The Internet? You Mean That Thing Elon Musk Wants to Buy Next?
The Internet? You Mean That Thing Elon Musk Wants to Buy Next?
It's a weird day to be someone who exists online
Sally Rooney Season is almost upon us so I hope everyone is inoculating themselves for the Conversations with Friends adaptation by rewatching Normal People. Stay safe out there.
While we do eventually have to unpack everything tied up in the That Girl aesthetic (often exemplified by the women in Rooney’s books as well as the women reading Rooney’s books), we have to cut right to the heart of things and talk about what it means to exist on the Internet. As you know, the girlies (me) have had a few conversations about social media and The Internet in the past but today’s discussion is almost like a Black Mirror switcharoo of those chats.
This week, I talked with my friend and forever Glossier Baddie Bianca about creating an online identity, the problems that come with commodifying your hobbies and passions on the Internet, and what does it even mean to romanticize your life?
Hi! My name is Bianca. According to my LinkedIn, I studied environmental science at Georgia State University and am currently an Environmental, Health and Safety Information Management Consultant (it’a a mouthful I know!!) But that’s just what I do to pay the bills (aka skincare, TheRealReal, and my car). In my free time, I like to binge watch or binge listen to anything true crime related, read sappy romance novels, hang with friends, or lounge around with my dog, Velvet.
As Always, the Most Important Question
Emily: Marry fuck kill any social media platform of your choosing.
Bianca: Marry Tumblr, fuck Twitter, kill Instagram.
Gosh, I just love hard-hitting journalism!!!
This Isn’t a Joke, This is My Life (Online)
As someone who read Fake Accounts and No One Is Talking About This back to back last year and resonated with a lot of elements in both novels (and yeah, we’re talking books today—I have another big book girlie on with me so this week’s newsletter is a safe space to unload my Goodreads on everyone), I can confidently say that I’m someone who is very online.
A loose definition of someone who is “extremely online” is someone who finds knowing Internet trends, terminology, and events important and, according to this article on a site called the Daily Dot, to know these things is to have a sense of power. (As someone whose birth chart has split Aquarius and Scorpio dominance, I personally love both knowing things and having power, so this makes sense for me.)
Regardless, I wanted to get Bianca’s thoughts on this:
Emily: What does it mean to you to exist online?
Bianca: To me, it means that everything that you have is online: your source(s) of income, friends, future etc. I feel like there's absolutely nothing wrong with using social media to make money, friends, whatever. But I think you exist online when you consciously choose to keep what you’ve gained from the Internet on the Internet.
Like, if I take away your Internet access and your world basically ceases to exist, you exist online.
I’m coming around to realizing that social media, something I once thought of as a way to genuinely connect with others, is actually a big scam. The fact that a marketing website said it best kind of speaks for itself: “Social media is any digital tool that allows users to quickly create and share content with the public.”
In the age of content creators and social media influencers, it’s getting harder to tell what is real and what is just an ad to sell you flat tummy tea. And yet, there is something so appealing about “making it” online.
I asked Bianca:
Emily: What are the reasons why you would want to "make it" on the Internet? What are the things that stop you from pursuing that?
Bianca: I’m vain enough to admit that I’d only want to be big on the Internet for the social capital, but as I get older I’m starting to learn that excess of anything is bad. So I don’t want to spend any more time on social media than I do now.
Emily: Do you think there is a way to authentically exist online?
Bianca: I think so. I believe sites like Pinterest and Tumblr are where you can pin and post whatever you want because there’s rarely a face to the name. But apps like Instagram are a bit different because your face is all other your feed.
When it comes to Instagram, people show their authenticity in their story posts rather than their feeds. Instagram would be a lot more authentic and fun if we took the approach that we use for posting on our story and apply that to our feeds.
While Bianca is not wrong, it is interesting that social media platforms like Pinterest and even TikTok can feel more genuine, they are two of the three sites most commonly used to promote online commerce… which means we have to talk about it again.
C*pit*lism
In today’s installment of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, we’re not going to fully dive into side hustles and hustle culture but we are going to give it the side-eye.
It is incredibly endearing to create a passion project or start a hobby and use social media to publicly share it with the world (follow @pasdeemily on IG for weekly Emily For President polls). You are essentially inviting people to view a very personal part of yourself, one that arguably says more about your personality than your job does. But it has become so easy for Gen Z to fall into the trap of turning hobbies into hustles and using social media as, you guessed it, a marketing tool.
I asked Bianca:
Emily: Are there any pure innocent fun hobbies anymore?
Bianca: I think so, but you’ll have to put up a fight to keep it that way. I remember working at Glossier and I would talk to customers about skincare and makeup while working the line and almost all of them would tell me I should make content and I was always like no!!
Turning interests and passions into just another way to make money may work for some, but I think it’s important to have some stuff that’s just for me.
Emily: Follow up: is there a way to share the things we like without commodifying it or making it a part of our online identity?
Bianca: I don’t think so. Unless it’s a private account that no one knows about, but then that defeats the purpose of sharing it.
Well, there goes the “social media is for connection” defense, your honor. But what about simply enjoying things for yourself?
While the “romanticizing your life” trend may have its roots in the ye old Tumblr days, there has been an overwhelming amount of content promoting the notion since the pandemic. At its core, it seems magical: falling in love with your self-care routine, tiny moments throughout your day, a cup of coffee, your friends 🤩💖✨🌙🥰👯♀️🦄⚡️ Essentially: glamorizing your life as though you are the main character of a movie.
But skincare costs money!!!!!! And that cup of coffee from the probably-moldy Keurig your sister gave you when you moved isn’t romantic—you have to get a matcha latte that may or may not cost $9 if you want to have a good day. Oh, and your friends? Don’t even THINK of taking a picture of them unless you’re outside having a cottagecore picnic in the middle of the workday. Otherwise, they’re not really your friends.
What I mean to say is that what started as a kindhearted practice has begun to devolve into a contest to see who can have the most picture-perfect life on social media (we return, fleetingly, to That Girl). But an interesting element of romanticizing allows you to be publicly vulnerable, although often, this comes at the expense of your privacy with many people filming themselves crying á là Bella Hadid or sometimes even trauma dumping—because what’s not romantic about oversharing with strangers on the Internet. Not to mention: a picture-perfect life costs an increasing amount of money to create.
I asked Bianca:
Emily: What are your thoughts on the "romanticizing your life" trend? Do you think there is some merit to actually romanticizing your life offline?
Bianca: I think the trend has wholesome origins. It was kind of a middle finger to influencers by creating a way for people to find beauty in their everyday life. I personally love (and will be attempting) the trend of making a recap video of my summer. I think videos like that are a cute reminder to take a step back and look at life as a series of seemingly uneventful days that create something worthwhile.
The issue is that now people are attempting to out-romanticize each other, basically sharing what I believe to be some of their most intimate moments to gain Internet clout.
Emily: What is the line between romanticization and commodification? Can you romanticize without commodifying?
Bianca: I read a really good article about this topic earlier this year titled Why Is The Internet So Obsessed With Morning Routines? In my opinion, everything will be commodified under capitalism.
The pressure to achieve the “romanticizing your life” trend also reveals a much bigger stressor that has now largely become subliminal: the need we feel to curate a desirable image of our lives.
To return to Bella Hadid for a second, the model spoke candidly about her mental health struggles by sharing a series of photos of her clearly going through it. As mental illnesses are still often stigmatized (dare I recall last week’s article?), what Hadid did with an audience as large as hers is important and should be regarded as such.
The tricky part comes from the line in the post where she admitted, “Social media is not real,” as well as the line in a subsequent interview when she stated, “I don’t know if that’s not what people want on Instagram, and that’s fine.” Because since that crying post, Hadid has since continued to share a feed that’s the perfect balance of promotional content, enviable candids, and her signature political posts—in other words, a highly curated feed.
I want to be clear that Bella Hadid1 is not to blame here: she’s one of us. She wants to look like others just as much as others want to look like her. It’s a never-ending loop of everyone trying to imitate someone else, all while claiming to romanticize the life they have.
I asked Bianca:
Emily: What are the dangers of always presenting a curated version of our lives?
Bianca: The pressure to keep up is what’s most dangerous.
But in my opinion, I feel that people, subconsciously or not, start to feel like they owe people something. If all you do is post ‘fit pics' and now you have 10k followers on Instagram, you’re gonna feel like fit pics are all you can post because that's the content people expect/want to consume from you.
Emily: Do you think an element of social media is that we all will inevitably compare ourselves to others?
Bianca: I think so, but I think that says more about us as consumers than it does about social media. I think you need a certain amount of self confidence to navigate social media without feeling the peer pressure to conform to everything you’re seeing.
It’s Giving Cyclical Pattern
As I’m writing this article, I’m also in the middle of curating an Instagram carousel of images from the past month that encapsulates it honestly while also still trying to be cool girl (Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun.), so believe me when I say simply writing about all of this doesn’t mean I’m past it.
But can we ever get past all this, or is curating and romanticizing and buying things from Instagram ads just the cost of existing online? Is this how it’s going to be forever? I personally don’t know how to change my habits any more than what I’ve already done, for better or worse, and I feel like I might not be the only one who feels that way.
I asked Bianca:
Emily: What do you think your media consumption will look like when you’re older?
Bianca: I think it’ll depend on what new apps come out. But for me personally, my consumption will be more of the same because TikTok is my latest and last social media vice.
That said, Elon Musk just bought Twitter so now I’m seriously debating if I’ll still be on it.2
Even if they become commodified the second we share them, maybe putting our interests and hobbies and tiny moments on the Internet is something that connects us. I mean, we are all having the same problems… together.
But again, maybe not. I don’t know!!! Either way, I still asked Bianca to share an interest online:
Emily: As a big reader, what's the best book you've read in the last year?
Bianca: Verity by Colleen Hoover!! My friend Marcus recommended it and I finished it in 4 hours because I just couldn’t put it down.
To be both tongue in cheek and honest at the same time, follow me on Goodreads.
Thank you so much to Bianca for answering all of these!!! Everyone say CONGRATS to her because she is graduating at the end of next week!!!!!! 🤩💖✨🌙🥰👯♀️🦄⚡️
I also know a lot of people have taken offense to her comments on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but that’s not the issue at hand here.
Emily For President: Breaking News.