Unreal People
Not everything on the Internet was made by a real live human being. Some stuff comes from robots and spiders (like the ones who try to spam my comments section). And some stuff comes from people who pretend to be someone they’re not. We share the blogosphere with fictional characters. Alternate reality games spawn characters run wild over blogs, forums, and e-mail: if you play an ARG, you may spend hours communicating with a character played by a puppetmaster. And once you know this, it gets easier and easier to suspect that a “real” blog may in fact be some kind of a work of fiction, and you just haven’t caught on yet.
Which brings me to Penelope Trunk.
You may know Trunk as a freelance writer whose column is syndicated all over the place. She gives advice mainly to twentysomethings - er, “millenials” - who are superambitious, telecommute on their iPhones, and want marketing jobs at Google. She keeps a blog, where she regularly reveals way too much information about herself in the name of “transparency.” And if I didn’t know better, I’d think she’s a work of fiction.
For one thing, she has a fake-sounding name - and in fact, it isn’t her real name. (She tells the whole hilarious story about that right on her blog.) She tells us way too much about herself, without a hint of self-consciousness. You know how, when you read a novel written in the first-person, you sometimes wonder why this person is giving you so many private and embarrassing details? That’s Trunk’s blog. She talks about blackmailing her supervisor. On assignment for Time Magazine, she screams at a publicist and then accepts flowers from the handsome CEO she’s profiling. (Carrie Bradshaw, phone home!) She reveals her husband’s failed career, and blogs her first visit to a marriage counselor. Tantalizing hints of extra-marital affairs are littered across the blog - is this foreshadowing?
More than the exposition, I’m convinced by the dramatic arc of her blog. She’s clearly building up to something - a divorce? A murder? A nervous breakdown? There’s a strong LonelyGirl15 vibe behind her blog, minus maybe the Satanic overtones. Then there’s her voice. It’s infectiously readable, half train-wreck, half chummy best-friend. It’s the kind of writing you see in the “quaint little stories about my life” column that’s in every daily paper in the country, that everyone makes fun of but everyone reads. (In fact, she had just such a column at the Boston Globe.) Real people don’t write this way. Yet here she is.
In a way, Trunk is a character. Specifically, she’s constructed a persona, like so many creative-types - musicians, writers, artists, and really anyone who builds a brand around their name. And this is my real point: on the Internet, there’s no daylight between a real person playing a persona, and a person who’s enacting a fictional character. In the same way that we call zombies “the undead,” these people are “the unreal.” Whether you’re playing a part in an internet game, or playing the part of your own successful, self-promoting self, you wake up, log on, and become someone that you aren’t - except, over time, they can’t help but reflect you, because where else is all this stuff coming from? We in the audience are buying into a construct. We know we’re getting a fictional person - that whoever’s typing all this stuff looks a lot different first thing in the morning with a toothbrush hanging out of their mouth than they do when they put their blog-face on. But we go along with it. And we also buy into the real-life material that fuels this fiction. At the end of the day, fiction vs. nonfiction doesn’t really matter. It’s all entertainment - as long as we keep coming back for more.
