Words by: Emily Gambrill (she/her)
Hello, my name is Emily and I recently deleted Tik Tok (cue applause, flowers, etc.). But the findings of my abstention have been less than promising. While it’s nice not to have mind-numbing dopamine vomit melt my brain each night before I sleep, I have somehow managed to keep the time spent on my phone exactly the same as before. As for my visions of intensive reading, writing and academic weaponry in my Tik Tok free life, I have nothing to offer. Instead, the realities include learning of Jojo Siwa dry humping stage corners from my friends as if it was medieval gossip, and a general feeling of confusion.
Most importantly though, the only reason that I can live happily without Tik Tok is because I am not really offline at all.
I got my first Instagram account in year five (?!?) and my handle was Funkymunkyunicorn. Life couldn’t get much better: I posted minion memes and photos of surfboards with filters and would get max three likes from my friends who also somehow managed to download Instagram without their parents’ consent (a notable mention being my friend Potatoyummy). But the time eventually came to shed my fun quirky handle and go with the eponymous.
I have never been a serial Instagram poster, but now that I have had an account for almost half my life, the question of deleting it quickly becomes existential. In some dystopian digital age fear, deleting Instagram feels like at least a partial deletion of myself. Which part exactly is a tricky question, but regardless my own personal crisis has made me suddenly quite concerned with the way in which we use social media (for the purposes of this article, Instagram).
First and foremost, I can’t help but see social media as a modern-day social currency—and I am not talking just about influencers and celebrities; I mean this as applicable to basically every single Instagram user. As soon as we are, dare I say, ‘introduced’ to someone new online, we can almost immediately ascertain key information about them based on how many mutuals they have with you, who those mutuals are, how many followers they have, and just their general vibe. While such features enable us to figure out if we know a person, or if we would like to know this person, they also encourage us to make reductive judgements of people based on largely superficial presentations of themselves. Knowing that these judgements are constantly being made, we cannot help but create digital profiles that portray ourselves in the ways in which we would like to be understood. There is an immense pressure to curate one’s social media presence because, when our followers extend beyond our close friends and family, with each post there is the knowledge that this might be the sole way in which someone else perceives you. It is hard to deny the social value assigned to our digital identities—whether an individual chooses to embrace or reject this is up to them.
To understand if there was any academic basis to my feverish revelations, I talked to media and communications lecturer at Te Herenga Waka, Dr Alex Beattie. Having recently conducted research into how various groups of people in Aotearoa were disconnecting from the internet, Beattie offered significant insight into the challenges of disconnecting in the digital age. Beattie emphasised social media as redefining our social norms, changing expectations surrounding availability, and making the “previously invisible, visible”. Beattie highlighted that, while the social pressures that people might feel using social media have always existed, it is the constant connectivity encouraged by social media that makes them inescapable. While in social environments such as high school or work we can simply leave at the end of the day, the constant connection enabled by social media means we are not afforded such relief from pressure.
The pressure to “self-brand”, as Beattie calls it, however, is not simply a product of social media alone but rather a reflection of other aspects of our late-capitalist societies. With social media there is no limit to the extent to which our daily lives, personalities and ideas can be commodified—even if not for money specifically, then for cultural capital. Again, however, we must remember that humans have long attempted to control the way in which we present ourselves to others. The hyperconnectivity enabled by social media simply allows us to do so on an unprecedented scale.
In his research, Beattie has revealed varying experiences across different demographics in Aotearoa in the choice to disconnect. As expected, younger people (18-24) struggle to disconnect more than older people (75+). With differing relationships to connectivity however, Beattie highlights the limitations of older generations' ability to understand younger generations’ relationship to social media and the internet. With so much of our identity and existence now experienced digitally, solutions to disconnecting such as simply turning the WIFI off or banning phones in schools fail to understand the extent to which the digital world has become inseparable from the real. Therefore, the future of navigating disconnection cannot be understood in black and white, but rather by realising our online lives to be a feature of our existence.
With all this, it is essential to understand the value of social media as deeply personal. This is emphasised by Beattie, “Social media can be an amazing tool depending on who you are and who you talk to”. Using social media, people, who may be otherwise marginalised for their sexuality, ethnicity, or other reasons, are able to build their own online communities. Alternately, Beattie’s research revealed factors of ethnicity and gender norms to affect participants’ ability to disconnect: more women cited pressures to be available to friends and family as a reason for not disconnecting while Māori were more likely than Pākehā to disconnect due to concerns for safety in online environments.
Clearly, our relationship to social media does not transcend reality but is rather deeply informed by who we are and our own life experiences.
With this, sometimes I think I might just be a weakling in a world full of digital alphas (if so, natural selection will sort me out) and other times it’s just not that deep. This isn’t a call to boycott, rather a reminder that social media has radically altered the way in which we socialise. There is a digital aspect to our being that can no longer be denied. As the distinction between an online and offline world disappears, it’s important to remember the extent to which social media encourages us to curate our lives and identities. As always, people are complex and multi-faceted and possess a depth that cannot be conveyed in a post or profile alone. Don’t let the constant connectivity of social media trick you into thinking otherwise.
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