Cold Intimacies and The Commodification of Suffering on Social Media

Where it was leading was a long, cold Winter.

As is so often the way of things in life and online, the story of my gentle, warm protest on the handling of women's disclosures of sexual violence in Mindfulness Teacher Training did not end up being quite the Hallmark movie moment it had promised to be on that dry Spring Day.  

A month or so later, the Mindfulness Teachers Association of Ireland kicked me out of their Facebook group, publishing a  rather snooty Social Media Etiquette policy (which still exists today) about having the "right ethics" and avoiding "aggressive attacks" online:

Ethics, by definition, is the concept of what is good, bad, right and wrong. In social media, the right ethic equals the right perspective and the right thinking on using social media appropriately and engaging people in the right manner.

 Etiquette is a code of what is generally considered acceptable within the context of our society. In social media, the right etiquette means acting the right way. Anyone who has ever been spammed (and that basically means everyone) understands this concept. Anyone who has been disrespected or treated unfairly through social media understands this even more.

 It is very important to remember that whenever you connect with a social media network, you are joining a community. In any community, there is an appropriate way to communicate.

 You need to be sure to treat the people in your MTAI community with respect and kindness and you are entitled to be treated in the same way, in turn. It is of utmost importance to respect the boundaries of others. 

Aggressive attacks have no place in social media. 

Your motivation for being a part of the community is to give others the benefit of your experience, to build relationships with other members of the MTAI community and to support the community in growing and thriving.

I was hurt. Members of the Board had met me warmly, cordially on that day. They had invited me in. 

I had declined warmly, cordially on the day - saying I wanted to be respectful to the boundaries of those involved and not to put them under any pressure to communicate with me if they did not feel willing to do so.  It had been almost painfully gentle and careful. 

Any yet, while I was hurt, I was also not surprised. I wanted to wash my hands of it all, and clung to that feeling it was over as the silver lining in this new storm cloud.  Their words stung, and I also had no respect for what they were saying. I was not surer than ever I wanted to put it behind me, and I refocused on getting on with life, as best I  could.

Slowly, I began to rebuild my social networks online and off, through attendance at real life events where I was well known for live tweeting.  Slowly, members of UCD faculty began to greet me again at those events, and over time, to engage with me online. Towards the end of the Summer of 2020, my former Course Director DM'd me on Twitter to say she thought I was very good at science communication, and she would share all work I did on her research online. Things were moving on, and I was glad of it. 

Until two and a half years years later, when the Aoibheann ni Shuilleabhain case broke.  

Aoibheann ni Shuilleabhain was an assistant Professor at UCD who had been horrendously sexually harassed by a colleague and left, alone, to handle it, in fear for her life. It was UCD's #MeToo and provoked an outpouring of stories of poor handling of sexual harassment of both students and staff, and a severe lack of institutional responsiveness or care for students who had been sexually assaulted: including a refusal to accommodate requests to distance from staff and student perpetrators. That was something I’d experienced myself as a young person, and it appalled me it was still going on, pulling me out of my complacency.

The Minister for Further Education, Simon Harris, appointed the then Director of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Noeline Blackwell, to the Governing Authority and I wrote a letter to them both congratulating the Minister for appointing her, sharing my own experiences. I had a response from the Minister, and from Noeline Blackwell, but predictably, nothing from UCD.

And then, on International Women's Day in 2021, as the Propel Report (Promoting Consent and Preventing Sexual Violence for Higher Education Institutions), the Technological Higher Education Authority's framework for improving responsivity to issues of sexual harassment and sexual violence in Higher Education, whizzed by me on Twitter - something inside me just.. snapped.

It was somehow just.. no longer okay with me that any of it  had not been responded to. I shared the letter I had sent to UCD to Twitter. Over the course of three days it was viewed 77,000 times. I tagged Noeline Blackwell in the tweet, who forwarded my communications to the Secretariat of UCD, asking that it be responded to.

The response from the new Head of School was masterfully dismissive, suggesting I had been well supported during my time on the course but lacked the "intellectual, emotional and personal" capacity to complete. She was confident that her knowledgeable, hardworking, experienced staff had done the best they could to support me, and was sorry I "felt" that this was not my experience.

This time, I wasn't feeling so conciliatory and mindful. 

This time, I was enraged. 

The victim blaming narratives around the murder of Sarah Everard that same week pushed my buttons even further. I wrote another blog, more politically focused this time, which included some commentary on the ridiculousness of forcing women to take to the airwaves and social media to seek any sort of restorative or proactive response to complaints and concerns relating to courses focused on compassion and social justice in Universities.

As momentum built, I posted both the Head of School's response to me, and mine to her, to Twitter for about 48 hours.

Professional friends began to write to the Department, pressing on them to address it. 

An Assistant Professor in Restorative Justice intervened on my behalf, and procured a meeting with the Vice President for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion to talk about policy and the Dignity and Respect Review that would shape future UCD policy on formal processes with respect to staff and student relations.

While UCD denied the opportunity to have a facilitated Restorative Conference or to meet me with an advocate, it went as well as I could have hoped it would and it was better than nothing. Most importantly for me, it resulted in direct changes to policy around the handling of complaints to allow for opportunities for early resolution with a no-blame focus, to be facilitated

On the 26th of March, I posted a final statement to Twitter, copied to colleagues at UCD, reiterating the two points I'd spent what already felt like a lifetime banging my head against a brick wall to say within the institution:

• Please listen and respond when people share sensitive details of their histories in good faith.

• Please support your staff to do the same by providing adequate space and emotional and  professional support to deal effectively and compassionately with difficult conversations with dignity and respect.

The Affordances of Social Media (Part 2) 

The speed with which I achieved a more satisfactory outcome when I recruited the power of social media with a public, influential audience surprised me. 

It was a reminder that when it comes to pressing on such issues, social media can be powerful, unsurprisingly, perhaps, given it is is now a form of media used by 53% of the world's population. 

It maybe goes without saying that as a modality, social media  offers different affordances to in-person communication.  Dandridge (2023) provides a succinct summary of some of its main features. In addition to its global reach, social media is highly accessible, and available 24/7, and scalable:  posters can, at least to a degree, choose who has access to their personal posts and select or constrain the size of the audience.   Unlike real time conversations, online content is also replicable – a blog post can be shared across platforms and across time, other’s tweets and images can be screen-shotted and shared (including in a court of law). Users can exercise choice with respect to synchronicity and identification,  whether to communicate in real time (synchronously), or delay and consider responses (communicate asynchronously), choose whether or not to identify themselves, and how and what identity to assume. 

Most critically for me, perhaps, social media also affords cue manageability – the ability to choose intentionally to conceal or hide visual and auditory communication (body language, tone, facial expression, gestures) and to skilfully and strategically deploy others towards particular communicative functions.

Such affordances suggest potential for a higher degree of strategic intentionality in communication – they invite the creation of a persona,  or perhaps several different personae, within and across contexts for the purposes of achieving particular communicative functions. 

Online, I could be fierce. 

In person, if the Head of School had told me that I had been well supported but hinted I lacked capacity, I'd likely have dissolved into a pool of angry, voiceless tears.

But of course, no one sees beyond the screen. 

At the point I took my story public, I had been practising voicing all kinds of things about myself online for years - the personal, the private, the professional, the mundane in public.  Though it feels unbelievable to me now, in that four year period, I had tweeted nearly 50,000 times.  Good tweets, kind tweets, memes to build affiliation, to build "community" and "relationship": to restore myself as a credible speaker within the psychological community of Ireland.

In truth, throughout 2019 and on into the pandemic it had consumed me. I was increasingly chronically online, and online in a sort of memetastic aspirational way informed by the psychological theories I'd learned in my mindfulness training. Forgiving, accepting, working on myself - all the while anxiously checking my analytics and tracking who was liking what as some sort of affirmation of my basic self worth. 

Over time, I became very good at being, or perhaps more accurately, performing just the right amount of curated vulnerability carefully diluted by more commonly presented affable, cheerful persona of resilience and prosociality-  hitting a Goldilocks sweet spot somewhere between commodified humanity and co-operative co-creation of social capital within the field by promoting just about every Mindfulness paper and event known to humankind. Behind the screen I was all too often sleepless, on edge, chained to my phone.. crumbling. 

Cold Intimacies and Oversharing

In Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism Illouz (2007) writes about the performative creation of cold intimacies of self-realisation in which a persona informed and shaped by popular therapeutic discourse becomes:

"almost an ideal commodity: it demands little or no economic investment - it demands only that the person allows us to peek into the dark corners of their psyche and that they be willing to tell a story. Narrating and being transformed by one's narration are the very commodities produced, processed, and circulated by a wide cohort of professionals (such as therapists, psychiatrists, doctors and consultants) and media outlets.."

None of this was in my awareness at the time. I was just connecting, after all. Building strong networks. Getting the work out to the world. Finding my strength in my vulnerability. Communicating the Science.  

But it seems to me now that I had, bit by bit, become this very commodity. Over time, I had cultivated what was for a jobless MSc student an insane social professional network: I was followed by people who had founded whole schools of therapy, at the most prestigious Universities in the world.  The very UCD staff who had ignored my efforts to re-engage professionally, who wouldn't look at me in public, seemed to know it, and while still ignoring the elephant in the room, began to like and share not only my tweets promoting their work, but pictures of my kids and my pets and my Christmas tree and mundane things like bathroom renovations. Every time I thought I might be edging towards restoration of my place in the community though, something would bring me back to square one. Even the most careful and tentative and respectful of  professional contact backchannel was always ignored.

Despite the fact I clearly wasn't getting my true needs met, the more they engaged with the content I produced online, the more I produced. While Illuouz (2007) speaks of such strategy as economically efficacious in the culture at large, it took up all of my free time, and most of my mental and creative energy.  I was effectively selling myself as free labour, a science communication worker bee,  in some sort of warped process of decontaminating my professional reputation of my unspeakable past of real, live, true, terrible sexual trauma.  I found myself becoming more and more deeply ambivalent about the whole way I was presenting this strange, new version of myself, and uneasy at doing so given what had happened. It became exhausting and depleting trying to keep up:  I felt split in two. Jack (1991; 1992) speaks of this as an act of self-silencing, a performance of a "good woman" masking growing resentment at their failure to express themselves authentically, that often leads to depression.

Illouz unpacks how the redemptive recovery story has come to dominate the cultural sphere since the late 1980's. She views the adoption of therapeutic discourse by the state in American culture as having become deeply globally institutionalised thanks to its coincidence with professional interests of a wide variety of workers and insurance companies.  She argues that it is morally and epistemologically wrong that  stories of suffering have become a form of commodified entertainment, criticising how therapeutic discourses has come to " create a personal memory of suffering that ironically creates much of the suffering it is supposed to alleviate."  

She also argues that it is only by voicing the authentic experience, supported by feminist movements like #MeToo, that there’s ever an escape from the silenced, divided self. These days, I'm more and more inclined to agree. 

What I needed was not likes and shares on social media. What I needed was a conversation that would restore to me a sense that I was more than this narrow story of my unchangeable past. What I needed was the transformation of restorative justice..

References

Dandridge, S. (2023). Overusing, Overposting, Oversharing, Subtitle (Some Things are Better Left Unsaid).

Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity.

O'Neill, F. (2021, March 14). From challenge comes change. Shelter of Each Other. Retrieved October 10, 2023, from https://shelterofeachother.blogspot.com/2021/03/from-challenge-comes-change_14.html