I read about Justin Hall’s retirement from blogging in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. It was also the first time I’d ever heard of him or his site, although he’s apparently been at it for nearly a decade. A few hours after I read the article, a friend mentioned Hall in an email to me, and the coincidence prompted these thoughts over the course of the day:
First, some props: Hall’s clearly a forward-looking thinker, and I respect his creativity. Here on my site, in this post, I’m following a trail he blazed along with a handful of others, and his personal obsession is now having a tremendous effect on the world at large.
However, I spent some time looking through Hall’s site (now converted into a searchable archive) and watched his farewell video, and it gave me pause. I encourage you to take the time to watch it as well, but be advised that it’s intensely emotional–it’s not graphic in any way, but his anguish is difficult to watch. Hall spends a portion of the video talking on the phone with a friend, and these quotes from that conversation seemed telling:
I used to write about [my life] on my website…but I can’t write about it anymore. I can’t write about people–they don’t want to be there, and I have nothing to write about. I have nothing to write about if I can’t write about people… I publish my life on the fucking internet and it doesn’t make people want to be with me–it makes people not trust me, and I don’t know what to do about it.
If I want to make art that I believe in, do I have to sacrifice meaningful personal relationships? Is that what it costs? And then should I give up my art? Then should I give up what I do? Should I give up what I do? And can I find something else? I don’t know what the fuck that would be.
Earlier in the day, before I’d seen Justin’s site, having only read about it in the Chronicle, I’d written to my friend, “[Hall’s] blog seems to be the sort that gave blogging a bad name for a while–the extroverted loner geek who feels compelled to put his inner life online, tapping into a disturbing voyeuristic streak in this culture…Uh, news flash, Justin: the real world still matters.”
Having now seen the site and the harrowing video, I’m ashamed that I used such a flippant tone, because Hall is clearly in pain. But I can’t retract the statement, because it seems even more accurate in light of Hall’s body of work.
Hall represents blogging taken to an unhealthy and compulsive extreme. In his own words blogging is “what he does.” It’s as if the events in his own life don’t actually happen and the people around him aren’t real until he writes about them and posts it online.
To Hall’s great credit, he’s realized that this behavior is driving people away from him, presumably because they feared simply becoming grist for his mill–hence his retirement from blogging. That’s clearly a positive step, and I wish Hall the best as he moves on with his life.
But I’m not optimistic, because the mere existence of the video, and the self-conscious and highly public nature of Hall’s ostensible retreat into private life serve only make the problem worse. It’s as if he’s addicted to the attention as a means of easing his loneliness, even though he knows it will only serve to deepen his isolation.
And perhaps saddest of all, I believe that Hall’s genius–his creative and groundbreaking use of this new medium–is actually inseparable from his inability to establish an appropriate boundary between the private and the public spheres. In a sense, Hall’s suffering has paved the way for an online world in which it’s much easier to determine where that boundary should lie, and the rest of us will all benefit as a result. I just hope it’s not too late for him.