Finding a home online

Rachel Rayner, 27, faffs around on Facebook and Twitter for a living, but she says the internet is more than just her job, it’s where she spends most of her time.

"When I tried to think of the things in my life that came from the real physical world, I struggled. All the good things in my life came from online," says Rachel Rayner. "It's where I exist most of the time, and the ‘meat space’ is this inconvenient thing you have to put up with until you can get back online.”

While her job is as a “social media expert” (which means she actually does more than just faff around – though no one is quite sure what), she also organises craft and activist groups online. Twitter is her spiritual home, where she says she met some of her closest friends, her flatmate, and how she got her job – through having a self-described "good Twitter account".

She can remember the first time she was shown the internet, sometime in the mid-nineties. At the time, she couldn’t understand the point. Why would you look something up on Yahoo.com, when you could go to the library? She describes her first internet experience as underwhelming.

But in her teens, she spent time cultivating intense friendships on message boards – on slow dial-up internet.  “It’s not a decision I regret, because have you seen teenagers? I didn’t catfish, I was just always myself, but I could hang out with other people, who were a little older, who I was genuinely interested in talking to – rather than the awful people I went to high school with.”

Rayner says she sometimes misses those friendships – she hasn’t found a platform like those message boards since. She got into Facebook quite late, and isn’t a massive user.

I have a separate phone for work, and when I’ve had more than one drink, I turn it off, and put it in my bag...So there’s no way I can accidentally get myself fired by doing drunk selfies from the work account.”

She shares a lot of her life online. And she’s aware that, with more than 1300 Twitter followers – including colleagues – she’s sharing that to a wide audience. Recently, she blogged, in great detail, about getting an IUD, and had to be aware that John from development and her bosses would read it. She also shares her relationships, her health, and her family.

But she says, she’s careful. She only puts the things online she would talk about in company. What she doesn't share are the things she would only talk to her close friends about. She tries to be careful, especially when there is drama involving other people from the internet.

And she tries to be fair. Her current boyfriend gets a pseudonym in her online chatter, despite the fact that he’s also on Twitter. “I don’t want to tag him in every single Twitter mention and have that be searchable. It’s pretty easy to figure out, I think, and our relationship is nowhere near secret, but just giving him that layer of anonymity I think is fair.”

And of course, as someone who works online, she has to navigate keeping her work internet life separate from her personal one. “I have a separate phone for work, and when I’ve had more than one drink, I turn it off, and put it in my bag,” she says. “So there’s no way I can accidentally get myself fired by doing drunk selfies from the work account.” And she has occasionally deleted a work tweet – when she realised that a joke was less funny and more inappropriate.

Like any written communication, that particular misunderstanding can happen easily when you put everything online. But Rayner says being able to figure out tone comes with practice. “You can pick out an advertorial on TV from the tone, can't you? It’s almost the same online.”