Most reporters are internet culture reporters who don’t know it yet
Katherine Dee
It’s the op-ed that people can’t stop publishing: “We’re already living in the Metaverse.”
It started two years ago when Facebook went all in on its metaverse product‘s hype by changing the company’s name in October 2021. That month, I wrote a short blog post about how most of us live with a digital filter over our lives: We’re always “logged on,” even when we’re not. In November, Chaos Monkeys author Antonio Garcia-Martinez echoed the sentiment, writing that “the little ‘m’ metaverse is already here and firmly in place. It’s the elective, virtualized reality composed of Twitter, Instagram, and even the very Substack you’re reading right now.” And then, for UnHerd, around a year later, Jon Askonas wrote, “You are already in the metaverse,” where he offered something very similar to one of my core theses: The internet was once a place and now is a perpetual filter over day-to-day life. This year, Megan Garber, in a piece with another nearly identical title, wrote in the Atlantic, “Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”
For good reason, too, because it’s true. The line between online and offline is less clear than ever. The physical and digital have merged. Where we once had to dial up from the computer room, we now are always online. “Logging off” and “logging on” stopped being events in 2013.
The dissolution of our awareness of the barrier between internet life and “real” life has had the biggest effect in journalism. There was a time when one small beat in journalism was “internet culture reporter,” a beat generally regarded as juvenile, though one that got more cachet as the internet became more important. But what does it mean to be an “internet culture reporter” in a world where we never log off? In a world where on-the-ground reporting budgets aren’t just slashed but, for most people, nonexistent? Where journalists are expected to be capital “C” Creators to make ends meet and our shared workplace is Twitter and TikTok? It means we’re all internet culture reporters, whether we know it or not.
Most of us are synthesizing what we see on Twitter, TikTok, and occasionally elsewhere online and writing stories about what we see. By now, we all know that any article that begins with “People are arguing that,” usually exemplified by outlets like the New York Post, is really a recapitulation of what’s happening on Twitter or TikTok, not a data-backed trend in the physical world. Political articles are especially prone to this: How many articles about “the Right” are really about viral Twitter conversations? Embedded reporting, today, means leaving the workplace (Twitter) and going to the field (Telegram).
Most of us have no other option, though. Nobody is paying for physical world reporting, which does, unfortunately, cost money. So do databases, and so does the time to interview subject matter experts.
I don’t think it’s the end of the world that many story ideas come from social media. But when all journalists are reporting on and from the internet, things can go wrong, especially when journalists pretend reporting is less internet-based than they really are. You rarely see any speculation about how a platform influences the story or how a given story has developed in the context of the internet. Core details often remain missing, even when there’s some awareness that journalists are writing about the internet and not the physical world.
Take, for example, TikTok and mental illness. Some teenagers will “choose TikTok over a therapist,” Christina Caron reported in the New York Times. But this isn’t a new phenomenon; it’s as old as the internet. Almost every TikTok “mental health fad” has a long history, from dissociative identity disorder, which has deep roots in 1990s Usenet newsgroups and later took on a new life on LiveJournal and Tumblr, to self-diagnosing oneself with autism, which in online spaces goes back a decade at minimum. Details like these are important, but unless the reporter’s beat is explicitly internet culture, they will almost certainly be excluded. Yet many “culture war” op-eds are based on a single tweet or TikTok that is used as representative of a behavioral trend. The irony is that once they get reported on, they do have a knack for memeing themselves into existence.
It clearly matters that most story ideas today are scraped from a small cadre of power users. Ideally, we’d at least adapt to the reality of journalism comprising mainly internet culture reporters. It’d be explicit that when we write about “the Right,” we really mean right-wing internet communities. I think that’s fine; these people aren’t nobodies. They just shouldn’t be conflated with the whole country, and we should clarify the context: We’re talking about one population in one specific place online, with particular influences, a particular history, and a particular reach.
When every major outlet published a piece about how hip New Yorkers are now “tradcaths,” where did Twitter figure into that? It’s one thing to be self-conscious that this isn’t a widespread trend, which many of these pieces at least were. (They always were quick to clarify that they were talking about “Dimes Square.”) But within the smaller group being reported on, why them? Were they being viewed as some sort of “influencer class”? If so, why? What were the dynamics there?
A small but illustrative detail: In the mess of trend pieces about new Catholic converts, people would frequently bring up Red Scare podcast co-host Dasha Nekrasova’s sedevacantism, an obscure belief that the pope is illegitimate. Well, it’s obscure if you found the church through physical world communities. If you traversed the online Right in the 2010s, you would certainly be familiar with it. Sedevacantists were as much a part of that particular ecosystem as Old Norse neo-pagans were.
Vox’s then-internet culture reporter Rebecca Jennings did a better job describing the phenomenon in her piece about why Catholicism seemed so amenable to being memed, contrasting it with “Instagram-ready Evangelicism,” which, at the time, was just winding down in popularity. Jennings’s piece wasn’t a deep history, but it did seem more grounded in reality than the New York Times’s. Jennings recognized that the story wasn’t about going to Mass or conversions or really meaningfully about religion at all. It was about something uniquely digital with digital influences.
The difference that gave Jennings the right frame to describe reality is that she is an internet culture reporter in title, not just an internet culture reporter who doesn’t know that’s her job and therefore does her job poorly. After all, the distinction between an internet culture reporter and a “regular” reporter on the real world is a distinction that, increasingly, makes less sense.
Katherine Dee is a writer and co-host of the podcasts we met online and The Computer Room. Find more of her work at defaultfriend.substack.com or on Twitter @default_friend.