Introduction
My interest in the way people use the internet to challenge the boundaries of what’s normal began in 2014 when my editor at New York magazine noticed the considerable buzz generated by a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” with a man who has two penises.1 He suggested I write an interview column in the spirit of that candid Q&A: it would be based on in-depth conversations with people living lives unfamiliar to the typical reader of New York magazine. The resulting column, “What It’s Like,” was featured on the magazine’s online human behavior vertical the Science of Us. It wasn’t long before I realized I was onto something: it was regularly the top-performing piece across our website, and it was often picked up by other outlets. One interview, “What It’s Like to Date a Horse,” became the most read article, and for months I received messages or emails from readers, and hundreds more went online to leave feedback.2
“What It’s Like” connected powerfully with readers because it gave ordinary people space in a mainstream publication to speak freely about things that they (and others) often did not feel safe sharing even with those closest to them. The brief was simple: I was to talk to people whose experiences weren’t readily reflected in the world around me, and instead of editorializing, diagnosing, or judging, I’d listen while people told me about what it’s really like to be them.
In retrospect I have to acknowledge that as much as the series was meant to provide an empathetic space for people to talk about difference, it could fairly be accused of problematically lumping together sexual identities with medical and psychological conditions, physical disabilities, and illegal behavior. I talked to a woman with a debilitating phobia of vomiting, a man plagued by the desire to amputate a limb, and someone who elected to undergo chemical castration because he couldn’t stop cheating on his wife. There were interviews with people who couldn’t recognize faces, who were slowly losing their eyesight, who had excessive amounts of body hair, or who had a very small penis. I also talked to mature aged people who had never had sex and, arguably most troubling, people who claimed to be in consensual sexual relationships with family members.
As a reporter I found the lack of coherence liberating: whom I spoke to and what we talked about were largely up to me, so I was free to explore anything I was curious about. It was a science publication, but I had a background in media and cultural studies, which definitely influenced my more qualitative approach to human behavior. I found most of my interview participants online. I signed up for mailing lists and Facebook groups, I used Google to locate blogs and virtual communities, and I browsed forums like Reddit where users from around the world gather to anonymously discuss very specific experiences.
The subjects covered represented my own perspective at the time about what would be both interesting and provocative for a general readership. Of course, I wanted the series to be widely read, but I was mostly looking for experiences that even in a very confessional epoch still weren’t openly talked about. I’d run ideas past my editors and then go on a search for people who were willing to confide in a stranger and have their story shared.
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For about two years, from my office in lower Manhattan, I immersed myself in conversations between people from a range of backgrounds and generations. Then I identified myself as a reporter, made connections, and arranged to talk on the phone. When they’d adjusted to my accent (I lived in New York for a decade, but I grew up in New Zealand), we would become familiar with each other and talk for hours.
The conversations were confessional, raw, and intimate. We discussed their bodies, their sex lives, their deepest shames and desires. I was struck by how intimate our conversations were and the rapport we were able to build from a distance in a relatively short amount of time. People were usually equally nervous about sharing their private life with a reporter and excited to have the opportunity to candidly talk to someone at length, without the pressure of a face-to-face encounter. I often felt a heavy weight of responsibility for being the one who would eventually communicate their very private experiences to a public audience.
My interviews about sexuality and relationships invariably attracted the most interest and often went viral. On the one hand, readers were surprisingly generous and open-minded; many saw themselves reflected in the experiences of others and relished the boldness of those who talked to me without a filter. But others responded angrily, condemning me for writing about taboo experiences, accusing me of “normalizing” undesirable thoughts and behavior. As far as conservatives were concerned, I was a sick enabler assisting in this country’s moral decline. As one blogger put it, “By asking some of the most detailed, graphic, and disturbing questions, that no one … would be comfortable reading about,” I “put Howard Stern to shame.”3 In liberal publications I was a dangerous normalizer. The accusation was that allowing certain people to speak in depth about taboo experiences would result in their behavior being copied or become a guidebook for anyone who might stumble upon them online.
What was striking, though, as I discovered when I was researching people to participate in the series, was the normalizing that some feared I was contributing to was happening online without my help. When people gathered and shared experiences and ideas, new support systems, identities, and ways of being in the world were created and became known, including to journalists like me. During interviews almost everyone said the exact same phrase, that after failing to find themselves in real life among peers and role models or on film or TV, they went online, where they were relieved to discover “I am not alone.” I became focused on the internet’s power to allow people who might otherwise feel invisible or isolated or even truly demonized to connect with others, share ideas, get information, and find a place where they could be “normal”—a word that was routinely used by those I spoke to as a sort of shorthand for locating their place in the world, finding community, support, and happiness, and knowing who they are.
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When I conducted this virtual ethnography for “What It’s Like,” three things became clear. The first was the extent to which the internet was helping people who might have once lived closeted lives find community and come of age. This wasn’t just a case of young people exploring new identities: coming-of-age could come at any age. I’d listen to the details of their journey, often a long self-directed search, and find myself in awe, marveling at how, against the odds, they’d managed to find peace.
The second was how normal people become, even those living outside the bounds of what might be “normal” to you, after you spend some time listening to them and understanding their world, their choices, and their courage to embrace who they are without a clear map. It occurred to me that this experience of finding normal mimicked the normalization that happens when people discover themselves online.
The third was how much the pressure to appear “normal” shapes the lives of everyone, including people who appear to be living quite far outside its bounds. While we might have found new ways to live, normality still governs how we see ourselves in the world; it’s a relentless search from which it’s difficult to opt out.
Another layer emerged when the interviews went viral. While many participants had been representing themselves online in closed supportive spaces for years, when their stories were picked up by an outlet like USA Today or the Daily Mail, they were exposed to a totally different audience. They were read by people across the country, and the world, and a conversation—or an argument—about boundaries and tolerance played out in real time as their experiences were shared, reposted, discussed, commented upon, and dissected online, on TV, and on radio.
As noted above, with virality came a mix of hate mail from people who worried that I was normalizing problematic behavior (with great variation on what was viewed as problematic). And in truth, behind the scenes, my own sense of normal was being shaken up. As you will see in the final two chapters, I spent a lot of time in online communities where experiences that were previously abstract became familiar or “normal” to me. In some cases this led me toward a radical empathy; in other cases it was almost as if my own sense of normal were dangerously compromised. And in one case, it made me question the limits of my tolerance in a way I still haven’t reconciled.
The project also made me question my role as a reporter involved in creating content for an online publication. When my interviews were shared, they were often summarized, reduced to bullet points, reposted with a brief opinion, or simply reported as headlines. A good example of the way they were commonly repackaged by other publications is that when readers write to me, they often think the pieces are personal essays. And what about the practice of relying on a single source (whom I had often only met online or on the phone) without any context or supplementary reporting? Was I producing decontextualized clickbait?
I wanted to learn more about the less sensational ways that people use media technologies to find themselves as normal. I also wanted to consider in depth some of the more sensational experiences I’d only scratched the surface of for “What It’s Like,” especially those that were so taboo they went viral and received so much backlash. I wanted to celebrate the liberating, connective power of the current media landscape, which I call the “hyperconnected media era,” while also exploring its potential dangers.
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There has always been an “us” and a “them” that is exploited for mass consumption. In the nineteenth century, the great showman P. T. Barnum paraded biological anomalies like conjoined twins and dwarves—as well as fabricated “never-before-seens” like the Feejee Mermaid—before paying crowds of middle-class spectators as a form of entertainment. Part of the ticket holders’ pleasure derived from the unconscious, comforting reminder that they were superior to those on display. The popularizing and dramatizing of the divide between us and them, or “normal” and “abnormal,” was rebooted in the late 1980s and early 1990s on talk shows. At the heyday of their ratings, shows like Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, and The Jerry Springer Show were bemoaned for signaling social decay, exploiting the lower class, and promoting a breakdown of privacy. They were slammed by critics on both sides of the political divide for exploiting their vulnerable guests and sensationalizing complex experiences and identities.
But they had their defenders who urged critics to appreciate how they functioned as a radical public forum: audience members and guests could finally share their stories using their own voice. With the talk-show revolution and the concurrent explosion of tabloid news, we began to watch real people, people we didn’t know, grapple with very personal problems, all manner of sexualities, and experiences traditionally excluded from the mainstream.
The shows were popular because of their Barnum effect, of course. They were also successful because they triggered their audience with base emotions like outrage, shock, and disgust (talk to anyone who works in online journalism, and they’ll confirm that these are still some of the main ingredients for success). But they were also revolutionary. It can’t be understated how much it mattered that they resonated with those who saw their own secrets, problems, desires, or relationship structures reflected in the media from the lips of flesh-and-blood humans often for the very first time in their lives. They became part of the media landscape that offered what could be called “templates for normality,” scripts for knowing who you are.
Our fascination and concern with unraveling the private lives of “real” people went prime time in the early years of the twenty-first century with the reality TV boom. Mainstream media became obsessed with how real people lived their lives. Serial adulterers, incestuous families, women addicted to pregnancy, restless homemakers transforming into dominatrices, people in unorthodox relationships. These “real” depictions were sensational and salaciously edited, exploitative, and often literally scripted, but once the world began to hear stories of pain and struggle directly from individuals, unrelatable experiences were humanized, even if it was in hyperbolic form.
This allowed for empathy. Experiences that were once abstract became understandable, perhaps even relatable, and shared. And we knew the characters at the heart of the drama were real people who continued to exist when the camera was turned off, even if they were acting a certain way because of the camera in the first place. There’s still plenty of reason to critique the ways that people were edited and scripted, but these were not fictional characters invented by a few individual elites who were lucky enough to work in media production; they were real people who exist in the world, and that mattered a lot.
But the biggest shift came when kids who are now adults we call millennials were being born or coming of age—that is, with the internet. Early adopters at colleges and in labs and home offices began to “connect” with each other online. Even before the World Wide Web was made public in the early nineties, people were creating chat rooms and communicating with one another anonymously across state lines and national borders. First came BBS services, then Usenet, and later chat rooms on AOL or Yahoo Groups. This made it easier for people to trade pornographic pictures or for fans to offer their own readings of Star Trek, but it was also, crucially, a way for people who for various reasons could not connect well in real life (IRL, as we say now) to form communities.
As more and more people went online and internet technology advanced its bandwidth and its accessibility went wireless, it became a force responsible for both shaping and reflecting our identities. Communities grew, populations that were already marginal joined forces, and new identities were born. The internet interrupted the prime position of TV, film, and print media as the vessels that impart scripts for normality. But it didn’t replace them; it joined them, which brings us to the final shift that brought us to this moment: the rise of social networking and the blurring of the boundary between producer and consumer. While that boundary was already slowly being eroded by the impact of the internet, with the rise in social networking and app culture we all became media producers: from small, private audiences on Instagram or Facebook, using text and a pseudonym on Reddit, to larger audiences on YouTube or Twitter when content went viral.
In this country at least, media technology is now fully embedded in our everyday lives—on a phone in our pocket or on a laptop that lies next to us when we fall asleep at night. We are all both producers and consumers of media at once, at the same time. The technology has become more intimate and so have our ways of using it. We turn to the internet to manage everything from birth to death; we meet each other there for sex, to date, to marry. The sender-receiver model has been dismantled. It’s a two-way street, and everyone is traveling on it: this is the hyperconnected media era, our current moment.
The hyperconnected media era is defined by an increased ability to connect with others we might never have encountered in our everyday lives, share information, form community, and give birth to new identities or templates for normality. In the hyperconnected era, media is connected to everyday life. The virtual and the real are intertwined in such an intimate way that it’s impossible to disentangle them, but we are still bound by the social structures that govern our IRL circumstances. This is important.
With so many new ways of being swirling around us, the limits of our tolerance are being tested. There are more ways to be normal, but does that also mean that we are more aware of, and focused on, being normal in the first place? What are the limits? Can anything become normal? What stops something from becoming normal? What is normal, anyway? How do we find it? Why are we looking?
Copyright © 2021 by Alexa Tsoulis-Reay
