc.) and standing alone as a separate thing.
This is something I’ve thought about a bit as well. If YA authors need to have clean public personas, then I’m a bit screwed. But I comfort myself by thinking of Cat Valente. Her Fairyland books are best-selling middle-grade novels and I feel like I’ve learned tons of stuff about her, from her livejournal, that parents would not find appropriate for the author of books for their eleven-year-olds.
Yeah, she’s a good example of someone who is very authentic online in an adult way. The main audience of her blog is not children, but rather the adults for whom she wrote fiction first. Obviously this is only one example, but I do wonder if it means a lot of writer anxiety around issues like this is unnecessary, and that ultimately not enough readers will care to make a difference to reader base and sales.
I think it’s more that _if_ it becomes a thing, then it’ll become a BIG thing. Like an op-ed-in-the-newspaper, boycott-this-author, brick-in-your-window sort of thing. You can never tell what little thing is going to catch the public’s attention…