The Guardian with some harsh words about blogging and selling our souls.
Many people today enter the vast online marketplace for attention with goals similar to Magnanti's: they want to support their "real work", whatever it is. We say: I will start blogging or tweeting or Facebooking to help publicise my business, or jumpstart my writing career, or supplement my income with some advertising money. Once we begin, we discover that this new work we've taken on – the "not-real" labour of online self-promotion – has its own relentless dynamic. We gauge our progress by page views and follower counts, Google rank and incoming links. If we're not careful, we start to peg our sense of self-worth to these numbers.
Some of us enjoy the independence and opportunities this kind of social entrepreneurialism affords; others resent it as a crass slog. Either way, we ought to be as clear-eyed as Belle de Jour about what we are doing. Like her, we are taking social interactions that we normally pursue out of courtesy or affection or enjoyment and treating them as transactions. I'm not going to argue that this is always harmful or wrong. But whenever we do it, we ought to be honest about it with ourselves.
Too often, today, we meet people online who are frantically promoting themselves and their businesses – all the time pretending that what they are doing is not advertising or marketing but rather "being sociable". Long before the internet's advent, the academic world concocted a phrase that describes what's happening when we do this: we are commodifying our own authenticity. In plainer language, we are selling our souls.
Commodifying our own authenticity. Those are some harsh words. But I'm guessing that doesn't necessarily make it untrue.