Less skin-smoothing filter, more don't-be-an-a-hole filter

per Holly Math Nerd's request, I've compiled some thoughts on purposefully employing prosocial filters, and how filtering yourself does not equate to censoring yourself or being dishonest

Holly Math Nerd recently wrote about her friend Jim, who is an academic and something of a Twitter phenomenon.¹ She talked about how he’s incorrectly perceived as a person based on his Twitter persona, and she also revisited some of the reasons she quit Twitter several months ago.² (Unrelated to the eye-rolling melodrama surrounding Elon Musk’s takeover.)

Despite being aware of the controversies surrounding James Lindsey’s Twitter behavior, what really interested me was Holly’s connecting the performance of an online persona with the difficulty of integrating yourself into a whole, healthy person.

I commented:

I recently was suggested by the algorithm a video by a family blogger mom of 8: the video was her revealing that social media is a lie and her “loving husband” is actually a piece of shit who has left them high and dry for a third time.

I was a small-time “mommy blogger” in the first wave of that, but I had a lot of trouble accepting turning my life into a brand. That’s not why I started writing and it’s not what I wanted, so I didn’t write consistently online for years. It was hard in real-time to realize that the fairly new social media was doing exactly what you’ve said here, and to pinpoint why I was so unhappy with it.

We DO perform ourselves all the time, even in meatspace, because prosocial filters cause us to censor ourselves, or stop us from reacting impulsively, or prevent us from fighting in the street with every stranger who annoys us. Twitter, from what I can tell (I didn’t last long on Twitter), does just the opposite: for many people it removes the prosocial filters.

Rather than trying to “live authentically” or whatever, I think it’s more useful to understand what filters we’re using (or not using) and why. So much of the meme-ified self-help and social justice advice is also about removing prosocial filters, not “owing anyone” anything, feeling unencumbered by the very prosocial filters that make good relationships, rather than examining those filters and when it’s appropriate or not to use them.

To which Holly kindly replied: “This is very astute -- thank you! If you have any posts about this, please email me a link. I'd like to read more of your thoughts on this.”

Well, I didn’t have anything written. But now I do. Here’s the thoughts!

I’m pro-prosocial filter

If you’re on Instagram or Facebook, and even more so if you’re on those platforms and even marginally plugged in to self-help or social justice accounts, you’ve likely come across plenty of snappy memes about your self-worth and what you don’t owe people.

Some examples I’ve seen:

• I don’t owe you the emotional labor of explaining my position or answering questions.

• I don’t have to reply to texts or voicemails or emails if I don’t want to.

• You can—and should!—cut out of your life people with different politics or opinions on hot button issues, even if those people are family members or close friends, because they are “unsafe.”

• My feelings and perceptions (aka “lived experience”) are sacred and only subject to my own interpretation (no way my feelings or perceptions could possibly be wrong or incomplete!). Anyone disagreeing or questioning you at all is gaslighting.

• I’ve seen screen grabs of professors’ Twitter threads that are filled with melodrama and meanness, followed by people thanking them and offering to pay them via CashApp for their “labor” of “sharing your experience.”

• Journalists following their own flavor of “moral clarity” as expressed through snarky Twitter presences with no feel for nuance or uncomfortable facts, even going on crusades to get colleagues fired who they disagree with or dislike. Also conveniently deleting tweets that inadvertently reveal inconsistency, wrongness, or lies.

• I’ve had an upsetting email exchange with a writer I enjoyed for years who jumped on the radical internet social justice bandwagon.

In short, look anywhere online and you’ll find people advising you to behave and think in ways that are antithetical to what actual, real relationships require: give and take, personal sacrifice and reciprocation, benefit of the doubt and reasonable boundaries. Sure, how you conduct yourself on the internet is an incomplete representation of you. But the internet is here to stay, and we need to learn to cope.

Judicious filtration

This is the life-size model of an actual kidney’s vasculature. This little guy and his buddy filter your entire blood volume 30 or more times every day.

Prosocial filters, when applied properly, don’t mean you’re closed off from other people or unable to be vulnerable. I obviously share a great deal of my thoughts and feelings in my online writing. I don’t have a problem being vulnerable with others at appropriate levels.

That’s one thing the internet has flattened: the perception of a right time and place. There is no news cycle, which is inevitably based on the rhythms of day and night, differentiation between Work Time and Home Time, the capabilities of real humans in real space using real tools of production.

On the internet, it’s always Now.

On the internet, there are no natural or intuitive physically imposed boundaries, or subtle cues of body language, or traditions of manners. I have to create the discipline of time and cycling for myself.

So what I’m sharing are my thoughts and feelings that I’ve already spent time considering, that I likely have already talked about with people I trust.

What I am not sharing: sensitive details about my personal relationships; details and personal information about the people in my life; unformed ideas or opinions that are tied to highly emotional, unresolved issues; strident and uncharitable hot takes.

My ethic of life series is a good example of what I mean. Obviously political questions that intersect with matters of life and death are incredibly personal and charged. I have thought and read an awful lot about these topics before writing about them. Enough that I know why I think and feel the way I do, so when someone disagrees, I can either consider their perspective without feeling shaken OR be comfortable in the understanding that reasonable people can come to different conclusions, and that doesn’t make either conclusion Wrong—or threatening.

An example of a scenario I find potentially damaging (in addition to the one with the mom-of-8-vlogger from the comment above): a famous mommy blogger I followed back in the day actually discussed the particular sexual encounter that led to her accidental pregnancy.³ I recently learned from lovely old-school-style blogger Nicole that this mommy-blogger-turned-Instagram-writer has come out with a memoir about her husband’s sudden death from cancer, which he was diagnosed with two weeks after she asked him for divorce. (“WHAT?! HAL IS DEAD?!!!” I exclaimed to the empty room when I realized who the author was.)

In it she apparently discusses details of her post-widowed dating, talks openly with her children about it, concluding that she’s finally free and not all that sad. Which. Okay. I haven’t read it and I probably won’t—I quit reading her blog more than a decade ago when I started to feel uncomfortable with how much she revealed about her personal life. Considering I, who hasn’t read her work in more than ten years, remembers how her two youngest children were conceived, I can imagine there’s plenty more overshare about her sexual escapades (the book’s subtitle is “a memoir of death and desire”).

Which illustrates my point: these kids have had much of their lives shared on the internet, and now they’ve got a detailed account from their mother about how toxic their father was and she’s not sorry he’s dead.

I, a literal stranger, would recognize them on the street if I saw them. “Hello, tween child. You don’t know me, but I know how and when you were conceived, why your parents chose your name, how your mom felt about your infancy, and that your dad is dead and your mom is glad.”

That seems like more than an overshare. It’s a violation of the boundaries of her kids, as well as a likely hurtful account of a now-dead man’s flaws for his children and family to read, not all that long after his sudden and traumatic passing.

Of course, Roxanne Gay is blurbed on the cover.

How much performance is healthy?

As I said in the comment to Holly, for years this was a thorn in my online writing life that I couldn’t quite identify. As an early-ish blogging adopter, I was doing it before social media became a career for lots of people. I watched as people who wrote in great detail about their homes and families professionalized their blogging, and I wasn’t comfortable doing so myself. I loved and still love writing, especially personal essay, but I didn’t want to commodify my life.

I’m not even deep in the bowels of social media—more of a casual user—and I’ve come across MANY “influencers” who walk back their openness and/or implode in real time, because the performance of self via social media infringes so heavily on their real lives and mental health. A classic case of the observation of something interfering with the natural behavior of that thing. Am I doing this because I want to, or am I doing this for the Instagram post?

An important discipline, I think, is purposefully holding back parts of yourself, rather than inventing a new and overly curated—often untruthful—persona, a doppelganger who could easily be confused for you, but isn’t really. Otherwise, in bearing your whole unfiltered self to the internet, you will be destroyed, or your performance will become so total that there is no you behind the mask. The internet loves a messy queen, but it’s an unhealthy, vampiric love.

I am who I present myself to be on the internet. Though, of necessity, this is only a small part of me. The part of me I deem acceptable and appropriate to share with strangers, in hopes we’ll connect in positive ways. If you met me in real life, my personality would not shock you (though my beauty and grace probably would, hey-o!).

Still, the access to my mind I’ve given you through these thoughts and carefully chosen words cannot tell you what my laugh sounds like, or what makes me laugh and how, or my mannerisms and quirks of expression, or the way my home smells, or how I look when I think. I could try to describe those aspects of me, but the description would be incomplete. You cannot know more of me, the uncurated me, without sharing a physical space with me.

I recently told some friends that I never delete comments, because I never post things I wouldn’t say in real life (not a knock on people who use pseudonyms or who DO delete comments they don’t want available for everyone for all time). For me, this is the discipline of a prosocial filter. My real-life friends and family get to hear about the antisocial things I sometimes think and feel (they’re so lucky!) because they know me and know what kind of person I am and want to be. They can let me vent and then remind me of my better self. They can tell by my demeanor and tone of voice and cadence if I’m simply exasperated and blowing off steam.

As opposed to strangers on the internet who, if you vent your worst self there, will only ever see that aspect of you, and will judge and respond accordingly.

Bottle it up

I’m anti-emotional constipation. Anti-self-deception. Anti-stigmatizing of mental illness. I have written about my struggles with depression in the past, about the death of my mother-in-law, my grandmother’s dementia and her passing, the illness and death of my uncle. So I’m not advocating for pretending and presenting a purely aspirational or sanitized version of yourself to the world/internet.

But not everyone has earned the right to your raw emotions, your discovered truth about yourself, or your pain. There are appropriate places to work through vulnerable and sensitive topics and emotions: therapy, say, or with people who have earned your trust over time, by being consistent in how they present themselves to you, being consistently caring and compassionate.

Relationships are reciprocal. Trust is built one small act at a time, with reciprocity an essential element. If people are being unequally vulnerable, then dial back what you’re giving them of yourself. They’re not trustworthy, or they’re not ready. If you actually spend time with a person—share longer, more in-depth discussions that include gracious interpretations and honest questions—you’ll learn who is performing and who is being real.

Pro tip: The wider internet is never trustworthy.

Not to say that relationships begun on the internet are not real: many are! I have a couple of dozen message board friends I “speak” to and exchange ideas with on an essentially daily basis, and many of us have exchanged numbers and revealed more of our Real Life Selves as time has passed. The internet can be a great tool; it CAN bring people together. That’s probably less likely in bursts of a couple hundred characters or 10-second videos.

The internet is the Wild West. Sometimes, you’ve just got to bottle it up. For your own sake, and for everyone else’s.

What are the prosocial filters I’m using in all areas of life?

To summarize, here are a bunch of my prosocial filters that can be used or discarded as the situation dictates:

• Don’t lay bare the worst parts of myself to strangers. If I wouldn’t say the thing to a person sitting next to me on a bus, I probably shouldn’t say it to that screen name I’m interacting with.

• Don’t share with just anybody deeply personal, emotional details that are still raw and unprocessed. That goes for your brand new significant other as much as for the randos on the internet. Intimacy cannot be rushed; it is earned.

• My story is my story to share or not; the people in my life are part of my story, but they have their own, too. An important boundary is respecting their privacy.

• Realize that a lot of people bring their worst selves to the internet, on purpose. Don’t engage with someone who refuses to show any humanity.

• Realize that a lot of people on the internet ARE good people, worthy of the opportunity to build trust and friendship.

• Remember that every interaction, whether online or not, is calibrated by the people in it to suit the occasion (rules of courtesy, or tradition, or lack thereof). Social conventions exist so we’d stop resolving problems with fist fights. Don’t verbally spar with brass knuckles on the internet. You’re not a Peaky Blinder.

• Remember that not everyone is good at calibrating their presentation of the self. High-functioning autism, for example, can lead to misinterpreting someone’s behavior because situational re-calibration of self-presentation doesn’t come so naturally to everyone. The flatness of text online makes it even more difficult to read cues or discern intent.

Parasocial relationships are not necessarily good, but they’re not necessarily bad either. This is why it’s important to be mindful of how I present myself. Though someone will always misunderstand or misinterpret, it’s on me to choose which aspects of myself to share.

What are some ways you manage life plugged into the web of millions of brains interacting without the until-recently universal filter of being a brain that’s actually attached to a meat suit?

1. He’s a coauthor of Cynical Theories, a book I very much enjoyed when I read it

2. I didn’t last long on Twitter, maybe a few months after it first launched.

3. Actually, twice: her first child, and again with her third and fourth, who were twins.