A (very) small-time influencer’s thoughts on why hypervisibility is killing our souls
The first social media usernames I ever created were simply my first and last name. I began my relationship with the internet under the illusion that it was simply an extension of life at school in the computer lab, or at home in the living room. I posted photos of myself on style subreddits and forums beginning at age thirteen, and thought nothing of it. It was just the internet, a place like any other. It wasn’t until a complete stranger approached me at the grocery store to ask how school was going that I realized how deluded I had been. Reader, do you know me? Could you name three things about me? Do you know where I live, work, and go to school? Who my friends are? Do you think less of me when I post a certain way? Is the image you hold of me in your head the same as everyone else?
Admittedly, I am particularly neurotic. I have been blessed with the remarkable ability to turn even the most mundane task into an act of ritual self-harm. However, I barely blame myself when it comes to the negative effects of social media, where even the most well-adjusted users are subject to distortions of reality. Although most of us cooperate happily, online participation has become mandatory. To withdraw from the internet is to withdraw from social life, from current events, from career opportunities, and from easy hits of dopamine and ego reassurance. We have each created digital counterparts, and the discrepancy between these selves and our “real” selves creates tension internally and in our relationships with others.
Baudrillard describes “hyperreality”, a condition in which the real and the not-real coalesce until they become indistinguishable. “More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished”. The artifice of reality is the most appealing angle a social media influencer has at their disposal. Within Instagram, there is even a hierarchy— feed posts and reels (often taken with an SLR and overtly edited) are seen as the most artificial, while stories are immediate, low-stakes, ephemeral slices of life captured through your phone’s camera. All of it is simulacra, and most big accounts count on perceived intimacy as a marketing tactic. Even within the more curated aspects of our feed, the idea of casual “photo dumps” creates the illusion of unmediated reality. I scroll through my camera roll to select the photos that strike a perfect balance of unstudied yet chic, where I seem candid (yet always have my best angle towards the camera). Does this photo of patent stilettos dangling off a bicycle adequately communicate the sexy yet carefree nature I want to project? Does this photo of a torn show poster on scaffolding show my artistic eye? Each photo, no matter how abstract, still has to be representational. Even when I am not in the picture, my presence should be obvious.
After a certain amount of time and posts, there is an inevitable bleed between our two personas, and any misalignment has ramifications. When we make content that incorporates our real life, people will conflate the two. Sometimes this is encouraged. Personas are designed to be infallible; real people are not. Aware of this discrepancy, a not insignificant contingent of people lie in wait or actively hunt for their misgivings to be confirmed. Infractions have gotten smaller, and the punishment has become more extreme. First, it is rarely sufficient to merely dislike someone; there must be a moral failing that makes this dislike justifiable and renders anyone who disagrees immoral themselves. Second, there is a lack of consensus on how digital space functions. One person may post a photo with only their friends as the intended audience, but if a power structure (either a body or an algorithm) detects this photo, it can be examined as if it were posted for the whole world.
There are countless examples of this phenomenon happening every day. A husband and wife were discussing divorce at a restaurant when a stranger overheard their conversation and decided to tweet about it, track down the wife’s Facebook account, and demean her artwork (a topic that had arisen in the couple’s original conversation). By the time the tweets were deleted, they had garnered hundreds of thousands of likes. An intimate and painful moment of mockery had metastasized into something hideously cruel within the span of a few hours. Are we supposed to monitor every interaction for fear that we are being watched? Are we supposed to straighten our backs in case that phone hanging idly in someone’s hand is actually pointed at us? Are we supposed to telegraph every thought to prove something to unknown individuals salivating at the thought of our undoing? The only thing stopping you from being subjected to the judgment of thousands of people tomorrow is luck.
We have designed a system where public figures are no longer the sole class subjected to high levels of scrutiny; merely by participating online, you have implicitly consented to forfeit your privacy. There used to be a distinction, and whether it was true or not, it was generally accepted that celebrities had made a Faustian bargain: rewarded with fame, fortune, or fans in exchange for constant surveillance. Paparazzi were unprincipled but understood as part of the package deal. Now, the distinction has been lost altogether. Everyone, from the A-list to your mother, neighbor, or child, is fair game, having committed the cardinal sin of setting foot in a public space, of which digital space is included.
The inhuman qualities of the internet have made us detached, desensitized, and cruel. We have no sense of boundaries because we often understand the internet to be real life while simultaneously reducing each individual to a combination of digital information. We are often told that “once it’s online, it’s there forever”. A thought that might have once been said aloud between friends is now an albatross that can follow you for years. The belief that every thought or moment posted should be crystallized online as a fixture of our permanent identity is profoundly unempathetic and goes against all beliefs that we are capable of change and growth. We have all made mistakes, hurt people, and had bad thoughts, and to pretend otherwise is to deny our humanity.
Social media also restricts self-growth in its need for consistency. My best advice for becoming a popular Instagram influencer? Find your niche, upload reels 3x a week (feed posts 4x a month), and keep your format identical. People want to know what they’re in for. Use the same hook, the same typefaces, the same location, and the same cadence. Welcome to part three hundred and forty-three in my Get Ready with Lee series. The algorithm discourages experimentation, deviation, and diversity. Before long, you’ve become Flanderized (“the process through which a fictional character’s essential traits are oversimplified and exaggerated to the point where they constitute their entire personality over the course of a serial work”). Because the algorithm is inscrutable and everyone is trying to break through, the techniques of any successful posters are replicated ad nauseam. Content and culture are flattened into a narrow feed of identical short-form videos.
Audience capture is “the phenomenon where an influencer is affected by their audience, catering to it with what they believe it wants to hear or is willing to pay for. This creates a positive feedback loop, which can lead the influencer to express more extreme views and behaviors”. To some degree, we are always responding to our environment and modifying our behavior accordingly, but I think most people would find their lives markedly different if they were not able to post or share photos on social media. The age-old question of whether you actually want something or if you merely want others to see that you have it
The structure of digital life not only affects social and parasocial relationships and comparative self-esteem, but it also splits our self-image into two disparate parts that both compete for our reality. In the grand scheme of the influencer world, I have a relatively small following of about 35,000 on Instagram (and the occasional viral post on Twitter), which still leads to the periodic occurrence of being recognized in public. Just this past month, I was in the middle of a horrible conversation on Stuyvesant Street, sobbing, with snot running down my face, when a (very polite) woman crossed the street to tell me she followed me on Instagram and loved my work. At school, I’ve had peers and professors alike tell me mid-elevator ride that they follow me on Instagram. I never knew how to feel about this information gulch, other than that they knew me, or thought they knew me, before I ever knew them, and that only made the pressure to curate the perfect digital representation stronger.
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On the 26th floor of a Tribeca skyscraper, in the confines of a mirrored dressing room, I am wearing thousands of dollars’ worth of this season’s trend forecast and having a panic attack. I’ve been invited to this ultra-chic, Instagram-friendly showroom for one reason only: the number on my Instagram “following” tab has reached the threshold required to deem me worthy of special treatment. In this case, that means an agreement to post content in exchange for free clothes. With the image of myself in a sheer organza gown and ponyhair stilettos staring back from all four walls, all I can think is how I don’t belong in a place like this. As a piece of expendable furniture, I clash with the chrome coffee table and expensive floral arrangements. There are stress breakouts dotted across my chin. My hair is dry and brassy from the bleach job I did in the bathroom sink last week. I have crooked teeth, bad posture, and patchy makeup that creases when I laugh. All these things make me a completely unremarkable person in the flesh. I’m much cooler online.
I daydream of an idyllic past. It’s not that I’m attracted to conservative fantasies associated with returning to a “simpler” way of life; I merely like to romanticize a time far away from the present hell of overexposure to my own image. I long for a time when I have little knowledge of what I look like, when the idea of my physical self could only be roughly cobbled together from brief reflections in a pond or a polished piece of metal.
I am painfully aware of the feeling of being perpetually watched and compared to my digital doppelganger. If the discrepancy is too wide, you are a fraud who limits their life to only truly living in one realm. If the discrepancy is indiscernible, the danger of confusing reality and online life for the same thing is potent. In either scenario, it is nearly impossible to foster a healthy self-image if you focus on these selves much at all. I’ve had many opportunities to further monetize my Instagram account, but I turned them down. I know I wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure of a complete dissolution of boundaries, of my income relying on maintaining a baseline of focus-tested likability while preserving a positive relationship with my digital identity. I’ve already had to hop on Zoom calls to discuss “best practices” and “inventive strategies” for boosting my lackluster performance online.
“Look,” I imagine my manager saying, “now we have analytics to show us empirically just how unlikable you were last week.” When I bleached my hair from black to blonde over the summer, I soon found out it was statistically disliked by my followers. If I were a masochist who wanted to hone in on what aspects of my profile were driving engagement, I could dig through my insights and find all sorts of data on what people liked and disliked about me. When I lamented this predicament to my coworker, he corrected me by saying engagement metrics weren’t about “my” likability, per se; they were about the character’s likability. All I can say to that is, “But doctor, I am @divineeprovidence.”
These issues are all symptoms of the economic and socio-political framework tech companies have created. By making the implicit and private explicit and public, invisible corporations gain profit and control. We may be aware that the “get ready with me” video we’re watching on TikTok is subtle product placement for Glossier’s new lipstick line, but we generally prefer to live in ignorance about the fact that each selfie posted, each story uploaded, is unpaid labor for the tech giants.
In 1994, Carmen Hermosillo (known by her online moniker humdog) published an essay titled Pandora’s Vox: on Community in Cyberspace, in which she identified the commodification of personality and identity online, even in the internet’s infancy.
“i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.”
The problem has only worsened in the thirty years since Pandora’s Vox was published. We voluntarily record our existences through diary-like cataloging on various platforms, but our data is also covertly logged, bought, sold, and traded on a scale hardly imaginable in 1994. While Hermosillo rightly worries about the implications of bodies such as the FBI possessing all of her available data, government entities are no longer the only ones with such privilege. Identity has shifted from being controlled by the state to being controlled by private entities.
To this end, we’re constantly encouraged to turn our experiences into shareable content. The actual substance is irrelevant so long as it can be redeemed for attention online. Trauma can be turned into viral tweets. Art projects can be posted episodically as progress photos, negating the need to actually produce a finished piece. When I watch videos of online creators, I am often uncomfortably aware that the piece being created is a byproduct of the actual product, the reel. Even the most mundane aspects of everyday life can be posted to our story. Anything and everything is worth something so long as it can be broadcast and acknowledged.
Working as an artist online has its own unique pitfalls. The audience is the impetus for creating new work. The final product is flattened into an image suitable for Instagram’s preferred ratio. All sculptures are actually photographs. There is a deemphasis on materiality. Quantity is always favored by the algorithm over quality. As Brad Troemel writes in his piece Athletic Aesthetics, “Notes, likes, and reblogs serve as the quantitative basis for influence in an art world where critics’ written word has been stripped of power. Art making becomes a fast-paced, high-volume endeavor analogous to the universe of automated high-frequency stock trading”. Some artists have been able to work within the confines of the new medium of social media, carving out their own niche in a way that feels like an appropriate response to our current times, but the constant churn is not healthy or productive for most artists. The gamification of art is overall a net negative.
So why continue? Why not delete the app, as so many other sane people have? I’ll give one example. On New Year’s Eve, I was rushed to the emergency room with flank pain so brutally agonizing I could barely speak to the nurses who admitted me. Luckily, it was only a rogue kidney stone causing blockage, swelling, and infection in my internal organs. It was easily treated, but the subsequent hospital bill was nearly as eye-watering as the experience itself. In the moment I first saw the charges, I felt some gratitude that at least I could rely on my Instagram account to assist me. Although I enjoy my day jobs as a stylist and lab technician, they are functionally meaningless when it comes to alleviating the significant financial burden imposed by the American healthcare system. My current rate for one feed post, usually a 30-45 second reel or 5 slide image carousel, is $2,000-5,000 depending on the complexity of the brief. Story posts, which are very low-maintenance, can be $100-500. I’ve been through a decade of working hard, unforgiving service jobs, and now all I have to do is smile vacuously at the camera while hitting the stilted bullet points emailed to me by my agency.
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Socially, politically, and economically, we are trapped in cyberspace. It shapes our relationships and responds to its handiwork. We are cruel to each other, and we are also cruel to ourselves. We rob ourselves of spontaneity, of a lack of self-consciousness, of private joy. Posting can be a form of evangelizing our choices to others, even or especially when the decisions we’ve made are eating us alive. Most users probably conceive of their social media profiles as representations of their “real lives,” but the opposite is just as true.
If I imagine how my life would look with no one watching, I can barely recognize the shape of it. Attempting to reach the impossible ideals of femininity already imposes a sense of constant, invisible surveillance, but life in the digital age is relentless. For two and a half years, I documented my daily outfit in the school bathroom until I realized last October that the expectation of the photograph was dictating the clothing I wore. I had to look at my routines and ask myself the question we all know and fear: Is this all something I truly want, or is this something I want the appearance of having? In all honesty, a lot of the designer clothes, the glamour, the viral views, the follower count, and the perfect yet candid photos of me at a very chic lower Manhattan club or NYFW afterparty were things I just wanted others to see me with. Some of the things I’ve been the most happy to create were things I knew would never be shared with anyone.
I was recently called an elitist for my outlook on technology, but truthfully, I’m something much worse: I’m naive. I believe in a parallel space. I love to walk aimlessly around Manhattan until I stumble upon something or someone organically. I try not to talk much to my friends over text now. We meet at a well-decorated apartment and share fish stew and olive fougasse and catch up on everything face-to-face. I look for opportunities to carve out privacy or dodge visibility in my life, and to that end, I’ve established four new rules to improve my relationship with social media.
- I will not create work purely for social media
- I will not create content around my “real life” (e.g. get ready with me, content with my friends/partners, day in the life, etc.)
- Story posts will only be about my work
- I will not post progress photos until the work is finished
- No photo dumps
I still ride the train home, tap my bank card, make eye contact with the station surveillance cameras, note the woman taking a surreptitious photo of me, and know there’s no meaningful escape from it all, but I am hopeful. I still look for weak spots. I hope they find me.
Recommended Reading (by authors much more eloquent and educated than I am):
Pandora’s Vox by Carmen Hermosillo
Sociological Theory for Digital Society by Ori Schwarz
Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too-Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka
Electronic Illusions: A Skeptic’s View of Our High-Tech Future by Ian Reinecke
Athletic Aesthetics by Brad Troemel
Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell
Cyberfeminism Index by Mindy Seu
Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History edited by Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro
Backseat Driver 
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