Exit Stage Left: the performative nature of social media

In Jia Tolentino’s excellent collection of essays about modern life, “Trick Mirror”, there’s an essay called “The I in the Internet”. The title refers to the main theme of the piece, which is what it means to be you in the internet era. She writes about how everything online is performance now and how wrapped up our identities are in that performance. Our primary interaction through the world is a box or circle that’s supposed to be us. Our profiles. We want that box to be our authentic self but it can’t because of the lack of separation between other people, us, and all of the content we consume. Whether we know it or not, all of us end up performing in that box based on our digital ecosystem. It’s the modern conclusion of the classic Shakespeare quote “All the world is a stage”. A stage where the performance is no longer ours. It’s the algorithm’s, and it’s capitalism’s. This performance aspect of life online is what I want to dive into today. While this piece is inspired by Tolentino’s, there are areas where we may deviate from each other. I also may unintentionally misrepresent what her original thoughts were with my own interpretation, so I’d highly recommend checking out her piece and book. 

So let’s start with the performance itself. It’s not exactly that what we post is fake, most of us post things that we have genuine interest in. We post parts of our lives that we want to share or things that resonate with us. What isn’t genuine is how these platforms work and how we post. There’s a performative nature that’s inherent to how social media is designed. Social media platforms force us to create a 2-dimensional version of ourselves that fits neatly into a box called a profile. That box has room for a lot, but it’s impossible to fit everything in it. We’re also not incentivized to put everything in, just what drives engagement. Incentives like this force us to evaluate all of our actions and our box in the context of the algorithm. Based on this we create this carefully curated image of our online self. This version becomes more and more a performance as we act more in line with the algorithm and consume more of what it feeds us. In most cases, that image is definitely going to align with who we are but again it’s not going to be everything. It’s just a simple characterization of each of our incredibly deep and rich offline personalities. 

Saying that we’re performing isn’t meant to throw shade at anyone, because no one is immune to it. It’s something we all do, and have been doing long before social media. Social media is just the latest version of performing on society’s stage. The “professional” stage and our performance on it has been going on for almost a century now. As capitalism advanced so did the need for consistency and conformity. People had to fit into boxes in the way they worked, dressed, and behaved so that growth would never slow. We had to evaluate all of our actions through the lens of corporate culture and norms. To work in the modern economy meant and still means performing our lines exactly as the market dictates. There’s no room for authenticity and originality unless it’s under the guise of a “genius” like Steve Jobs. Though even that is largely performative because when you look at the actual culture of places like Apple, the vast majority of workers still have to “play their part”.

Other parts of our lives have always required a level of acting too. Different contexts require different performances, whether it’s school, community events, or something as mundane as dinner with your inlaws. Hunter-gatherer societies had their own traditions where community members had to literally put on masks to act in different roles to appease the gods or spirits. That ability to perform is one of the things that got humans to where we’re at now. It’s pretty useful to be able to modify our behavior based on whatever our current goals are. The thing is though, for the most part, we knew we were acting. Whether it was in the tribe, at work, or any of these other areas, we were aware that we were putting on the mask. It wasn’t always pleasant but at least we knew there was a time when we could take it off. 

What I’m worried about with the nature of performance in the current era is that some of us don’t know we have a mask on. Even if we do, we’re losing opportunities to take it off as more of our lives move to online platforms. On these platforms, there’s an invisible hand in the algorithm that decides what and who is on our stage. With that, we’re constantly being nudged into adding things to our performance and trying to adjust our performance based on others. Not to mention the forces of capitalism, where we all need to play a part to make sure that the GDP and stock market keep going up. At any moment we might get an email and have to put the professional mask on. The same goes for any number of notifications we receive. Eventually, there’s no line between the platforms and us. We’re just toggling between all of these different roles we have. While it’s not like we’re completely different people when playing these roles, we’re still not our full selves. That’s what we’re at risk of losing when everything moves to the online stage. That’s something Tolentino touched on in her piece. We need to be able to take the mask off so that we don’t just become the characters we’re playing in these other parts of our lives. Imagine what would have happened to our ancestors if they never took their ritual maks off and stayed in character forever. 

If we all stay in character forever then we never get to write our own story. We’ll just end up all being side characters constantly reacting to whatever line the algorithm feeds us next. There won’t be an escape from constantly trying to be the character you’ve been assigned based on whatever personality traits these platforms have keyed in on. I think it’s amazing that we get to share our lives on social media and express who we are, but at what point is it a character and at what point is it us? We have to figure out how we can express ourselves online without following the algorithm's script and getting lost in the performance. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I think MySpace might be a good example of this. Your MySpace profile was a space to showcase different aspects of your life. You could show what you were into without being fully enmeshed in it. It wasn’t you, it was your space. As more of our lives move online we need opportunities like this that allow for separation between us and our profiles. 

You’re not just a profile and you’re not just a character in the algorithms screenplay. You have a life and a real personality. Live it and be you. Share it if you want, but share you, not just who you think you should be based on what you see in your feed. Obviously, we need to curate things, but we can try to make that curation more of an intentional act. One where we bring our authenticity into the world rather than try to perform for it. Instead of putting on a mask, make the world your canvas and actually express who you are. It’s tough and I think we’re all dealing with it right now, but once again this is another chance to reclaim a bit of humanity. So step off the stage when you can but when you can’t, make that stage and its production yours.