This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange Page A

of our best artists have found themselves tangled up in it. Anyone who has posted a picture of herself toasting champagne with the VIPs from a pit of self-loathing or tweeted the day’s workout stats while weeping into a quart of raspberry sorbet has felt a tiny measure of this particular sting for themselves. The Internet is the ultimate realist medium—real people, real time, real messy—yet everything about the way we use it to perform our lives (and to a certain extent our culture) for one another confirms the manufactured terms of our beloved reality entertainment. It’s all about the edit.
    That we seem intent on forgetting this suggests the extent to which we are drifting from a shared sense of reality. The line between performer and performance is long gone. The line between performer and audience continues its slow fade. In a time when all of the information we consume in a day—whether it’s a news report out of Libya or a YouTube search for a Billie Holiday song or a long-forgotten friend’s post on your Facebook wall—falls under the rubric of “content,” the line between performers is blurring as well. After national self-consciousness comes a nation of self-conscious individuals, and after that a homogenization of the nation’s central precepts: money, property, and public recognition shift from shared values to rights. Which is how they are fed back to us, until suddenly the health of an entire country depends on the constant retail of fiction: stories about homes we might own, stocks that might soar, how we might look, the lives we might lead and more crucially advertise in a kind of panicked, perpetual present haze of—and I would urge you to consider the term— status updates .
    The new American dream is to build a really bitching personal brand, and the result of all that tap dancing on all those individual platforms is a pervasive kind of narrative decadence. We race to consume and regurgitate the hour’s large and small events for each other like patricians in a postmodern vomitorium—to know them first, translate them into bitter capsule form fastest, and be shocked or stirred or perceived as in any way less than totally savvy about these things the least. Even within our self-contained realities we become dulled to what’s real and what’s not, and further desensitized to what lies behind our fellow performers’ virtual scrims. From the vantage of the individual platform, even the narrative of tragic greatness seems less a product of secular anxiety—a sort of surrogate Christian allegory—than one more of the stories we devour out of self-interest. We take heart instead of horror in the idea that anyone can be famous, but we are performers with no interest in dying for each other. It seems related that actual death is by far the most awkward thing for the Internet to handle. Because it’s so real.

    4
    When I was nine, I saved up for my first biography, a pulpy, mass-market life of Michael Jackson, the kind with scratchy paper and those cold, thick-paged pictures in the middle. I didn’t own Thriller . I didn’t need to own Thriller—Thriller was circulating in the water supply—but I wanted that book.
    For a while it became a part of my body. I carried it around, slept with it, and spent afternoons cradling it on the couch. I studied Michael’s modest upbringing, homing in on the first appearance and acknowledgment of his talent. I thrilled to the timeline of its development—from the moment it was discovered, then discovered again, then once again, until it made its way to me. I sought out the story, hoping in some sense to organize the energy irradiating my television screen.
    Because despite being an enormously gifted and dexterous vocalist, Michael was first and then foremost a visual phenomenon: See how young he is! Look at those little feet go! And with his brothers, the way talent