What is part of your persona, people feel entitled to opine about. Readers feel entitled to "know how it ends" At some point, after enough nosy inquiries, people would end up writing some fairly opaque explanation about "Blue Eyes and I went our separate ways." The respectful thing for a reader to do, of course, would be to let it go, to understand that people break up, and if the person wanted to write about it, they would. Somebody would be writing about a boyfriend called Blue Eyes for months, and then nothing. It was even harder, I think, for people who were dating.
Where was El Hubbo? Sick? Were they separated? Did something happen? Where are Floofy and The Crasher? Are they living with you? And people would start to leave it in the comments: Where's El Hubbo? They would get more aggressive and more intrusive: Are you and El Hubbo still married? Why wasn't he in the story about your vacation? I cannot tell you how often it happened that someone I knew had been talking about El Hubbo for years, and then all of a sudden: no El Hubbo. And one of the first things they learned was that when you thrive as a storyteller about your own life, people begin to feel entitled to know everything. So did single people who wrote breezy, almost Carrie Bradshaw-like diaries about this and that, jobs and dating and what have you. When you thrive as a storyteller about your own life, people begin to feel entitled to know everything. A lot of people made their early reputations as online writers with that kind of thing. You would really, really begin to get the sense that you knew all these people as you heard the stories about their travels and their home repairs and their struggles with parenthood or whatever. For instance, a blogger might write under the name LucyBear (I'm making this up, so don't attempt to Google this person), with a husband referred to as El Hubbo (people did stuff like this, I'm so sorry) and kids referred to as Floofy and The Crasher. In early blogs and online journals, pseudonyms were very common for the people in your life, and even for yourself. So obviously, this revelation about cheating was an issue.
Fulmer is what people refer to as a "Wife Guy," a guy whose public image is very much centered on his loving relationship with his wife.
At one place where I worked, the phrase "stick it in a blog" was used as a kind of eye-rolling acknowledgment that if you have so much to say about something, go make yourself a space to say it.īut this week's drama about Ned Fulmer of the YouTube outfit The Try Guys losing his gig after he admitted to cheating on his wife with an employee of the show (catch yourself up with this useful explainer if you must) also emphasized the ways in which YouTube contains elements of 2003-ish blog culture and journaling. It was the culture of a quick take, a chance to see a writer's fresh thoughts on a weekly (or more frequent) basis, and it was independence from traditional publishing. Seeing blog culture in Substack and other newsletter platforms isn't difficult. "Here is some writing, here are some links, here is some information." That was also the mission statement of a blog, particularly in the more "journaling" incarnation, as opposed to the "rolling succession of tiny posts that were really just links" incarnation. As someone who had not just one blog but several in the late '90s and early aughts - and as someone who originally came to NPR to write one about pop culture - I have found it fascinating to see blogs boom, and then bust, and then be reinvented as newsletters essentially indistinguishable from blog posts.
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