Big bad selfie
Social media, the mirror we love to hate
The people who make the Internet have largely good intent. They want to make it easy to access information, keep up with old friends and get anything you want delivered to your doorstep, so you can go back to spending time with your kids or writing the next big novel. There’s certainly a degree of greed and get rich quick schemes, but the majority of people who make the Internet keep their heads down. They are quietly trying to make the world a little less difficult.
Lately there’s been a lot of talk about how unhealthy the Internet is. It’s killing the art of conversation, it’s diminishing intimacy between friends and lovers. It’s making it too easy for us to judge and dehumanize. It’s giving us ample opportunity to compare and see lack in our lives.
There have been a number of people who have defended the Internet, saying that it’s been humanity’s greatest equalizer to date. From Stop saying technology is causing social isolation by Héctor L. Carral:
I don’t think smartphones are isolating us, destroying our social lives or ruining interactions. I see smartphones as instruments …that enable interaction on ways that just weren’t possible before, connecting us with people all around the world, via Twitter, instant messaging or other services…I’m just not able to comprehend why should we be forced to interact with those physically close to us instead of with the people that we really want to interact with.
It’s not that the Internet is turning us into monsters. The Internet has fulfilled its only promise to us by making neighbors of strangers and strange ideas. In our attempt to fix the world, we’ve created a giant mirror and it turns out we don’t much like our reflection.
A famous teenage girl
19-year-old Essena O’Neill’s story has been blowing up my feed. An Australian ‘Instagram model’ with upwards of 612,000 followers, O’Neill deleted many of the photos from her Instagram account and recaptioned the ones that were left. She renamed her account, Social Media Is Not Real Life.
O’Neill no longer could ignore the way she felt. She realized the follower count was hollow. After the thrill of having money wore off, she realized cash was not the key to happiness either. She dealt with brands that wanted to put their clothes on her teenage body to sell a dream of sexuality and starvation to other young girls. She grew uncomfortable with her privilege when she truly saw how brutal and unequal the world is.
She’s since deleted her account entirely. Despite her protests, people are examining her actions with even more fervor. In a video, a makeup-free O’Neill responds:
“I have let go of trying to please people, I want to start a conversation about anyone questioning their life and their reality…I want to be a game changer…let’s talk about something more”
Countless people have praised O’Neill for the destruction of her unfulfilling persona. News outlets have amplified the story, framing the virality of her actions as Millenial disenchantment with social media and oversharing.
Perhaps it’s not about that, the fight between our phones and our lives. Perhaps O’Neill’s story has gone viral because it’s a magnification of the same sad story that has played in the minds of girls for decades.
A less famous teenage girl
I caught the tail end of the pre-Internet era, when you had to tune into the television at a specific time to watch the newest episode of that show you liked (Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Boy Meets World). I always carried quarters so I could call my parents in an emergency and I even had a little day planner so I could remember all my appointments and play dates.
Not that I needed it, since I was a lonely loser wishing desperately to be a hot girl.
I was eleven when it started. Popular girls started making fun of my clothes and hair, which no one had seemed to notice the year before. White classmates pulled their faces to make their eyes into slits when I walked by. Friends told me unprompted that their mothers had said I’d be pretty if I weren’t so fat. I started skipping lunch. I squirreled away the money so I could secretly buy polyester tube tops from Wet Seal, because I knew my parents would never approve.
Eleven-year-old girls should never be thinking about whether they’re hot or not. Eleven-year-old girls should be reading awesome stories, learning math and talking about space exploration with classmates. Instead teenage girls are funnelled into this funhouse of contradiction: you must learn to hate yourself if you ever want to be loved.
When I am honest about what it was like to grow up as a little girl in the 90s, I get three reactions. Some are right there with me and we conspire on how to make peace with these pasts. Others, particularly men, are shocked. Others hear the words of a privileged 28-year-old woman bitching about her childhood, roll their eyes and think, oh, get over it, people are suffering everywhere and they are suffering more than you.
This last third of the ratio is shrinking, while becoming louder than ever. I hear it clearly because it’s a voice that lives inside me as well.
A privileged girl
If you are privileged, it’s always been easy to structure your life in a way where you rarely have to confront difficulty. We have long built high walls and fences, and these days you can get whatever you want delivered to you at the touch of a finger. Had I grown up twenty years prior, I likely would have become the CAP (Chinese American Princess) my parents always joked I’d become.
But the Internet happened. I talked to strangers outside of my affluent hometown who also made weird paintings of magicians. I had access to fan fiction and saw that people like me were writing and calling themselves writers. I began to think that perhaps there was a huge universe outside of my Ivy League obsessed Connecticut haunt, one where people cared about the stuff I actually liked to do.
And then in my mid-twenties the Internet really happened. Friends started posting about their struggles with depression, about loved ones who took their own lives. I saw articles from people across the globe about racism, revolutions, extreme poverty, death and repression, the very things my well-meaning parents (my mother was the youngest daughter of 5 and didn’t grow up with much money) tried to ensure I’d never come in contact with.
I don’t know much about Essena O’Neill, having just learned of her existence yesterday, but I suspect she and I come from similar privileges. Perhaps we are both girls who didn’t worry about where the next meal came from, never wondered whether we’d be shot for asking a police officer for help and only slept without shelter because we damn well pleased on nice summer nights.
O’Neill’s new projects center around ethical clothing, veganism, equality and living a life of meaning. I am also floored that she is only nineteen years old. We are fascinated with Essena O’Neill because she reveals things we could live our whole lives hiding from. In the span of a few years, she rocketed into Instagram fame, made hundreds of thousands of dollars and then decided to chase a life of meaning. This is a quest that takes people decades. This is the fable of an entire lifetime in a few odd years.
A distant frenemy
Part of the canon O’Neill’s story keys off of is that social media is proven to make us unhappy. NPR reports:
A new University of Michigan study on college-aged adults finds that the more they used Facebook, the worse they felt. The study, published in the journal PLOS One, found Facebook use led to declines in moment-to-moment happiness and overall life satisfaction…Jonides suspects it may have to do with social comparison.
“When you’re on a site like Facebook, you get lots of posts about what people are doing. That sets up social comparison — you maybe feel your life is not as full and rich as those people you see on Facebook,” he says.
When I was at my unhappiest just a few years ago, I spent a lot of time on Facebook. I would look at everyone, shiny faced and happy in their jobs and wonder what the hell was wrong with me. I’d look at all their gorgeous work and wonder why everything I put down to paper seemed like the scrawlings of a blind oceanic turtle. If I’d seen that study then, I would have wholeheartedly agreed and lamented: why can’t we stop putting on airs? Why can’t we stop being fake?
It’s easy to blame the colorful carousel of Facebook for that feeling in your chest, the one that screams while you watch from the shadows. But this is not a new behavior. We have always coveted our neighbor’s cars and wives, so much so that the ol’ Bible itself has a passage dedicated to that envy. The entire 1950s in America was about ramping up consumerism and having more than the family next door.
Seeing these picturesque updates on Facebook, even if they were sanitized or fake, was a huge part of me beginning a path towards true happiness. It forced me to confront myself and the flatness of my life, similarly to how O’Neill confronted hers.
We have always sold the dream and faked it to our neighbors. We’re just upset that now the old empty feeling is accompanied with a high velocity evidences of a better life, a life that feels better than ours.
Nowadays, I spend a lot of time on my own Instagram feed. I like to look at all the places I’ve been and the people I’ve spent my time with. I leave social media feeling happy and glad for others’ success. I’ve come to value public vulnerability, so I share when I’m sad and try to buck up friends who need a lift. In fact, the University of Michigan study reports that the comparison is the key to how sad Facebook makes you:
Interestingly, Jonides notes, the study found the effects of Facebook are most pronounced for those who socialize the most “in real life.” He says the folks who did the most direct, face-to-face socializing and used social media were the ones who reported the most Facebook-related mood decline.
“It suggests that when you are engaging in social interactions a lot, you’re more aware of what others are doing and, consequently, you might be more sensitized about what’s happening on Facebook and comparing that to your own life,” Jonides says.
For the privileged, comparison unhappiness can be a gift. It can reveal to you that you could be doing anything right now, and that the time carousel is moving on, whether you jump on the lumpy fiberglass pony or not.
For the underprivileged, it can tell another tale.
A teenage boy
On August 9, 2014, an eighteen-year-old unarmed African American teenager named Mike Brown was shot in the streets of Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. His killer was a police officer, who claimed that the teen had assaulted him and that he feared for his life. Brown’s friend, who watched everything unfold, reported that at one point Brown raised his hands, unarmed, and begged the officer not to shoot him.
The story exploded on Twitter and started a tumult of protests, thousands upon thousands chanting, “hands up, don’t shoot” across America.
I watched from my own bright screen, saw the streams of people filing down Broadway in Manhattan through my window. I pulled the loose thread and was horrified to see the stories and videos of other unarmed black Americans who were killed. I read about Renisha McBride, a teen who was shot on a porch looking for help after a car accident, and Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old with a toy gun. I read about Aiyana Jones, who was seven years old when she was killed by a stray bullet. In prior times, we would lose their names. In prior times, I would never have heard of them at all.
Before Ferguson, it had never occurred to me that one could live in 2014 and be choked in the street for selling cigarettes. If it was really this bad, surely people would be revolting and burning cities to the ground. I felt that familiar pang of privilege, watching above the fence line. I would check in with one of my closest friends, who is black and tall, worried sick that someone might shoot him for pulling his phone out of his pocket, but also afraid to make him more paranoid than he probably already was.
Then I thought about all the people in America who didn’t even have a black friend to worry about. For them, black people are characters on The Wire, or people who make the music they listen to when they want to feel tough, or the tragic little girl from the Hunger Games that they actually thought was white.
In the year since, I’ve talked about #blacklivesmatter with many people, most of whom have not been black. I’ve had many conversations along the lines of, I didn’t even know this was happening or how the hell can we actually change this? or how can we be surprised when we portray people of color like thugs in popular media? I’ve also had many less productive conversations that begin as a casual examination of systemic racism and end with accusations that I have personally insulted them by calling them a racist.
This type of egocentrism is a form of privileged self-protection, but it’s particularly callous when it comes from those in the tech industry, those who build the Internet. As well-educated liberals, tech praises truth-seeking. Everyone loves to talk shop on how to disrupt corrupt systems.
But to realize this identity built and chosen (techie) is overshadowed by an identity one never asked for (privileged, white) is a hard truth to confront for some. It’s a truth similar to the jealousy and inadequacy we feel scrolling Facebook when we’re not happy, but at a much thornier scale. Without social media, we could not have the conversations about how difficult life is when you’re not a person of privilege. We believe what we see, and for the privileged, a life of violence and fear based on the color of your skin could be made largely invisible without social media.
And us
Social media can reflect back the horrors that happen every day, of little girls being shot in their homes, dead Syrian toddlers washing up on beaches, factory farming and the California drought, the poaching of endangered African animals by rich dentists, white poets getting published for having Asian pen-names while suffering none of the daily racism, women having acid thrown on their faces, the American prison complex, school shootings, the attempted erasure of WWII sex slaves, oil spills, drug wars and a million other things. It also reflects small personal horrors, realizing you’re not happy, regretting letting a good ex go, feeling unaccomplished, feeling uncreative, feeling poor, feeling guilty for being rich and still feeling unfulfilled.
It’s important that we stay critical of the people who build the Internet. Nobly building better tools includes listening to critics and understanding the effects of what gets committed to code. However, to put the blame solely on social media or selfies is to scapegoat a technology for the ills of our teeming and complex culture.
We need to build the Internet responsibly, in a way that shines a light on shitbag behavior without encouraging it — but we also need to build ourselves. In the same way we’re seeing videos of cops beating up teenage girls or witnessing another teenager’s come-to-Jesus about her relationship with herself, we need to use the Internet as visibility into our own world and make the decision not to turn off, not to whip back a #notallmen! or #alllivesmatter! or #itsaboutethicsinjournalism! The Internet’s leaky discomfort is our good hard look in the mirror. Whether we are condemned or saved is still on us.
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Published in #SWLH (Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking)
