The indistinguishable realm of life - social media has become a medium where life occurs.
If our lives are hyper-extended into social media, has that become another medium for where life exists? Life online and offline has become nearly indistinguishable as social media is a medium where we flex and show our everyday lives. It is also a medium for the real and unreal.
Social media is a mix of ourselves through performance and representation through our identities shown to the internet’s public domain.
We place ourselves in a theatre of streamlining our narratives – where it can be all shows don’t tell. Consequently, users have created a theatre in social media that blurs out the distinguishable lines between real life and an act of posing to flex or tell a specific narrative. Our everyday life has become a mode of self-commodification for internet affection. The birth of Kardashian Kolloquium by MJ Corey pins points out how every day has been commodified into some form of capital through her Instagram page that does media theory analyse of the Kardashians and their reality TV show. The Kardashians are the embodiment of self-commodification and taste-making their everyday life for mass consumption. From reality TV shows to social media, the norm is publicised and directed through causal Instagram, where marketers have capitalised on our displays of the mundane as a space for product placement. Think Emma Chamberlain and her “photo dumps” which have cascaded us into posting mundane “fit pics” and accidental photos on the Gram. Per the Digital Fairy, causal Instagram has shifted the marketing standards to products that fit effortlessly into our lives through social media. Social media “recontextualises what already exists” to be re-commodified into our lives in a different way (Jack Self).
With social media’s power to commodify our experiences, we are convinced to buy products not because we need them - but because we are marketed like we have to have them. Per Julie Megretu & Henri Lefebvre, we no longer consume what we need because traditional institutions have become out of sight and lost their relevancy in the age of social media where AI and algorithms convince us of what we should want but not need; along with the dilution of traditional institution’s powers on directing us on what we should do - we now have social media to do that as it is a main source of trafficking and controlling how our and other people’s data can be commodified into a purchase. It is unsettling that our feeds are dictated by algorithms and feeds - there is this loss of self-agency and autonomy over what information is fed to us.
In defence of social media, it is only a facet of a highly curated look of the self that does not represent our realities. It can often seem to represent other's whole realities as we are so fixated on curating our image online, no matter if we are active or inactive. It seems connectivity inherently causes conflict within ourselves, but it is how we use the technology, not how it uses us.
The metaverse offers the narrative that life can happen online. It is enticing how we can build new worlds and new identities within the virtual space; the metaverse can fulfil an extension of who we are and our desires, per Herman Narula (CEO of Improbable a company building metaverse infrastructure and software). Could “virtual reality becomes the next collective dream destination?” per Shumon Basar? Or will life online be distinguishable between two realms? The metaverse seems like a pipedream for now. But as of now, social media is our daily lives - it has become indistinguishable from the present and online.
I miss my pre-internet brain - but for Gen Z’s and onwards, we were born into a reality where the internet is omnipresent in our realities, and we don’t have a pre-internet brain.
