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Dave Bidini: My ego on the Internet

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More from Dave Bidini | @hockeyesque

Artist's representation, via the film Troll 2, of people who write hateful things on the Internet.

Dave Bidini on how a writer deals with Facebook, Twitter and the web

A few years ago, I taught a songwriting course at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies. I was invited to participate in a “How to Raise Your Profile on Social Media” workshop with two other writers and one online director who worked for a major publisher. I went in feeling wearied by the industry’s obsession with fitting a square peg into a round hole: Getting generally unsocial men and women to vault themselves into the public forum of Web dialogue and Twitter feeds and Facebook likes. Once the panel started, my weariness grew into exasperation which grew into anger which grew into outrage. I told the crowd of 50 aspiring writers that the artist as public figure was overrated and the nature of book sales tied to the author’s online savvy was an unproven science. Two of the panellists — both writers who’d parlayed online success into actual literary success — protested, and we had what would be described as a lively discussion about art, the Internet, commerce and doing something you didn’t want to do in order to do something you did. Then we adjourned for drinks. Despite the changing essence of books and publishers, some things, it seems, will forever stay the same.
Last week, I was reminded of this panel for a few reasons; one of them good, the other not so much. While listening to this year’s excellent edition of Canada Reads, I decided to send Newfoundland’s Lisa Moore a note, having heard through her defender, comedian Trent McLelland, that her novel, February, was based on a widow’s life in the aftermath of the Ocean Ranger tragedy (I have a song, When Winter Comes, written partly about this event). I’d been a panellist — and competitor — on Canada Reads with Moore a few years back (the King Leary year) and we’d had our scrapes. At one point, the discussion became nasty — she called me a “lazy” reader — and we hadn’t had much contact since. But my memories of the experience were good, and with her book in the running, as On a Cold Road was last year, I thought I might send her a note of support.
Opening my laptop, I searched for her contact. Scouring Twitter, nothing turned up; the same with Facebook. I was almost compelled to call my fellow U of T panellists — surely, they could be found online — and point to Ms. Moore’s success as a refutation of all they’d argued: that, in order to be a successful writer, you needed a recognizable digital footprint. As far as I could tell, Moore had none, yet her work was not only considered for Canada Reads but won the thing. Not only that, but her book had been voted into the Top 10 by online balloting, a campaign clearly not engineered by Moore herself. This was, in fact, the opposite of my experience getting On a Cold Road into the final group. After weeks of self-voting, my IP address was blocked from the site.
Once, after trying to coax The Replacements’ songwriter Paul Westerberg to come to Toronto to participate in a hockey tournament (he started playing in earnest a few years ago), I asked his manager if I might send him an email. He told me, “I don’t think Paul has ever been on a computer. This doesn’t just mean that he doesn’t own a computer. He, literally, has never used one.”
Joseph Boyden almost never posts on Facebook; Guy Vanderhaeghe still writes letters. One writer is, relatively, young, the other is older. For me — and without sounding as if I’m flattering myself — writing has always been the one art form you cannot fake, and, because of this, good writers find audiences, and no torrent of social media will convince a readership that something is good when it is not. Besides,  it doesn’t matter whether a writer has acne or bad hair or smells like an old sponge. This isn’t to say that good skin and shiny hair doesn’t help, but it’s not a deal breaker. While reading a great novel, no one has ever found an unsavoury photo of the writer online and then stopped. One of the best things about going to see an author read is that, like rock ’n’ roll bands in the ’70s and ’80s, their look and personality and voice and manner is revealed without any preconception, YouTube trailers be damned.
That said, I am on the Internet a lot. I do it because I like it. I like the exchange between readers and listeners because, growing up, I held close those bands and writers who reached back whenever I reached out. All of my musical heroes — Ramones, Stompin’ Tom and Rush — were good to me in this way. They gave me great memories of being a reader, a listener and a fan. The first time I ever read anything in public, it was from a story I’d written for a book called Original Six, which hadn’t yet come out. It was at the old Upper Canada Brewery in a tent, and I was called to the stage by one of my heroes, Paul Quarrington, who introduced the work in glowing terms — something he didn’t have to do, but did anyway. Whether it was true or not, it made it easier for me to survive the night and every reading that came after.
When people write to me online, I try to answer. I’ve only ever had good experiences, but last week, after my column about Chris Hadfield’s song and dance from space coming at the expense of planetary awareness in a time of impending environmental peril, the online world spilled with anger and vitriol. People have been critical of my work before, but it’s usually reserved for the letters page of the Post. This time, my Facebook page was flooded with opinions and I was assailed on Twitter. The first arrow arrived from one of the column’s subjects, and things grew worse from there.
I wrote the column using the voice of a young teenager, and, in it, the character — actually the character’s older brother and his teacher — implicated the Barenaked Ladies in all of this, having written a song with Mr. Hadfield (which I hadn’t yet heard). This upset my friend, Tyler Stewart, the Barenaked Ladies’ drummer and vocalist. I’ve known Stewart for almost 25 years, and his tweet hit me like a punch to the rib cage, making me instantly remorseful that he’d interpreted my use of his band as a critical indictment of them, when nothing could be further from the truth. I sent him a few emails, replied on Twitter, but heard nothing. He’s probably still mad — if it were me, it would take me a while, too — but I wrote to tell him that I would apologize in this space, so let me do that. I’m sorry. Maybe I should have written about William Shatner’s encounter with the astro-tainer instead. I have no history with him and, unlike Stewart, I won’t be seeing him on the ice. That’ll happen tonight. At 7 p.m., Upper Canada College, in case you want to come see if he either hugs or hits me.
After asking people on my Facebook page to measure the nature of my portrait of the band, the comments became an evaluation of my worth and ability as an artist. Some of it was fascinating, and, in a way, helpful: “Writing as a character dilutes the message and is too indirect.” “I usually like your stuff but this wasn’t properly considered.” “I don’t know why you had to slag BNL to get your point across.” It was a strange, unforced public forum, a global critical community. During my U of T panel, no one ever suggested that the digital sphere could be a way of understanding one’s work, but that’s how it played out, at least for a time. Then, because the Internet is magical for the same reason that it’s dreadful, the appraisals turned mean and venomous. Decent trolls became less decent and I wished I’d never turned on my computer.
There were personal attacks, which is the way these things tend to go. I wrote a few responses I shouldn’t have; blocked people who probably didn’t deserve blocking. I participated in the frenzy of name-calling when I should have just logged off, and, in the end, I sent out apologies because I shouldn’t have responded the way I had.
One of the rarely discussed aspects of digital life is how writers are supposed to deal with getting savaged. I am, generally, an indelicate flower, but the attacks were hard to take; strangers saying terrible things about me, and, in some cases, lifetime fans writing notes about how they feared I was losing my ability. I tried pushing all of this to the margin, but if it wasn’t easy for me, it would have been less easy for someone not used to this kind of interaction. Artists may be able to widen their audience online, but they also leave themselves exposed. And despite having written about far more contentious subjects far more directly, it was this column that triggered the dark chorus, blind-siding me and affecting me more deeply because of the unexpected nature of the digital assault. In the end, I self-therapied by writing what you are reading now, blotting out the rest of the world and staying inside my head. I’d advise writers to live there for as long as possible.

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