I don't think we give enough credit to the fact that content creation is a form of public speaking. "Block people you went to high school with" is an evergreen content pillar for a reason—when you practice empathy for an audience who wants to make and share things online, you inevitably bump up against their fear of being seen, particularly by those people who they don't trust to not make fun of them.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I work on a new offering for what you might call "thought leaders," those subject matter experts who've devoted a career to learning a lot about a particular topic and now spend their days waiting for TEDx to call and offer them a stage.
The premise of my argument is that all of the Internet's a stage—that there's nothing stopping someone who knows a lot something from talking about it to people who might be interested. It requires some upfront effort to get your work in front of people who care, but there are, inevitably, people who care.
This is one of the many things I find beautiful about being online.
The problem, then, is that a virtual audience is not just made up of those conference attendees with a vested interest in your research or scholarship, but also...everyone else. This leads to a fear of visibility, a kind of digital stage fright. I hear it expressed a lot as what I would call “group chat anxiety.”
What if I try in public and someone screenshots it and puts it in a group chat somewhere making fun of me?
What if I go viral for all the wrong reasons?
What if my video floats across my ex's For You page, reigniting critiques I've spent thousands of dollars in therapy unhooking myself from?
In other words, how do we try in public knowing that other people, including people we don't necessarily trust or like very much, will see?
The truth is there's no way to avoid it. I wish I could tell you that I have developed a toughness to snarky comments or rude remarks, but I haven't. Not in the slightest.
Once, I got a comment on TikTok calling me a scammer for selling a $2,000 marketing service. I was at a farmer's market when I saw (and promptly deleted) the reply, but it rolled around in my head for hours, soiling the rest of my day.
I felt significantly more hesitant to share about my work in the weeks following, resistant to talk about the strategy side of my business on the platform. I even briefly considered taking all prices off of my site, a choice that would’ve been decidedly misaligned with my business' ethics and my personal values.
A few years back, I took a leadership course for women. In one of the exercises, we were asked to personify the voice of our “inner critic,” identifying the shape and form of our spiraling unkind thoughts.
The trouble was, I couldn’t put a voice or a face to my inner critic. Every time I tried to imagine what it looked like, all I saw were mean tweets.
It's funny, isn't it, how much of our time we spend writing and creating and filming things in an attempt to earn attention, only to feel overwhelmed and terrified the moment that attention scales up?
If all of the Internet's a stage, it's also true that the house lights are often down—it's hard to see who is in the crowd, whether they're yawning or grinning or rearing up to throw a rotten tomato our way. This is the inevitable risk we take when we step up to the mic and try out loud.
It's scary. It's vulnerable. It's often exhausting on a cellular level. It can feel like screaming into a void.
When it doesn't work, we forget that we are negotiating with a billion-dollar algorithm and place the blame squarely on ourselves—as if the value of our ideas is the only variable in the experiment, as if there is not an entire economy currently hellbent on monopolizing our attention and selling it back to us in the form of digital advertising.
I don't know the answer. But when in doubt, I like to go where people are trying. Open mic nights, art walks, buzzy cafes where I can eavesdrop on other people's Zoom calls. These moments of common humanity remind me that I am not the only one who is attempting to do something that feels monumental, important, life-giving. That I am not the only one standing in front of my art and asking people to care.
Allowing myself to see and be seen with others reminds me that I am not alone.