Rick McGinnis:
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
Social media as we know it is nearly a quarter century old, and by now I think we have some idea of its dangers as well as its benefits. There was a reminder of those dangers earlier this year – just one of many we get, and one that you’re likely to miss in the torrent of news, trivia, opinion, propaganda, self-promotion, diversion, irrelevance, and lies that obscure our view of life in the age of “always on.”
In May it was announced that Heather Brooke Armstrong, a onetime web developer and mother of two from Salt Lake City, had committed suicide at home. Armstrong – born Heather Hamilton – rose to fame with social media as the “Queen of the Mommy Bloggers,” as she was described in an article published in the New York Times, written by Lisa Belkin, a journalist who was credited with (but denies) bestowing this honorific on Armstrong.
Armstrong was raised in the Mormon church but left it when she moved to Los Angeles to work at an internet start-up – a job she lost when her family and co-workers discovered the tart, sarcastic accounts she wrote of her life and workplace on her online diary. I remember these early days of what would be called “blogging;” I had my own online diary, and on the burgeoning internet, before we used terms like “social media,” there was a thrill in being read by strangers, often thousands of them, when it seemed like the “web” (such a quaint word, now out of use) was tens of thousands and not millions (or billions) of people.
Losing your job for something you wrote online was so novel that it became known as being “dooced,” after Dooce.com, the name of Armstrong’s website. She reconciled with her family and moved back home with her new husband (and eventual business partner) and shared the story with her readers. In 2003 she became pregnant and began her (initially unwilling) transformation into the first really famous “mommyblogger.”
The appeal of blogging in those early days was simple: for the first time you could make an end run around editors and print media and publish your writing, and the novelty and low density of content in the early days of online media meant finding an audience quickly. For someone in a precarious situation like Armstrong, this was an opportunity; as Belkin writes in her Times article: “So began a brief but golden age of women making themselves heard on the internet, proving what is now assumed but was then brand-new: that a woman writing about her life from her kitchen could make her life into a living.”
But blogging, like all social media, was a medium in search of a business model, and it would find it sooner rather than later, leading to the rise of the “influencer.” Money would come to social media in the form of sponsorships – advertisers paying to get their products plugged by content creators with a big reach – and the mommy blog was an early and obvious place to spend that money.
Parenting, we learn quickly and harshly, isn’t at all how it looks in magazines or commercials, and its inherent messiness – to put it mildly – can make you feel like you’re doing something wrong. This gap between what we want and what we get was the subject of Armstrong’s blogging, but it also makes it a fertile place for social media and the influencer to sell us the ideal, and the influencer economy has been with us long enough that a whole generation has grown up in it. It was also inevitable that it would create a conflict for a creator like Armstrong.
In an Atlantic article titled “The Influence Economy is Warping the American Dream,” Katherine Hu writes that influencer media “puts concerns about class in America into stark relief. Even for young Americans who don’t want to become an influencer, odds are that they at least follow one. Content can be merely a form of entertainment, but it’s also possible that the act of watching someone else vlog (video blog) their beautiful, comfortable life is rooted in a deeper belief that you may never attain what they have. Instead of improving our own lives, we continue to watch, as their subscriber numbers grow and their houses get larger, and our circumstances remain the same.”
In his book Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy, Symeon Brown writes that, to young people and especially those with diminished earnings, “‘influencing’ seems a viable career, providing a potentially luxury lifestyle with a low entry threshold. Once you have figured out how to get people’s attention, you can monetise yourself as both product and salesman.”
Brown continues: “The problem is that success in this world is not as attainable as some make it seem, and addiction to accruing followers by any means necessary is warping human behaviour on and offline. For many influencers, deception is lucrative, and becoming increasingly extreme. There are some feigning their wealth, their followers and even their ethnicity while hawking dubious products to their followers. In recent years, influencers have sold laxatives as health drinks, promoted music festivals that never happened and been caught up in serious fraud and multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes. Companies that sell regulated products such as cosmetic surgery procedures and financial services have increasingly turned to influencers to market their goods, away from scrutiny by the authorities.”
But that’s getting away from the story of Heather Armstrong. At first her blog featured simple banner ads – a novelty back then – but sponsorship deals demanded more. Writing about Armstrong in an Unherd article titled, “The death of the mommyblogger,” Oliver Bateman notes that at the peak of her career Armstrong had “a monthly readership of 8.5 million fans, raking in anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 a month. In 2011, Forbes ranked her 26th on its list of most the influential women in all media. Federated Media, the entity responsible for managing advertisements on her blog, celebrated Armstrong as one of their most prosperous bloggers, a top performer who generated over $1 million a year in ad revenue.”
In time, though, declining revenues and a more crowded marketplace meant that Armstrong had to conform to influencer conventions, and Bateman writes that “the need to shoehorn sponsored content into her blog posts became more pressing. Instead of writing about experiences, Armstrong had to manufacture them to fit the expectations of brand partnerships. The connection between the real Armstrong and the commercialised version of herself that the audience saw became increasingly flimsy.”
Sharing parenting stories inevitably invited criticism, much of it cruel, as the internet got bigger and less collegial. Armstrong’s 2013 divorce, Bateman notes, did a lot to damage her ‘brand:’ “Her loyal readership felt betrayed. Here was an unwelcome reminder that her carefully-told story of a perfect family life was nothing more than fiction.” She suffered from alcoholism and chronic depression, and the strain of providing content ended up forcing her to take a hiatus from Dooce.
“I knew I just couldn’t do it anymore when I was trying to get my kids into the car to play a word game while driving to a ranch in the mountains,” she wrote. “This would be the third of three posts I was to write for an automotive brand about quality time with my kids in the car … Marlo did not want to participate in yet another ruse, and I had to bribe and threaten and cajole to get her in that car. Right as she opened her door, she looked up at me through tears and begged, ‘Please, Mom, don’t make me do this’.”
The influencer has become crucial to marketing, and now dominates some industries. When I was on a travel press junket to Montana in 2016, working for a national daily, an influencer was included – an innovation that my guide and much of the staff at the state tourism board felt was dubious, and forced on them by head office. Three years later I was the only print journalist on a junket to Mexico loaded with twentysomething influencers.
But the career of the influencer can be remarkably short. It helps to build it on already existing celebrity status, but selfie culture and the simple rubric that the influencer is the story tends to reward youth and beauty in front of the camera. She might have been the queen of the mommybloggers, but Armstrong’s status as such was now a generation old, and social media tends not to have a long memory.
Armstrong underwent experimental treatment for her depression in 2017 – ten medically-induced comas with the drug propofol. She wrote about in a book, The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live, but by the time it was published in 2019 the depressive episodes had returned. She stayed sober for two years after an ultimatum by her new partner during Covid lockdowns, but had apparently returned to drinking.
In her last post on Dooce from April of this year, Armstrong mostly sang the praises of her oldest daughter, recalling a line from a song by the English rock band The Cure: “We used to read books together before bed, and I would sing that one line to her every night while stroking the hair away from her eyes.” It’s heartbreaking to read when you know what happens next; such an intimate detail, so tempting to share, but you can’t help but wish that it and so much else had been cherished privately instead of being offered to the world at a retail price.
