Go quietly public on the internet
A reimagination of how to exist online as a sensitive creative person
Welcome to SEE YOU—a companion for artists, thinkers, and analog lovers with ideas, inspiration, and reflections on living an intentional creative life.
Today I am kicking off Quietly Public, a series about sharing without performing one’s self on the internet. Join to follow along!
For my artists, my crafters, my introverts, my sensitive beings—I’d like to propose to you the concept of going quietly public on the internet.
To go quietly public online, you must first inhabit your world. This is any digital world you own outside of a social media platform. If wherever you primarily exist online can be answered by the question, “are you on _____ (Instagram, Substack, Youtube, Reddit)?” then that is not your own world.
What can your world look like? Anything, really! A structured starting point might be a blog or a digital garden. It can even be your artist website. Wherever it is, make it a cozy place where you want to hang out, not somewhere you clear the cobwebs once every four years to update your CV.
How do you make your world somewhere you actually want to go? Own your weird! Go on tangents and fall down rabbit holes. Log them in your world. Upload your sketches and unfinished ideas. Create your future archive. You can decorate your world through photographs, text, drawings, and screenshots. As you decenter your public persona and output, you’ll find that you have a lot more fun hanging out in your world.
How do people find your world? Quiet people can easily connect with each other through shared interests. As you inhabit your world, visit other interest-based community worlds and make friends! This can include social media, but it can also look like forums and membership communities. It could be a shared private internet of its own, like Metalabel’s DFOS.
Share your web world while you’re visiting other worlds so that the right people can discover you. If someone explores your world and finds that not only are you a writer, but you also share their interests of ice skating and foraging and Hannah Arendt, then they are immediately connected with you.
Once people land in your world, give them places to go! Provide a map. Point out your favorite attractions. Let them know ways they can communicate with you outside of visiting your world, like a newsletter or a workshop or a mail club.
What makes this approach quietly public? When you inhabit your own world, you set your own norms of what is public and private. You don’t have to share your name, your face, your voice, your body, your family life, or your mental health. Or you could share all of those things, but choose to hide parts of your creative process.
In contrast, being “loudly public” on the internet is showing your face, speaking to the camera, and sharing on multiple platforms as often as possible. Loudness online requires performance and catering to the audience.
No shade to this marketing tactic—it is very effective at meeting the people where they are! Artists often see benefit from it, like when they’re promoting a book or an album or any artwork related to current events.
But I don’t believe that the only way for artists to thrive on the internet is by performing their creative work. Much like the “adopt or lose” messaging that surrounds AI, I am tired of the determinist view that social media is the way to reach people online.
Once upon a time, I logged onto the internet to reimagine my world.
Through online blogs and websites, I constructed identities that held the various textures of my inner world. I chose usernames that masked my real name, like “raddest” and “subtitles” (yes, I was a tumblr girl). I role played fictional characters from The OC and Fruits Basket. I deliberated the colors and fonts of my internet homes, decorating them with moody quotes and photographs.
The internet never asked me to present my face. That didn’t happen until I had my first Myspace account, which got replaced by Facebook, then Instagram. I obliged with sharing my persona since these social platforms were for facilitating connections in the physical world. It made complete sense to share my face online with people who had seen my face in real life.
Soon after college, social media became the entirety of how I existed on the internet. Logging on meant staring down my own simulacrum of performance—a grainy video of myself dancing in a studio, a photo of me taken during Santorini’s sunset hour, the final form of a zine I labored over for months. These objects captured my polished external self, a masked self to hide my anxiety and neurodivergence.
Social media isn’t antithetical to authenticity. The very performance of authenticity is expected in order to succeed on social media now. I certainly don’t “need” to mask online, but I struggle to figure out the right balance of posting on these platforms while still liking my persona and seeing her as myself. I imagine that an “authentic” me would not edit a caption over and over until it’s so blandly inoffensive that it means nothing. It would not have me trimming out all the pauses and ums and you knows from my Youtube videos.
“I do wonder if tying the physical self to art incentivizes the wrong things. It places success largely in the hands of people who are willing to talk on camera, who can withstand people commenting on their looks, who can endure the stress of the weird and snarky commenters.”
”Do You Have to Become a Content Creator to Make It in the Arts?” by Hannah Glenn
While I work on my craft of performance, I am mired in fear of rejection. This blocks my authenticity from shining, which affects what I end up sharing. Of course, I can keep performing alongside my fear and gradually improve. But is perfecting my online performance really the best use of my time? Must I spend more time on this than my creative practices, none of which fall under performance art?
I am weary of succumbing to binaries. The choice isn’t between “social media = success” or “no social media = failure.” Ideally I would utilize social media when I have a lot of finished work to share, then ghost for six months while I work on a big project. But the tricky thing about social media is how quickly you can jump to the conclusion that the whole world is busily churning out carousels and think pieces and process shots. You start to think there is no other way to be online.
Social media is not the whole world, or even the internet. The internet existed long before social media, and the human world for hundreds of thousands of years before that. I don’t love social media, but I still love the internet that made me who I am. Through the internet, I experimented with my identity and made lifelong friends. I am so grateful for the internet and everything it gave me. That internet is still here, actively being shaped today.
My reimagining of how to be on the internet is by being quietly public. I am a quiet person in real life. Why should I exist differently online? I wouldn’t try to share my art on a huge stage with an audience I can’t see every time I created something new. Why would I fall for that mirage on the internet?
Being quietly public means I mostly live in my internet home and my digital garden, where people can visit and get to know me beyond my mask. I leave my home for social events—coworking hours, classes, discussion groups—hosted through online communities. I get to know people within these groups, expanding my network. I mail digests to people who’ve visited my home, inviting them to drop by again. When I make something that beckons to be shared loudly, then I head to social media. I do the arena tour as best as I can. Then I come back to my quiet home.
By being quietly public and going at my pace, my internet is alive. My internet is small. And I still have the capacity to love her.
This post is part of Quietly Public, a series about sharing without performing one’s self online. In the following weeks I’ll be sharing interviews with some of my favorite artists who have a quietly public presence on the internet.
My seasonal companion zine Summer Practice is available for preorder for one more week. I’ve made a few fun updates for this one, including a summer bucket list and pages to document memories of your summer. You can order your physical copy here!
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The digital garden is an interesting idea, one I might adopt when I (hopefully soon) update my own internet home. One way I remember we used to come together before social media was webrings--do those still exist? Maybe they're due for a comeback! 😁
oh I love this and feel so affirmed in how I choose to show up. It can feel easy to compare to more polished up, consistent, “loud” socials. I am always amazed at the beautiful leadership of quiet people taking up space and creating a new way of being in the world. Thank you for this piece. New subscriber 🌀💫