Analyzing Media – Page 2 – Jamais Mayville

Elitism

I’m not an “intellectual” in the strict sense — I hate Greek mythology and I absolutely can’t stand when people drop Latin phrases into non-legal or non-medical conversations.

I like to read, but I don’t like to be smug about what I have or haven’t read. (The only thing I’m willing to be smug about is that I absolutely despise Edmund Spenser. I wish I could do to him what Twain threatened to do to Austen, shin bone and all.)

I’m certainly not an elite. I spent the first four years of my life living beside a railroad track — so the phrase wrong side of the tracks is more familiar to me than Ivory Tower, even though I have been degree’d up. I’m credentialed, I guess, but I feel like the same little girl who stood out in the yard, waving to the train conductors, begging them to honk the bellowing horn. They always did, from what I remember — and those are fond memories.

Before I digressed, I was saying that I’m not an elite. I go back and forth between two tabs on my phone — the New Yorker and r/datingoverthirty. I look at the first one when I want to make myself upset over not having written the Great American Short Story Collection, and I look at the second when I want to remind myself that being 29 and unmarried is okay, because nearly every single person is either lonely or messed up. Or both.

All of that’s to say that I balance my high-brow interests with my low-brow interests, and that I often realize that my low-brow interests are more relevant to my own tastes, my own behavior, my own lived experiences.

I will never write the Great American anything, because I enjoy reading more about literary gossip — and the bad behavior of writers — than I would enjoy trying to emulate their work. Similarly, I’ve yet to find someone I want to marry — but I feel like that’s more within my reach, and that it isn’t an elitist aspiration to find a partner.

There are two “elitist” hills I will Green Boots myself on. The first is that I don’t enjoy the show Friends. I don’t haaate it, although I understand why other people do. But I feel like the Venn diagram between “people who think Friends is the funniest TV show ever” and “people who liked playing Chubby Bunny at church youth retreats” is probably close to a circle.

I think it’s perfectly wonderful to watch that show, if you really enjoy it, because it isn’t hurting anybody. It’s a harmless show — but it’s also a toothless show. And that’s its biggest sin.

The second “elitist” hill I’ve climbed involves reality TV. As a teenager, I hated Jersey Shore, because I thought it was shallow. Guess what? It is shallow. That’s the whole point.

Most of the MTV reality shows know that they’re shallow. I don’t mind reality shows that understand and actively embrace how depthless they are. The reality TV shows I can’t stand are programs like The Bachelor, where finding love — something that should be sincere or fun — is trivialized in the form of competitive dates. The idea of competitive dating is bonkers.

That being said, dating is inherently competitive—to a certain degree. All of the eligible singles in your area are also looking to find someone, and while that doesn’t mean that everyone else is your direct competitor, it usually means that you have to find a way to make yourself seem like the Most Appealing Bachelor(ette). You want your partner to feel like they won a prize.

At the end of the day, I still have more in common with the people who watch Friends and The Bachelor. I would much rather listen to them talk about relationship journeys than to listen to anything about The Faerie Queene or dawn with her rose-red fingers.

Life is too short to be (too) pretentious. Sometimes, you have to eat ice cream for dinner — just because that’s what’s available, or just because that’s what all your friends are having.

The Squelching ‘20s

“It suxx that I was born in 2047. I wish I’d been a 2020s kid!”

I want to preface this by saying that I’m not a bitter or mean person. Whenever someone says something like that, it generally means that they’re about to say something wildly cruel, ignorant, or insufferable.

I promise that this isn’t the case. (This time, anyhow.)

Let me start back at the beginning — that manufactured quote, about life in the 2020s — and life as it’s going to be perceived by future generations.

I try not to fall back on pessimism, but it’s safe to say that we’re living through some wild times right now. In spite of that, in twenty or thirty years, our kids (or our grandchildren, or perhaps even our great-grandchildren) are going to romanticize life in the ‘20s.

But these are not the Roaring ‘20s. These are the Gasping ‘20s, the Sobbing ‘20s, the Squelching ‘20s.

Certain things have made life in the 2020s so … disconcerting. There are many lovely things happening right now that are worth celebrating — but there are plenty of trends that are less than swoon-worthy.

The same way that Millennials have cringed over photos of their Spandexed, bemulleted, and acid-washed ancestors? Generations Beta and Gamma will scream-laugh when they see an IG Reel featuring their grandpa’s gas-guzzling, vinyl-wrapped, Carolina-tilted Ford F-250 Super Duty. They will hoot and holler when they see their meemaw’s Shein dresses and Fashion Nova janties.

And I’m not a hater — I swear! After seeing The List — a compilation of the side effects of pregnancy, meticulously logged by a young TikTok user — I felt like I could do something similar. I wanted to start a catalog-slash-index of the worst trends/moments/crises of the 2020s.

And so I did.

Here’s a running list of things that have made the 2020s less than romantic:

anti-intellectualism
artificial intelligence, misuse of
cryptocurrency
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization
dogs inside restaurants
facial-recognition technology, abuse of
fast fashion
high-beam headlights
hostile architecture
housing crises (mortgages, rent, and homelessness)
hydraulic fracturing
inclement weather, higher frequency
insurance ads, unfunny
insurance companies, greed
janties/jiapers
low-rise jeans, revival of
main character syndrome
Marvel movies, ubiquity of
mass shootings
media illiteracy
monthly subscription services
multi-level marketing schemes
non-service animals, service vests on
opioid crisis
over-the-shoe bodysuits
pandemics
pivot-to-video
plastic, single-use
politicians, authoritarian
price gouging
public health crises
1. See pandemics and opioid crisis.
push notifications
road rage, increasing
Shein
1. See fast fashion.
side hustles
spam callers/text messages
streaming services, enshittification of
SUVs, increasingly large
tip creep, self-service checkouts and
tornadoes and tropical storms, increasing prevalence of
Twitter, downfall of
vaccine denial
vindictive landlords/AirBnB hosts
wage gaps

I believe that the only way we’ll be able to counteract the worst of this stuff is by talking about it, so … let’s not sweep it under the rug. Let’s acknowledge it. Let’s talk about it.

And in the meantime, I’ll keep adding more entries to this list.

Af-Flix-ion

Me: I’m looking for a documentary about —

Netflix: Got it, friend! 😎

Me: … okay. The documentary doesn’t involve crime or celebrities, right?

Netflix: Uhhhh. Let me look again.

Me: I’m just looking for something about, like, an obscure moment in history, or a scandal in a competition, or a person who makes cool sculptures, or the rise and fall of KMart, or —

Netflix: Yeah. We don’t do stuff like that. We have Kaled Over: Death of A Vegan Pizza Heiress and Load€d: The Big ₩ild Bit¢oin $tory.

Netflix: Take it or leave it.

I Am A Publisher

A while back, on another blog, I wrote about the Golden Age of Blogging.

Between 2004 and 2009, you could surf the web and find all sorts of blogs.

Mormon mommy blogs, with super short paragraphs and long, long photo dumps. Blogs run by German high schoolers, where they’d wax poetic about their favorite music — My Chemical Romance, Justice, Tokio Hotel. (Those were the usual suspects.) Blogs that were only created for a class project, only to be abandoned a few months later.

I actually enjoyed those the most. It was fascinating to find a three-to-six-month time frame preserved in amber like that. A digital scrapbook of sorts. I love it!

But … that was then. And this is now.

I have to say, I only got back into long(er) form writing when I started (1) posting essays on Medium, (2) blogging on WordPress again, and (3) writing a monthly Substack newsletter.

I do all of this for fun, by the way. Not for money. Although …

Where’s that Donate button? There’s got to be a Donate button or block or widget that I can insert on here and … Nah. I won’t do it.

This time.

Anyway, I’m not here to give tips on how to make money by writing short little blog posts. I’m just here to say that I only got back into long form writing because of the downfall of Twitter.

Between 2009 and 2023, I wrote roughly 21,000 tweets, most of which I didn’t delete.

I look back now and laugh at this — but when I was 19 or 20, I realized that (like many others before me) I wanted to write a novel. I figured I needed to write around 75,000 words — so I was constantly doing math. 500 words a day, and I’ll be done in just a few months! 100 words a day, and … I can spread this out over the years, right?

No book materialized. Not even a novella. I will say, I kept a 200-word schedule up for about a month or so, which is impressive. I had a 700-day language-learning streak on Drops, which I also eventually quit keeping up with. But other than the streak on Drops, I would have to say that my regular attempts at writing …

Well, it gave me something to be proud of. I was proud that I kept chipping away at it. And I did churn out a lot of words — some of them were pretty good. But there were no novels, no novellas, and no short stories.

I repurposed some of the more colorful descriptions into poems, and I compiled those into a little chapbook. It sounds pretentious — and maybe it is. 🫠 I can see how it might seem pretentious, even though I genuinely love poems and poetry. Even the ol’ epic poetry. But I digress.

I never managed to produce a novel, despite my best attempts at word-counting.

Like counting calories, which can also feel like wasted effort.

When I saw, though, that I’d posted 21,000 tweets, I felt even sillier. There they were — my 75,000 words!

If each tweet were at least six words long — and I’d say many of mine were longer— then I’d have 126,000 words under my belt. A novel and a novella.

I realized — about a month ago, actually, when they were threatening to purge inactive accounts and the accounts of deceased users — that someday, all of those tweets would probably disappear.

So I immediately downloaded my archive and uploaded everything I could to the Internet Archive. It took about a day and a half, but it’s there now. It’s preserved.

Until someone goes after THAT website — Lord, don’t let him try to acquire the Internet Archive! Millions of pages will be taken down overnight. My chest is hurting at the thought of that happening. “OhhhhhhmyyyGodddd, nowayyyeeayyeeeayyyyyyaaaay!”

But … whew. I need to calm myself down right quick. Genuine terror struck my heart. Damn.

In any case, I may never publish a novel — although I am working on writing one. Just for me. Just for fun.

But even if I never publish a novel, I have “published” things online. Forget the quotation marks — we can just drop those. I don’t need to try to qualify what I’m saying here, because this is a blog entry, and not a scholarly paper. I can just be literal, without trying to write defensively.

The Internet has enabled all of us to be publishers. With just a single click, I am my own Simon & Schuster.

Now I am become the Big 1, publisher of words.

I have published tweets. I have published blog posts. I have published newsletters. I have published poems on Wattpad and Archive of Our Own. I have published reviews on Letterboxd and Goodreads. And it only took one click to call myself a publisher.

Someone else is doing the hosting, I realize. But I am the writer, the editor, the marketing department, the sales department, and the publisher.

The sales department is being really lazy, by the way. One of them suggested adding a Donate button to the blog instead of actually trying to sell anything. Can you believe that?!

… I have to go now. I need to add publisher to my LinkedIn.