Why I don’t think online vulnerability works as well as people want it to:
—Vulnerable literally means hurtable. You’re giving people information about how to hurt you. Sometimes they’ll do it!
—Taboo subjects, like sex and money, are taboo or a bunch of reasons, and one of the reasons is that they are extremely hard to check and easy to lie about. People are saying it’s valuable to talk about these things because otherwise we don’t know about them, people’s sex lives and financial situations are fairly private. For the same reason, it’s really hard to call bullshit on someone’s lying.
—People don’t have to be actively lying to convey false information! They can just be fooling themselves. Just as it’s easier for people to lie online, it’s easier for people to make identities based on fooling themselves online. It’s just harder to factcheck!
—Online dynamics mean that even if everyone is honest, surprising and controversial honesty (which will almost always be less representative honesty) will come to the top.
That doesn’t mean that relationships formed online, or online content, can’t be valuable and emotionally deep. I think a better way to create this depth is to shrug off the vulnerability paradigm and embrace the here-and-now paradigm.
Irvin Yalom is a psychiatrist known for his banger case studies. He’s also a really important theorist of group therapy, and one of the things he especially hammered home was the importance of a here-and-now orientation in group therapy.
To simplify a lot, there are two basic ways to think about therapy as a tool for helping people. You can think about therapy as a place where the patient brings in stuff from real life for the therapist to process (or to help the patient process). This paradigm has a few problems. The patient could be lying or wrong about what is happening in the outside world; it would be difficult for the therapist to check.
The other model is the here-and-now orientation. Therapy is a place where the patient will do the things they do outside of therapy. By focusing on what’s actually happening in therapy, and changing that, the patient changes their patterns in the outside world.
Group therapy was probably invented to save money on doctors. And if you think of therapy as a situation that primarily processes things that happened outside of therapy, group therapy is a scam. Everybody gets less time to tell the doctor their trauma!
But if you use a here-and-now orientation, then group therapy is great, because it offers the patients a lot more here-and-now to work with under the therapist’s supervision. There are group dynamics to play with!
To the degree that someone wants to use online social interactions for therapeutic purposes, I think that on the margin, people might find more freedom in somewhat moving away from the vulnerability model of kind of pouring out the tough-to-talk-about things that have happened to them in their online life, and being more curious about how they’re existing in the here-and-now online.
What about simulating vulnerability to create a parasocial relationship with one’s followers? Surely this okay (and even encouraged)
People who insist that you should be vulnerable generally want to hurt you.