Social Media or So-Faux Media?

Figure 1: What social media influencers are striving to be. (Hoxmark, 2018)

Social Media or So-Faux Media?

In the last 15 years the internet has become like a display home of people's lives. Millennials, Gen Z and Baby Boomers alike are utilising social media apps like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to showcase their day to day lives for those around them. But how real are the lives they are promoting? In a lot of cases, especially on the photo sharing app Instagram, they are picture perfect. Maybe even just a little too picture perfect, in every way.

Instagram is the growing trend of influencers and trend setters who show feeds that are overloaded with images of fancy food, beautiful landscapes, and lives that appear to be filled with parties, fun, travel and extravagance. "Doing it for the ‘Gram" is what seems to be the catchphrase of those in search of "likes". The more "likes" an Influener gets, the higher their following and the more moeny they can make. So they do things that they normally wouldn’t or even something every day that has been filtered or staged to make it look 50x better than it ordinarily would. As Foucult said '' Just like actors on a stage know they are being watched by the audience and tailor their behaviour to find the best effect or best effective use of social media by selecting and forming content with the view of pleasing and impressing a certain crowd'' (Rayner,2012). 

Identity. It’s everything to Instagram influencers and yet we are left to wonder are we truly seeing them or are we seeing only a version of themselves? As professor Henry said in her lecture, according to the theorist Judith Butler, “It's not about pretend and being fake, it’s that we all perform everyday in our life” and “We enact the script and by enacting that script we create ourselves” (Henry, 2020).  Are they all simply creating the show they put on for people to feel a sense of sameness or is it about ego? The lives we know are fake and yet we continue to grasp at them because that’s what we need to feel good, to feel like we belong. Shaping the way we are perceived, shaping who we are to match what the world wants or what we perceive it to want.

Finally, if we spend enough time promoting a version of ourselves that we have scripted do we then in turn become that person wholly? "Regardless of whether you realize it, you’re spending a great deal of time and effort on the creation of your digital identity. The molding of this alternate self depends heavily on how others are projecting themselves in these arenas as well. What happens to your ‘real’ self, then?" (Sunstrum, 2018).

References:

Image: Hoxmark, J. (2018, April 2). Photo by Jonathan Hoxmark on Unsplash. Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/6VWTC9sWu8M

Rayner, T. (2013, May 10). Foucault and social media: I tweet, therefore I become. Philosophy for change. https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/foucault-and-social-media-i-tweet-therefore-i-become/

Sunstrum, K. (2018, July 8). How social media affects our self-perception. World of Psychology. https://psychcentral.com/blog/how-social-media-affects-our-self-perception/

Henry, R. (2020). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narrative and the Making of Place; Week 4 Lecture LearnJCU. https://learn.jcu.edu.au/