Author: L.C.
Welcome back to my channel, today we are going to delve into my updated morning routine! I actually use a series of products from my local Sephora (SPONSORED #AD) and if you want to look like me, you’ll go get them too! Okay, obviously I am not going to walk you through my morning routine; however, how many times have you logged on to YouTube in the hopes of finding commonality with an internet persona selling a “real life” but you end up realizing it is all fabricated to hook consumers into literally buying a lifestyle? Yeah, me too.
In today’s online and consumer-based society, people are more than willing to subject themselves to media marketing to buy someone else life. Sauter’s essay, “What’s On Your Mind,” highlights that these new ways of consuming media technologies are either “beneficial or detrimental to the ways in which people act, communicate, work, socialize, govern and are governed.” Almost every day there is a new way for people to cater to the public gaze and make their self-forming activities visible to others.
Platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, prize social skills that encourage performance. In turn, the people selling and buying these ‘lives’ are rewarded with jobs, dates, and attention for displaying themselves in an easily-consumed public way. Although this fixation with sharing a digital day-to-day life can create normalcy and relatability through platforms and programs such as self-help groups, talk shows, and themed groups, are we ultimately impeding the development of ‘self’ by forcing others ‘realities’ onto ourselves?
Sauter defines selfhood as a “contingent process that is intricately intertwined in complex networks with other actants and entities,’ and through selfhood and self-formation people create ways of acting and functioning based on what influences them. As a member of Generation Z, it feels like at times there are too many actants influencing your identity met with a constant need to live up to the ways everyone portrays themselves on these platforms. This is largely due to the techno-social hybridity of modern western societies shaping practices of self-formation.
Sauter’s article also emphasized the concept of self-writing. As writing is described as a mundane way people work on and shape their lives, relations, and realities, often unconsciously, self-writing is seen as a secular way of expressing emotions in the service of self-reflection and self-improvement. As writing in modern society is viewed as a technique of “individuals constantly…share[ing] the processes of their self-development with a public audience,” one’s idea of self adheres to the way they ‘write’. Most recently, an app called BeReal has been released in an effort to ‘capture the reality and ‘writing’ of one’s day.
BeReal markets itself as a more authentic social media app. The premise of the app is to show peoples’ actual realities as opposed to Instagram where filters and sponsorships can hinder the authenticity of the post. To accomplish this, users are sent a notification at a random time of day and are expected to post a photo of what they are doing within two minutes. This may seem like a safe way of adapting to our techno-social society; however, it is hard to be truly authentic when you are still catering to a platform and your peers. Even if the ability to have sponsorships and filters is eliminated, there is still the opportunity to create jealousy and envy for those who follow you and may not have as cool of a ‘reality.’
At the end of the day, this makes us no better than a Facebook mom bragging about how many scholarships their kid got when they graduated high school. We are all obsessed with our online persona and will continue to cater to the techno-social world through engaging with these platforms.