Online Performance and The Stage of Instagram: Reflections on "Trick Mirror"
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by Elena Mudd ℅ Slate
Last semester, I took a four-week capstone seminar called “What Is Meaning?” It was pass/fail, a graduation requirement for my school’s honor’s program. Our only assignment over the course of four weeks was to give a brief presentation on anything (a poem, a picture, a social phenomenon) that we thought prompted deeper reflection on the nature of meaning and meaning making. One of my classmates presented on New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino’s book of essays Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion. Intrigued by the passages this student read in his presentation, I sent my mom an Amazon link after class, putting the book on my Christmas list.
Fast-forward to Christmas morning, I found the book wrapped under the tree. Trick Mirror is a complex reflection on how to navigate a life in 2019, now 2020 — a life that is both expanded and limited by the internet. Reading Tolentino’s poignantly critical essays on millennial existence, the meaninglessness of routine, and most notably, online identity, brought me both terrifying and exciting “oh shit” moments, as I sat around in my childhood bedroom trying to pass the days between Christmas and New Year’s.
Tolentino’s first essay, “The I in the Internet,” examines the role of the internet in identity formation and social media’s false ideal of action-making. She references sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory of social engagement, and although I was unfamiliar with sociologists, his theories made complete sense. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman likens all social engagements to a type of dramaturgical performance. In the theatre of public life, we are constantly taking the stage, performing an act that involves an audience, the cast of actors alongside us, and the setting of the show. We curate a performance that we hope will shape the audience’s impression of us. Every social situation necessitates negotiations between the actors and audiences presenting and gathering impressions, making meaning from a delusion of reality. A performance is only as real as it is perceived by the audience, and there is always some layer of conscious awareness of this performance by the actors and the audience.
In Goffman’s social world, there exists an “off-stage” realm of life where the performance ceases. A curtain closes and behind it we no longer need to attempt to curate our identities before an audience. Whether it is alone in our home or with a close family member, friend, or partner, our real lives provide us with moments where we can perhaps “be ourselves,” hidden from an outside gaze and freed from the pressure of presentation. This might seem obvious. We all act differently around different people. I think the ability to assume a performance identity that fits with one’s surroundings demonstrates a level of social intelligence. Someone who spoke to their boss the same way they spoke to their best friend of several years would mostly make everyone in the office uncomfortable. I don’t see myself as the same Colleen when I’m around my family versus when I’m in class, when I’m at work versus when I’m around my roommates.
What Tolentino explores in her essay is the way that this idea of social performance is disrupted, manipulated, and messied by the internet. If our everyday performances rotate through the same predictable audiences, the strangers at the local grocery store, the co-workers in the office, classmates and professors on campus, then the audience on the internet is both unpredictable and limitless. Tolentino writes “Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.” The internet has no backstage. The curtain never closes in the perpetual performance of online existence.
The notion that we curate our online selves in certain ways, hoping to control the perception of our audience, is nothing novel. Since the development of Web 2.0, when the Internet shifted from static HTML pages to an intricate and dynamic web of user generated content, humans have been crafting virtual personas. But what Tolentino’s essay drew out of me is my own burn-out, anxiety, and false-meaning-making in maintaining an online performance, and how carefully controlled performances on the stage of the Internet translate into our lived experiences, our material selves, and in-person interactions.
It seems as though we’re aware of the fact that social media performance is not reality (hence the Instagram vs. reality meme format), yet our profiles are collections of carefully-selected content that we hope builds a personal brand that a real human being will see and associate with our in-person selves. The cognitive dissonance between our conscious performance and our understanding of our real identities is the space where, for me, my anxiety around the internet lies.
Post anxiety, like gratification, and the ego boost of online attention has morphed with my perception of my identity in a way that is both confusing and troubling. Posting a photo on Instagram triggers the same anxiety and excitement as walking into a room at a party; in both instances I’m donning my costume for a social performance, but the difference is that one is real and one is not. Walking into a room and interacting with humans in real-life is a performance that I know has an end point. By the end of the night, I know I’ll be off-stage, sitting at my desk, wiping off my makeup, and getting into bed. But posting a photo that I want to keep on my feed is a permanent scene in my perpetual online performance, available to an unlimited audience (my profile is public).
And its this unending pressure that leads me, and I think a lot of people, to value my online impressions more than the in-person performance of my real identity. I know this critique of millenials and Gen Z’ers is about as old as social media itself, but it’s increasingly problematic to me when I stress more over the photo I could post on a given night rather than the actual experience I’d have. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve based my outfit, or how long I’m going to spend on my hair and makeup, around whether or not I think the events of the night will lead to an Instagrammable moment. I wouldn’t want a photo of myself on my feed wearing a “fit” that didn’t match the persona I’d worked hard to create in the other photos on my feed. There is a certain expectation ingrained in me that I have a responsibility, or maybe even an obligation, to control how my audience will perceive me. Knowing I wouldn’t be documenting the night on social media took away some of the pressure of the in-person performance. It was reminiscent of the certain high-school play rehearsals that are opened up to elderly community members who see the show before the “real” opening night. It didn’t seem to matter as much if I didn’t leave a lasting impression for strangers in a bar that would never see me again, but the weight of the world rested in the prospect of “flexing for the gram.”
One could argue that yes, everyone wants to look better when they know they’re having their picture taken. But I think Instagram takes the anxiety a step further, when feeds do not simply consist of photos of ourselves and our friends or families. I once tweeted: “The secret to Being Cool™ on Instagram is going to a city (preferably NYC) and taking incredibly zoomed-in photos of random objects: spilled food, a street light, etc.” I saw a similar sentiment expressed in another tweet a few days ago, which read: “how am i supposed to know if this artsy girl cute her ig just fucking zoomed in pictures of trash and dirty water.” Having a profile that has no images of your likeness whatsoever is a brand in and of itself. In attempts to undermine the caricature of a “normie” profile, a new archetype emerged of e-girls and e-boys, a persona grounded solely in online presentation. Audiences’ perceptions of our identities can be controlled through pictures of spilled tacos and dirty subway cars. In a literal sense, what is a person to assume about a profile that shares these types of photos? What meaning can be derived from a picture that in reality, doesn’t make much sense to attach to the essence of a person? A hard question to answer, but somehow it’s done anyway. Collections of images, even without a physical person in them, are attached and constitute the identity behind the profile. It’s now possible to perform an identity without sharing anything really personally identifiable at all. And I don’t speak on this from a pedestal. Deciding whether or not to go to a bar if it has a “cool aesthetic” for a photo, or whether or not to wear an “Instagram-worthy outfit,” are real life decisions I’ve made for the sake of a virtual performance.
Even finstas don’t necessarily provide a backstage or a complete escape from the gaze of an internet audience. While my finsta audience might be smaller and more carefully-selected, I might know these people in real-life, and I might be more willing to share photos or thoughts that more similarly align with my real-life self, I am still posting with the perception of the audience in mind. My finsta over the years has turned into an outlet for me to vent, like a chaotic diary detailing every aspect of my life that I’ve deemed unsuitable for my rinsta-persona. It’s worth inspecting, at least for me, why it feels better to dump my thoughts after a painful experience like an anxiety attack, or even after a positive moment like receiving a high grade in a class, on my finsta rather than turning to someone who could actually help me or share in happiness with me. The validation I received from posting on my finsta, while the content was different, still felt similar to the validation I received on my public Instagram account.
To give credit where credit is due, the internet has proven itself valuable in numerous ways. I’m a journalism major currently interning for an online-only publication, DCist, and I love what I do there. That job wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the internet. I wouldn’t be writing this article for Camp Thirlby right now, without the internet. I don’t want this piece to leave a reader with an “okay boomer” taste in their mouth. I’m trying to make sense of the anxiety that I didn’t even know I was feeling until I read Tolentio’s piece, and hopefully scroll, post, consume, and perform more consciously on social media. For my own sake, and I think for many people whose lives now exist in the messy space between reality and social media, it’s important to be able to draw some sort of line between what is meaningful and what is not, what is real and what is only real as long as we deem it that way.
Instagram and Youtube influencers’ livelihoods depend on the brand they curate for themselves on the internet. Recently, there has been a trend of lifestyle vloggers quitting their 9-5 jobs to work full-time as a Youtuber. Paying rent, putting food on the table, and being able to financially maintain the “lifestyle” that keeps their content interesting for subscribers now depends entirely on their online personas. I think its situations like this that make the line between real and curated identities blurry, if not invisible. (To really explain my thoughts on influencers would be another piece entirely.) For me, having a clearer line, or at least possessing the ability to recognize a line, is healthier for how I view my own identity, both online and offline.
Hoping to have a career in writing and journalism, I know I can never divorce myself from an online presence, and that unfortunately my identity on the internet will soon become a part of my identity in the workplace. But understanding that every photo, every tweet, every hashtag is a curated performance is a helpful reminder that social media, like in-person social interaction, is only as real as we as an audience allow it to be. There is only so much I can do to control the perception of myself online, and only so much I can do monitor an audience that by the nature of the web is unbounded. The anxiety that cropped up inside me while reading Tolentino’s piece was a red flag — perhaps my on-stage self needs a break, and I need the curtain to close. It shouldn’t be so much emotional and mental labor to contrive myself on the internet, and I shouldn’t be posting with such trepidation about the perception of my audience. If I value the essence of myself as a person, then my online-self is only a small slice of me, and it is only as valuable as I make it to be.
