Several informants confessed that negative comments or e-mail “flames” from audience members had upset them or even made them cry. Even people who claimed that negative comments didn’t affect them had developed coping mechanisms. Adam Jackson said: “I announced after that I’m going to start tagging negative comments and I’m going to turn it into a blog one day. So I did a hash tag, ‘#Dick.’ So from now on, when I get just a really asinine comment I’ll re-tweet it and hash tag it ‘#Dick.’ So now when someone says, ‘why are you so bitter over Twitter?’ I’ll just send them that to that hash tag and they can see all of that negative crap I get.” Ariel Waldman turned to her friends who had gone through similar things to ask for help. … People also found ongoing self-surveillance to be anxiety provoking, because they were engaged in a continuous loop of measuring themselves against an audience. As Glenda Bautista said, “A lot of my own anxieties have been developed by online judgments.”

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 511