The Business of Being Yourself
Identity in the Age of Social Media
Overheard on Facebook: “Madras Madness?! If you know me, you know I’m currently in heaven — at Vineyard Vines.”
“So thankful for this amazing woman who threw me the best surprise birthday party ever. No other way I’d rather spend an evening. Life doesn’t get much better than this.”
“Fireside chat with my good friend Wendy Kopp, founder of TFA — at Harvard Kennedy School.”
It is no longer enough just to live in the world. Now we must also package our lives for others’ consumption. “Sharing” is a deceptively innocent term for these performances. It suggests an authentic glimpse, the candid, uncensored disclosure of some truth about ourselves or our lives in the name of civic, community-building principles. Marketing—or, to use a popular term, “self-branding”—is closer to the function that digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter really serve: they are fundamentally promotional tools.
In this regard, their use by professionals and corporate brands makes sense. It’s not even a particularly novel phenomenon, but an extension of the reputation-building in which companies and institutions have long been engaged: public relations for the digital age. What’s new is that social media has allowed branding to seep from our professional into our personal lives. In the case of pre-professional teenagers and students, the personal is in fact where branding starts. Declarations like the ones featured above have become completely commonplace occurrences. Everyone is in the business of making a name for themselves as entrepreneurs of their own digital identities. This merging of individualism and self-starter business savvy seems, on the one hand, like the apotheosis of the American dream. But there’s also something rather surreal about a culture in which ordinary individuals promote themselves in the manner of corporate entities.
What really happens when we brand ourselves? What is it that we’re doing when we post a picture or a status update?
We’re cultivating an impression to be received in a certain way by our audience. We’re seeking validation of the image of ourselves that we want to project into the world. You could call it identity formation or personal expression, but “identity” possesses a metaphysical, even spiritual, connotation. Self-branding on social media, by contrast, is a deeply commercial undertaking. It turns civic interactions into consumer relations in which your friends and followers become patrons of the performance you produce. It infuses relationships with a capitalist logic. Indeed, Alison Hearn at the University of Western Ontario sees in our social media interactions the “erosion of any meaningful distinction between notions of the self and capitalist processes of production and consumption.” We win over followers like companies capturing markets. We quantify our personal success in the number of likes and comments we receive. In the process of managing our personal brands, we’re alienated from ourselves, from genuine human relations, and from that elusive promise we call authenticity.
There’s no clear financial endgame to these commercial interactions. (Except, of course, in the case of people whose social media brands are so successful that they gain sponsors and contracts. More on that later.) For the most part, branding is simply a way of being. It signals an evolution in our self-help philosophy from an emphasis on self-improvement to a belief that success is more a matter of self-packaging—finding the right filter with which to present ourselves.
At the same time, social media attempts to maintain the illusion of spontaneity. Olivia Bee, who has become a Flickr phenomenon by posting pretty, pink-washed snapshots of her daily life, insists, “It’s all honest, you know? That’s the important part for me, being honest about everything.” She compares her photos to a diary, as though they offer some kind of raw exposé. But the pictures are thoroughly staged, even if only for aesthetic ends.
It’s a common misapprehension and we labor willfully under the illusion of social media’s sincerity, posting comments with typos and impassioned, of-the-moment reactions to breaking news—as though because our digital communication appears online instantaneously, it must present our unedited selves. This thinking recalls political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s belief that we disclose our true selves through our instinctive responses to contingent events. But the spontaneity of social media is pretended. It doesn’t disclose ourselves but only the pretense of how we would like to be disclosed.
In this sense, digital platforms offer a kind of inverted, secular confessional. We “share” our lives, we offer ourselves up to judgment, but it’s judgment on our own terms: a carefully curated self, cleansed of any incriminating evidence.
The validation we receive through likes, views, and retweets is understandably uplifting. Unfortunately, our need for it easily becomes insatiable. Just as capitalism must always find new markets to conquer, so we must always find new ways to get likes. For corporate brands, this is business-as-usual: the response of consumers is an important gauge of success. But what happens when we behave like brands, directing our digital profiles in constant pursuit of the next like? It is natural to seek the approval and admiration of others, but social media extends and encourages our desire for it in destabilizing ways.
Fostering narcissism and insecurity simultaneously, digital platforms find their true model in celebrity culture. With tools to publicize and promote not just our businesses or our books but our very identities, we resemble public personalities on our local digital stage. The real talents have such successful personal brands that they achieve minor celebrity status through their social media presence alone. Jen Selter of the infamous butt-selfie (or “belfie”) is a prime example: having amassed three million admirers of her rear, she has made a business out of being herself.
Sixteen-year-old Brent Rivera has achieved a similarly peculiar kind of fame. Unknown to the world at large, he has a huge fan base on Instagram and Vine for no discernable reason other than that people (mostly teenage girls) “like” him. In January 2014, Bustle awarded him with his first piece of media coverage for the enviable achievement of possessing half-a-million followers. He complains that his friends try to piggy-back on his popularity by jumping in his pictures and asking him for “shout-outs,” a technique by which popular Instagram users tag their friends in order to lend them greater visibility. In Texas, fifteen-year-old Garrett Dwane is already one step ahead: he charges friends $30 per shout-out.
Posting flattering pictures and subtly self-aggrandizing statuses seems innocent enough on the surface. But what will the long-term social implications be for people who have learned to treat themselves and each other as brands? What will happen to our political life when our civic interactions are commensurate with consumer dealings?
We’ve decried digital technology’s pervasive surveillance potential, but there’s more to fear than the omniscient, Orwellian gaze. Political repression can also take less sinister-seeming forms. In The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov writes, “the internet has provided so many cheap and easily available entertainment fixes to those living under authoritarianism that it has become considerably harder to get people to care about politics at all.” Though social media has been touted as a tool for democratic change, it can also serve as a brilliant distraction from political engagement. Our networks and platforms provide an endless stream of fresh videos, pictures, and babble. They relieve our boredom; they divert us from existential and political anxieties alike. With a phone in hand, we never have to experience a moment empty of entertainment. It is arguable that even our outcry against the abuses of the NSA was dulled by the pleasure we take in the very technology that compromises our privacy.
This is repression Brave New World-style. Huxley, not Orwell. Absorbed by our own and others’ selfies (and belfies), we risk becoming the mindless pleasure-seekers of his leisure dystopia. Long before the age of Instagram, media theorist Marshall McLuhan issued a prescient warning: “The basic thing to remember about electric media,” he declared, “is that they inexorably transform every sense ratio and thus recondition and restructure all our values and institutions.”
This is not in itself bad as long as we maintain control of how we’re allowing ourselves to be reconditioned. But digital technologies have a tendency to get away from us. As in the archetypal sci-fi movies, our robot creations recreate us in ways we cannot foresee. Still, it is a voluntary surrender of mastery. We can delete our Instagram accounts if we choose, and reading Lolcats isn’t a government-enforced activity. The true danger lies not in the possibility that we can’t turn off certain technologies, but that we don’t want to.
