Eli Pariser’s filter bubble. Courtesy of Eli Pariser.
Before we get to the food, let us review some numbers that help to describe the social media phenomenon and its phenomenal growth. Facebook, established in 2004, connects more than 800 million users daily (meaning that if it were a country, Facebook would be bigger than the United States). Twitter, established in 2006, connects more than 200 million users. It took three years, two months, and one day to generate the first billion tweets. Now about 1 billion tweets go out every week. In February 2011, Twitter was averaging about half a million new accounts per day. When Michael Jackson died in June 2009, Twitter users set a new record of 456 tweets per second (TPS). By March 2011, the TPS record was 6,396 (@twitter 2011a). In August of that year, news of singer Beyoncé’s pregnancy set a new TPS record of close to 9,000 (@twitter 2011b). On New Year’s Eve 2011, Japanese tweeters set a new record of 16,197 TPS and crashed the site as a result (Hastings and Fisher 2012). In 1999, there existed about fifty blogs. In 2005, there were more than 30 million, with about 1.6 million blog posts per day (Solove 2007, 21). By the end of 2010, there were more than 150 million blogs on the Internet (Pingdom 2010). There is naturally more to social media than Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, but as designer Angela Nielsen put it on an infographic: “Social Media isn’t a fad . . . it’s THE way we now communicate with our friend, client, prospect, grandmother, colleague, investor, doctor, realtor, teacher, dietician, veterinarian, grocer, pastor, hairdresser . . .” (Nielsen 2011).
Of course, none of this would be possible without the World Wide Web. At a 2007 conference, Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, pointed out that the Web is “less than five thousand days old. . . . This abundance of things that are right before us, sitting in front of our laptop or our desktop . . . this kind of cornucopia of stuff just coming over, never ending, is amazing. And we’re not amazed.”[1] Taken with some of the numbers he provided—2 million emails per second, 100 billion clicks per day, 55 trillion links (almost equivalent to the number of synapses in our brains), and that at its then-current rate of growth, the Web would exceed humanity in processing power by 2040—it is a fitting reminder of the tremendous size and capability of this new technology and also of the astounding speed at which we have become accustomed to it. Contemplating how unimaginable all of this was a mere decade earlier (including that most of it is free), Kelly suggested that the first lesson of the Web is that we “have to get good at believing in the impossible”—or as he put it in an earlier essay, “if we have learned anything in the past decade, it is the plausibility of the impossible” (Kelly 2005).
There are some things today that might not have seemed impossible in 2007 but that were then still speculative or belonged to an earlier Web generation than the one we find ourselves in today. When Tim Berners-Lee put the first Web page online (which is to say onto the Internet, the system of computer networks that had existed for several decades already) in August 1991, the idea was to create a network—what we now know as the World Wide Web—based on linking computers to one another to facilitate document sharing: an open collective of sorts, of mostly static information. The second phase, also referred to by some as Web 2.0, is characterized by linking information rather than machines, and linking users through that shared information. Web 2.0 is also when we see easier data retrieval through formats like Real Simple Syndication (RSS), which brings content directly to users, and the ability to access the Web from our phones and gaming consoles. Crucially for the development of social media, this phase also has the Internet opening up to accommodate user-generated content like Wikipedia, YouTube, and blogs, including the ability to post comments and customer reviews on retail sites like Amazon. Some Web developers envisage the next generation (known either as Web 3.0, or in Berners-Lee’s version, the “Semantic Web”) as still being defined by connections between data, rather than people, but with the aim of simplifying everything for the end user. This concept is premised on complete personalization, or the idea that all people who use the Web will have a unique profile based on their personal characteristics (likes, dislikes, friends, location, search history, and so on), which allows the Web, or the so-called “cloud,” to provide information uniquely suited to individual contexts. For that to transpire, we, of course, need to make everything about ourselves available to the “machine,” as Kevin Kelly calls it. In his summary of this future version of the Web, “total personalization requires total transparency,” which mandates Kelly’s view that “to share is to gain.”
Total personalization might not yet be the norm, but as any of us who pay attention to the ads above Gmail inboxes will have noticed, customized advertising has fast become standard, and Google’s Instant Pages feature almost makes it seem like the computer can read our minds (Manjoo 2011a). Similarly possible now is that two people who perform the exact same Google search will receive very different results, as Eli Pariser—who describes himself as an “online organizer and disorganizer”—discovered when he asked two friends to Google “Egypt,” and one got directed to the (then ongoing) revolution in Egypt, while the other friend’s top hits were travel and vacation links. Pariser uses this example to talk about what he perceives as the danger of “filter bubbles”: “Your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online.” He concludes that personalization amounts to the “Internet showing what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see.” When this happens, he argues, “Instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food” (Pariser 2011), here echoing the “toxic environment” analogy familiar to food scholars as describing the relationship between obesity prevalence and the ubiquity of cheap, “unhealthy” food (figure 1).
Pariser is one among a number of critics of the Web and how it affects us. This is not to say that he (or like-minded critics) advocates switching it off or not using it. Rather, these critics call for a more critical awareness of the way it works, and of the ways in which it may “work” us to our potential disadvantage. At the heart of much of the ongoing debate is the question of attention, which has become our scarcest commodity thanks to the abundance of information at hand. As the economist Herbert Simon theorized several decades ago, “In a world where information is relatively scarce, . . . information is almost always a positive good. In a world where attention is a major scarce resource, information may be an expensive luxury, for it may turn our attention from what is important to what is unimportant” (Simon 1978, 13). Continuing the food analogy, what this means is that while we may have large imaginary appetites, in practice we simply do not have the time, money, or the biological capacity to consume everything available to us. One of the ways to maximize the benefits of living in an attention economy is, then, to become more selective of what we choose to consume, or to do our best to ensure that our information diets are adequately balanced between the important and the unimportant.
But the problem that Simon intuited, and which now increasingly concerns media critics like Pariser, is that we are given less choice, or at least that the range of our choices is becoming less visible as our interactions with the “machine” become more customized. Ethan Zuckerman, cyber scholar and director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, uses the word homophily (Latin for “love of the same”) to describe the tendency of like-minded people to gather through social media channels: through “friend” recommendations; sites like Facebook encourage similar users to flock together like “birds of a feather,” with the result that “we end up in a situation where we don’t have as broad a view of the world as we need, and we tend to think that our view is broader than it is” (quoted in de Waal 2010). It is the plausibility of the Web fostering this kind of confirmation bias that is behind Zuckerman’s aphorism that “homophily can make you stupid” (quoted in de Waal 2010). That stated, he is quick to point out that there exist competing models, one of which he calls xenophilia (“love of the unknown”), which compels people to seek out new people and information, at least some of which are likely to challenge our existing worldviews. “But xenophilia’s hard,” he continues. “It’s one thing to say to oneself, ‘I really should pay attention to matters in Somalia’ and another thing to do it. . . . At Berkman [Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University], we’ve been discussing the problem in terms of broccoli and chocolate—you know you should eat broccoli because it’s good for you, but there’s just so much tasty chocolate out there!” (Zuckerman 2008).
These are just some of the contributors to wide-ranging conversations about the Web and social media. And just as there is little consensus among media scholars about which generation of the Web we are currently in, a good deal of the dialogue circles around whether we should be worried about where we are heading, or celebrating, or not paying it too much attention either way. In his review of a spate of new books about the Internet, Adam Gopnik describes these three camps as the “Never-Betters,” the “Better-Nevers,” and the “Ever-Wasers”:
The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home. (Gopnik 2011)
Summarizing his own ethos, Gopnik concludes with a prescient reminder—or hope, perhaps—that we are still in charge of what we do with the technology available to us: “Toast, as every breakfaster knows, isn’t really about the quality of the bread or how it’s sliced or even the toaster. For man cannot live by toast alone. It’s all about the butter” (2011). So, while the resolution of these disputes remains to be seen, one trend that is clear is that food references are popular in all camps. This is perhaps fitting, because if there is one area that has been revolutionized by social media, it is in the world of food—or more accurately, in the virtual spaces that accommodate the communication of, dialogues about, and attention to food. Social media do what food does best: they bring people together.
From the founding of Chowhound, one of the first online discussion forums dedicated to food, in 1997 (also the year that the term “weblog” was coined, which would eventually be shortened to “blog”), the Internet has functioned as a powerful generator of virtual food communities, attracting both professionals and amateurs to discuss, to rate, to ask questions, and to find answers. In 2005, the Washington Post reported that Cooking Light, one of the top-selling food magazines in the United States, had spawned an “enthusiastic, [sic] community of readers through the message boards on its Web site,” some of whom also started gathering in real life for “grassroots” supper clubs (Sagon 2005). While magazines like Cooking Light do have “long histories of connecting readers through contests, school and reader-submitted recipes” (Tedeschi 2007), the unique capacity of the Web for connecting people with no geographical proximity is what incentivized leading food sites to generate platforms specifically for social networking, like the “My Epi” section that Epicurious launched in 2007 as one of the first of its kind: “a set of online tools perhaps best characterized as Facebook for foodies,” allowing users to “search the virtual recipe boxes of other users, create profile pages for themselves and sift through profiles of other users with whom they may share similar interests” (Tedeschi 2007).
This hardly sounds revolutionary now, although it certainly was less than a decade ago. Surfing the virtual food world today, one would be forgiven for imagining that people had been sharing recipes—and reactions to those recipes—online for decades, so dizzying is the bounty. Some version of the “Facebook for foodies” concept is manifest on practically every top food site, and users are constantly encouraged to extend the conversation to other communities. Find a recipe you enjoy? After you have saved it to your on-site virtual recipe box, you can “like” it on Facebook, tweet it, +1, Digg it, or submit it to Reddit, StumbleUpon, MySpace, or (the aptly named) Delicious—any and all of which add value to the original site by generating the Web traffic crucial to the positive feedback loop of social media: attention from the world inspires attention to the product, which generates more attention from the world, and so on. So it is that a site like Epicurious could in 2011 boast a total of 18 Webby Awards (presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, Webbys are “the leading international award[s] honoring excellence on the Internet including Websites, interactive advertising and online film and video”),[2] the latest two of which were for “Best Food and Beverage Web site,” and the “People’s Choice Award.” Another site notable for Webby recognition is BakeSpace. Launched in 2006 with the motto, “Come for the food. Stay for the conversation,” the site is defined as “a grassroots online community where people from around the world gather to share recipes, build new friendships, learn from one another and express their passion for all things food related.”[3] BakeSpace has repeatedly been recognized as an official Webby Honoree in the category “Best Social Network” (2007–2010) and in 2011 was an honoree in the “Social Media” category.
There now exist dozens of website collectives in the mold of Epicurious and BakeSpace, but nowhere is the sense of social networking more apparent than in the explosive arena of personal food blogs.[4] Estimated at close to 50,000 in the United States in 2007 (Sylva 2007), food blogs are about virtual camaraderie as much as they are about food. Elise Bauer, host of the multiple award-winning blog Simply Recipes (also listed as one of Time’s “50 Coolest Websites 2006” and one of “Eight of the Very Best Food Bloggers” by Forbes in 2010), explains the appeal: “Blogging is extremely easy. It doesn’t cost anything. There is this whole community aspect, too. It’s not just having your own soapbox. It’s connecting with other people who have the same passions you do. Food and cooking is about sharing” (quoted in Sylva 2007). Molly Wizenberg, the woman behind the similarly popular and lauded blog Orangette (listed by The [UK] Times as one of “50 of the world’s best food blogs,” and winner of the Well Fed Network’s “Best Overall Food Blog” in 2005), concurs: “Blogs are like sitting down in the kitchen with someone, only that kitchen is on a computer screen. . . . Most of us who love to cook and eat also love, I think, to talk about cooking and eating, and blogs are an ideal space for that. I can’t think of a better way to share my love of food, and to (hopefully) inspire other people to get into the kitchen, too” (quoted in Robinson 2009).
Wizenberg is one of a growing number of food bloggers whose popularity has led to one or more book—or “blook”—deals (two, in Wizenberg’s case). While some controversy exists as to the exact definition of a blook (Pierce 2005), it broadly refers to “books based on blogs or websites,” as the home of the Blooker Prize (previously the Lulu Blooker Prize, launched in 2006) describes it.[5] On the Blooker panel of judges sits Julie Powell, winner of their first award, and perhaps the best-known food blogger for authoring the Julie/Julia Project, the blog in which she documented cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of one year (Powell was in competition with another famous blog-based book that year, Brooke Magnanti’s Belle De Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl, which one press release humorously translated as “Cooker Beats Hooker to Win Blooker”).[6] Powell’s blook was published in 2005 as Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and later adapted for the big screen in the 2009 film Julie & Julia, with Meryl Streep in the role of Julia Child. (The Julie/Julia Project has since been given new life by Lawrence Dai, who describes himself as “a college student with way too much time on my hands,” and who decided to spend that time watching the film every day for one year and blogging about the experience on the Lawrence/Julie & Julia Project. We return to Dai’s project in chapter 3.)
Taxonomy is a difficult—and often questionable—task, and in the world of food blogging, there is indeed little sense in trying to fit all the output into neat categories. Not all books that began as blogs, for instance, are simply print versions of their digital inspiration (Phipps 2011), and some blogs, similarly, function as digital counterparts to existing print and/or “real-world” culinary profiles. In preparing The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, which grew out of the Smitten Kitchen blog (attracting up to 4 million unique views a month), author Deb Perelman explains that only 10 to 15 percent of recipes from her blog made it into the cookbook, but that she had to put in “the greatest hits or it wouldn’t feel like the Smitten Kitchen cookbook” (quoted in Jacob 2011). It is arguably the sense of the personal voice as much as it is the food on display that accounts for the phenomenal success of some bloggers, as is equally apparent in the number of food blogging conference sessions focused on how to cultivate a unique voice—or brand—in such a competitive environment. Here, aspiring bloggers are typically counseled with some variation of “pitch yourself!” as food critic and Life is Lemonade blogger Meridith Ford Goldman put it during the closing keynote address at the Blogher Food ’11 conference.[7]
One such well-pitched blogger/writer/cook is David Lebovitz, who began blogging after a long career as a professional baker (he worked as a pastry chef at Chez Panisse for more than a decade). He explains on his blog that it was originally “intended as a place to share recipes and stories [following the publication of his first book, Room for Dessert], and in 2004, . . . software which allowed me to post more frequently became available and I turned the site into an official blog.”[8] So while the line between what distinguishes a blog from an official website—or a blog post from an article, for that matter (Manjoo 2010)—is likewise tenuous today, styling it as a blog evidently allows for a more “personal” voice, which has certainly been valuable, if not vital, for Lebovitz’s continued popularity in an age of social media “friending.” As Publisher’s Weekly in 2009 described his then latest book, Living the Sweet Life in Paris (also the tagline of his blog), “Writing with the same cheeky tone that has made his blog one of the most popular food sites on the Internet, Lebovitz presents an eclectic collection of vignettes illustrating his experiences living as an expatriate in Paris.”[9] Another famous Parisian, finally, who is as well known for her now-several books as for her award-winning blog, Chocolate and Zucchini, is Clotilde Dusoulier. Reviewing her first cookbook, a writer for the New York Times summarized what could be the ethos of food blogging: “Dusoulier is the Parisian friend we all wish we had” (Crapanzano 2007).
Fantasy friends are not a new phenomenon. Social scientists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term “para-social interaction” in the 1950s to describe the particular (and peculiar) kind of relationship that exists between one person and a score of followers—typically between celebrities and fans, and then most obviously generated through the mass impact of television.[10] Communications professor Joshua Meyrowitz summarizes:
They [Horton and Wohl] argue that although the relationship is mediated, it psychologically resembles face-face interaction. Viewers come to feel they “know” the people they “meet” on television in the same way they know their friends and associates. In fact, many viewers begin to believe that they know and understand a performer better than all the other viewers do. Paradoxically, the para-social performer is able to establish “intimacy with millions.” (Meyrowitz 1985, 119)
Blogs—now increasingly in tandem with companion social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which help to generate an even greater sense of immediacy and proximity—are ideal platforms for engendering this kind of relationship, thanks both to the personalized nature of much of their content and to readers’ ability to comment on site. Although it could be argued that the interactive allowances of social media change the one-way model of this relationship as it manifests through television viewing, equally plausible is the possibility that new media simply intensify the experience precisely because of the liveliness of exchange. In other words, although regular readers and commenters may also become “known” to bloggers, until the unguaranteed event that they actually meet in person, the single blogger continues to foster intimacy, if not with millions, then with hundreds or thousands.
Food blogging, moreover, has the potential to become even more intimate, dealing as it does with something so mundane and necessary, and at the same time so metaphorically loaded. As Molly Wizenberg pointed out, most of us love to eat, and we also love to tell stories through food. Consider the account of one reader (and blogger):
When you read a writer’s words and see what their cameras capture every day, their lives become an integrated, regular part of your own. If you’re like me, you remember when Smitten Kitchen announced her pregnancy with a recipe for cream cheese–covered cinnamon buns and an adorable reference to the other bun in the oven. Maybe, like me, you got a little teary eyed and hung in there when The Wednesday Chef revealed, with a forlorn can of baked beans and a broken heart, that she wasn’t ready to start cooking again so soon after the end of a major relationship. And you might have gasped with glee when Orangette told us that she got engaged over champagne and chocolate truffles to the young man for whom she’d baked orange-nutmeg muffins. (Suthivarakom 2011a)
There can be little doubt that the majority of food bloggers—or at least those who are rewarded with enough attention to make a success of their activities, which perhaps includes the knowledge that they are adding value to other people’s lives—would consider themselves what Gopnik calls Never-Betters when it comes to the Web and its impact on our lives. Certainly this is the case for bloggers like Shauna James Ahern, aka Gluten-Free Girl, who began a blog of that name after having celiac disease diagnosed. Her blog (also regularly hailed as one of the “best,” and its follow-up book the subject of glowing reviews) has grown into an “online coffeehouse for people who share the digestive condition. . . . But don’t expect a lot of moaning and groaning and symptom-swapping. In fact, it’s easy to forget that the blog revolves around gluten-free eating because there are so many gloriously decadent food photos. And because Ahern is determined to celebrate what she can eat—not what she can’t” (Lynch 2010).
Stories like Gluten-Free Girl’s exemplify the scenario in which sharing fosters community not only for the sake of vicarious engagement, but also as a potential service for those of her readers who share her condition and who may find inspiration to, like her, celebrate what they can eat rather than lament what they cannot enjoy. That said, it is likely the case that the communities that grow out of the combined attention to the food blogosphere—gluten-free and not—are fueled in equal measure by taking vicarious pleasure in food and taking inspiration to enjoy some of that food by re-creating it (or something based on it) in real life—although the sheer abundance of what is available precludes every inspiration from coming to fruition. This is probably not so different from the dozens of cookbooks many of us have on our shelves containing countless fantasy meals that we will never get around to cooking, except that the personal element of many blogs puts on display people’s lives as much as the food that they cook.
One blogger whose life features as prominently as (if not more than) her food and who has attracted a phenomenal following is Ree Drummond, or The Pioneer Woman. Drummond’s blog chronicles her life on a cattle ranch with her husband, aka Marlboro Man, her four children, and their dog, Charlie (who is the subject of a children’s book, Charlie the Ranch Dog). Drummond describes herself on the blog as “a desperate housewife. I live in the country. I channel Lucille Ball, Vivien Leigh, and Ethel Merman. Welcome to my frontier!”[11] Technically, it is a frontier that challenges any distinction that may exist between a blog and a website, and also between a general blog and a food blog, because in appearance it is a professionally constructed portal into the many different aspects of Drummond’s life. In addition to her “Cooking” section (featuring “P.W.” recipes), and a “Tasty Kitchen Blog” (featuring blog posts and recipes from registered members), the site has sections dedicated to homeschooling tips, photography, home and garden, entertainment (including favorite movies), and “Confessions,” which features stories and pictures about her life and family. Drummond regularly hosts competitions or quizzes on the site, in which she (Oprah style) gives away some her favorite things: KitchenAid appliances, Apple store and Amazon gift vouchers, and so on. As for the details of daily life on that frontier, a New Yorker profile explains:
Drummond doesn’t discuss politics or engage in cultural criticism; she doesn’t even gossip. Whole continents of contemporary worry go unmentioned: this is a universe free from credit-card debt, toxins, “work-life balance,” and marital strife. The blog provides an escape from the viperous forces elsewhere on the Internet. Depending on your circumstance and your disposition, the relentless good cheer can seem either admirable or annoying. . . . Drummond makes an average life look heroic. (Fortini 2011)
As we will see shortly, Drummond does annoy some people (very much), but she also attracts enough positive attention to account for generating “solidly one million” dollars in ad revenue in 2010, for winning a number of blog awards over the years (notably “Best Food Blog” in 2008 and “Weblog of the Year” in 2009), for her cookbook hitting number one on the New York Times best-seller list, for her memoir being optioned by Sony Pictures (with Reese Witherspoon in the lead role), and for Drummond to be given her own show on the Food Network.
The focus on what Drummond does not provide is interesting for what it reveals about what we expect of so-called food bloggers (and perhaps of bloggers in general). Compared with other high-profile food media personalities—consider the likes of television cooks Giada de Laurentiis, Sandra Lee, and Nigella Lawson—Drummond is not alone in providing an “escape” from the drudgeries, irritations, and challenges of an “average” everyday life. It is true that these (television) figures frame many of their recipes as “easy” solutions to precisely those unglamorous circumstances, but like Drummond’s recipes—and like Drummond herself—they are typically presented in a way that promises the potential of effortless glamour. Yet television has always operated on a level of artifice. Historically (until the advent of reality TV at least), it is a medium of performance, not disclosure. The Web, conversely, is about revelation and discovery. It is, in perception at least, about making “real” connections.
These are the kinds of connections that can mobilize the food blogging community to dedicate a day to baking a peanut butter pie to share with someone they love at the request of Jennifer Perillo, a fellow blogger who had recently lost her husband, and who invited people—some actual friends, mostly strangers—to help her to celebrate her husband’s life: a cooperative spirit in the face of a tragic, and very real, situation.[12] The description of Drummond’s blog as an “escape,” in contrast, suggests a degree of affectation, if not outright deception. The “average” life made to look “heroic” might very well be a large part of Drummond’s appeal. It can be inspirational and aspirational, much like Nigella Lawson’s television persona represents an idealized—which is to say unrealistic—version of the so-called work-life balance. Yet Drummond’s heroic frontier life has earned her the scorn of at least three other bloggers, whose regular posts calling her out as a fake, and her fans as duped, are celebrated in the dozens (sometimes hundreds) of comments on their respective blogs. The Pioneer Woman Sux blog, subtitled “Plowing through her bullshit . . . one deceit at a time,” takes as its mission fulfilling what is an apparent Web tradition:
All the cool kids get a Sux. Rachel [sic] Ray, Survivor, you name it and they’ve got one. So you knew that sooner or later PW would get one too. We’ll explore over here. We’ll dissect her content to find the heart of it. We’ll poke fun and we’ll expose just how fucking stupid all her sheeple followers are.[13]
Apart from copious ridiculing in the name of said tradition, The Pioneer Woman Sux seems fueled by the idea—understood as a problem—that “Ree Drummond no longer exists. Readers are now presented with the sanitized and trademarked Pioneer Woman. A brand. Nothing more, nothing less” (PWSux 2011a). It is this perceived condescension of being “unreal” that similarly provides fodder for The Marlboro Woman (dedicated to “Keepin’ the Pioneer Woman Real!”),[14] and Pie Near Woman, a blog that satirizes the Pioneer Woman with picture stories featuring plastic dolls, typically in sexually provocative positions.
The question of making the personal public, and of whether it ought to remain private, is one of the topics that trouble some media scholars. These debates largely revolve around how much control we have over our private data (Solove 2007, 2011; Carr 2010a; Harper 2010; Lohr 2010), but the kind of voluntary publication of the personal and/or private that blogs (and Facebook and Twitter) allow is similarly worrying to critics like Andrew Keen, who maintains, pessimistically, that “we are becoming the WikiLeakers of our lives.” Keen cites two American psychologists who have described this “contemporary mania with self-expression” as “the narcissism epidemic”: “a self-promotional madness driven . . . by our need to broadcast our uniqueness to the world” (Keen 2011). The example of the Pioneer Woman, and more particularly of her detractors, is a curious reminder that seldom in deliberations about online privacy and what we choose to communicate to the world is the truth-value of those disclosures questioned (excepting scare stories like the ones involving pedophiles posing as someone else, that is). Rarely when we read a story about someone’s life in a blog do we stop to wonder whether that story, unique or not, is in fact true.
This is not to join her hecklers in suggesting that the Pioneer Woman tells lies on her blog. It is, rather, to point out how much we generally do take at face value, because the social mechanics of the Web encourage confidence (understood here both as making virtual confidants of strangers, and as having confidence in those connections as “real”), even as much of what many of us do online is patently some form of performance. Author Peggy Orenstein put it well in her account of coming to Twitter for the first time, where she initially experienced an unexpected candor: “Distilling my personality provided surprising focus, making me feel stripped to my essence.” Later she realized that what she decided to tweet “was not really about my own impressions: it was how I imagined—and wanted—others to react to them. . . . How much, I began to wonder, was I shaping my Twitter feed, and how much was Twitter shaping me?” (Orenstein 2010).
It is possible that this self-consciousness is related to the divide between so-called digital natives and immigrants, the former having grown up with information technology, while the latter have had to unlearn “old” ways while adapting to new ones (Prensky 2001).[15] It is also possible that as a writer, Orenstein is more sensitive to the fact that whenever we present a mediated version of ourselves to others, be it on paper, in a photograph, on a blog, or through Twitter, it is always a representation, which means we always have the option to pose as we would like to be seen, rather than as we actually are. Nonetheless, a narrowing of the gap between digital immigrants and natives is certainly a step toward one future version of the Web that has us all losing our self-consciousness about how we conduct ourselves online. As Oliver Burkeman put it after attending the 2011 South by Southwest festival of film, music, and technology, “If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised—with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia—Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it” (Burkeman 2011).
Whether this has—or ever will—fully come to pass, and what the implications of that eventuality may be, are larger technical and philosophical questions than we can concern ourselves with here. Yet Burkeman’s description of Web 3.0 does give some weight to computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier’s chilling claim that “we tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument” (Lanier 2010, 6). If it is true that our “philosophies”—which is to say the values we attach to truth and knowledge, and how they inform how we interact and reason with the world—are manipulated by the technologies we use, this could account for one fundamental irony in the existence of projects like The Pioneer Woman Sux, The Marlboro Woman, and Pie Near Woman: anonymously dedicated to outing the “truth” by dissecting virtually every move the Pioneer Woman makes, these are no less constructs than their target, and no less branded than the brand they take issue with.
“Prosumption,” or the license to produce media as well as to consume it, is one of the features that do make the Web amazing, to borrow Kevin Kelly’s term. It is an amazing feature because producing includes the possibility of contributing in a meaningful way and of adding value to a dialogue previously dominated by the “powers that be.” Now, if we like something, we can say so, and hope that our input will contribute to maintaining, or to improving, that thing that we like. If we see, or read, or experience something that we do not like, we are also free to say so on numerous platforms. And if we dislike it enough to commit to the time and energy it takes to maintaining a regular blog dedicated to expressing that dislike, then we are likewise free to do so. As PWSux put it in one post responding to the charge of being a cyberbully, a troll, a griefer, or the host of a hate-site,[16] “For the record, I don’t ‘hate’ Ree Drummond. I don’t want to ‘take her down’ or ‘prove anything’ or ‘convince anyone’ or any of the things I’ve seen as speculation for this site. Please. Get over it. I’m posting my opinions on my own damn site. Period” (2011b). But like the number of anonymous comments littering the Web that are both likely to be nastier than if they were signed, or if someone had taken the time to sit down and put pen to paper (Dalrymple 2010), and also to miss their potential mark because of that, it is worth thinking about what the use value of these pseudonymous blogs may be, and if they even exist outside of the “narcissism epidemic” that they apparently protest.
The point here is not to single out the Pioneer Woman’s dissenters for particular scorn or scrutiny either. But they and the communities they foster are good, if inadvertent, examples of homophily and filter bubbles at work and of the questionable qualities of those phenomena in an attention economy. They are certainly entertaining to read (and Pie Near Woman deserves special mention for creativity with dolls), but if you stop to consider the amount of dedication required to be truly parasitic on someone else’s prolific output, and combine that with the likelihood that that person is likely not to pay it much attention anyway—or at least whose public profile prevents any direct engagement, and whose continued success probably also curbs the need for such engagement—what remains is a community of cynics who echo and feed off each other’s shared gripes: birds of a ruffled feather, as it were. Where there is engagement with the “outside,” meaning in this case those of Drummond’s fans or allies who venture to challenge any of these bloggers, they are quickly derided as one of the (“fucking stupid”) “sheeple.”
As the “sux” tradition demonstrates, Ree Drummond is by no means a lone target in the virtual world. And neither is every dissenting voice an angry, a nasty, or an anonymous voice. Mathematics PhD candidate Adam Merberg’s blog, Say What, Michael Pollan?, for instance, takes that writer as its subject: “Much as I appreciate what Michael Pollan has done to raise awareness about food-related issues,” Merberg writes, “I’m sometimes frustrated by things he says or writes that seem slanted or even incorrect. This blog is an attempt to encourage Pollan to check facts and think through arguments more carefully.”[17] But the louder choir in the cyber world of food is made up of consenting voices that take obvious pleasure in sharing and often in honoring the source of their inspiration. The blog, Not Too Much—Mostly Plants? took inspiration from Pollan’s now-famous dictum to eat whole foods for a year. The author of Not Quite Nigella (who also landed a publishing deal for a cookblook of the same name) tells us that, “Yes, Nigella Lawson has visited . . . , and loves the name.”[18] And from the host of French Laundry At Home, in her last post on that blog (before moving onto Alinea At Home), titled “Thank You” (the first thanks of which went to Thomas Keller):
I’ve been incredibly lucky these past two years. I’ve been able to meet some people I’ve admired from afar, and I’ve been given some amazing opportunities that continue to open doors I never could’ve imagined. . . . It makes me happy to know there are so many busy, hardworking people out there—home cooks just like me—who want to stretch their wings and spend all day cooking something special . . . . I love that we’ve been able to connect through this and other blogs. (Blymire 2008)
(For the lucky ones, there is more than “just” connection to be found: Wizenberg famously met her husband through her blog, and for those without blogs, foodie dating sites like Food Lovers Passions and Spoondate are on the rise.)
So perhaps it is not entirely true that we are not amazed by the Web. I would venture, though, that when we are amazed, it is at where we find ourselves, rather than how we got there. Like arriving at the Grand Canyon and being awestruck by its splendor, but forgetting to marvel at the technology that transported us there. Then again, paying less attention to the mechanics of transport and more to our surroundings is exactly in line with what the author of the Web had in mind: “Its [sic] not the Social Network Sites that are interesting—it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. . . . It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous” (Berners-Lee 2007, emphasis in the original). In the virtual food world at least there can be no questioning that excitement trumps nervousness—even if a few feathers do get ruffled along the way.
1. Kelly was speaking at the annual Entertainment Gathering (EG) Conference (“the premiere gathering of and for innovators in media, technology, entertainment and education”). A video of the talk is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYCf4ONh5M (accessed March 2, 2011).
2. http://www.webbyawards.com/about/ (accessed October 3, 2011).
3. http://www.bakespace.com/ (accessed September 20, 2011).
4. For a timeline featuring the most popular food blogs and aggregated sites, see Suthivarakom 2011b. Bridging the divide between collectives and individual blogs are online groups like the Daring Bakers and Charcutepalooza. Although focused on different outcomes (baking and charcuterie, respectively), they share a model based on members individually blogging about collective challenges.
5. http://www.blookerprize.com/ (accessed June 3, 2011).
6. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/04/prweb367086.htm (accessed June 3, 2011).
7. http://www.blogher.com/blogher-food-11-closing-keynote-liveblog?wrap=node/364836/virtual-conference/posts (accessed September 15, 2011).
8. http://www.davidlebovitz.com/about/ (accessed July 10, 2011).
9. http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7679-2888-5 (accessed August 5, 2011).
10. On para-social interaction as a feature of food television, see Collins 2009, 176.
11. http://thepioneerwoman.com/ (accessed July 10, 2011).
12. In August 2011, Perillo, host of the blog In Jennie’s Kitchen, lost her husband to a sudden heart attack. In a post titled “for mikey,” she wrote: “For those asking what they can do to help with my healing process, make a peanut butter pie this Friday and share it with someone you love. Then hug them like there’s no tomorrow because today is the only guarantee we can count on” (Perillo 2011). The request was widely tweeted (and retweeted) by the food blogging community, and a Facebook page was constructed for the public event “Peanut Butter Pie Friday for Mikey and Jennifer Perillo.” As of that Friday (August 12, 2011), the event had 364 members “attending,” many of whom had posted pictures of their pies and written tributes to a man they had never met. For the next few days, the first several pages of Tastespotting (a site dedicated to showcasing pictures of food submitted by users around the world) were dominated by pictures of peanut butter pies “for Mikey.” Perillo’s plight also became the subject of the Twitter hashtag #afundforjennie, which in turn inspired the blogger-based charity Bloggers Without Borders (BWoB). In October 2011, BWoB announced that the total amount raised for Perillo’s family was $76,430.50, which would be transferred into education savings accounts for her two daughters (Keet 2011).
13. http://www.thepioneerwomansux.com/about/ (accessed July 10, 2011).
14. http://themarlborowoman.com/ (accessed June 3, 2011).
15. Prensky (2001) characterizes digital immigrants as typically retaining a “foot in the past” or an accent, much like people who learn a new language: “The ‘digital immigrant accent’ can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first, or in reading the manual for a program rather than assuming that the program itself will teach us to use it.” Prensky’s theory is not without contention, as several studies claim to debunk the existence of the divide he proposed. See, for example, Bennett, Maton, and Kervin 2008; and Jones and Czerniewicz 2010.
16. Cyberbullying, trolling, griefing, and hosting hate-sites variously describe online behavior intended to provoke, embarrass, or discredit someone or to destabilize a virtual environment such as a discussion forum or a game. For the post in question, see Kellog 2011.
17. http://saywhatmichaelpollan.wordpress.com/ (accessed March 10, 2011).
18. http://www.notquitenigella.com/2007/07/15/about/ (accessed November 10, 2010).