“We’ve all wanted meaning and to matter to the world from the dawn of time. Now that we think we can have it there’s almost more discontent for us because it seems attainable so why aren’t we attaining it. “
-From a comment on the Blogsnark Subreddit
The point of this post is going to be:
If Christians are as counter-cultural as we like to proclaim, counter-culture this.
The scene described in this piece is not, of course, typical and widespread, but the author does an excellent job pointing out its relevance to the rest of us (see the last few paragraphs below.)
My point in bringing it to your attention?
Maybe just putting this out there – the most counter-cultural, pastoral thing we can do for our kids is to fight this, and to tell them again and again that this is not real life or connection and their worth is absolutely unrelated to their social media impact, even within their own circle of friends.
And that it’s largely a waste of time – sorry, it is – and a net loss for actual human flourishing and connection. I’m convinced of this, no apologies.
And to fight it, not just through our words, but through our actions as well, as purported evangelizers and ministers and such – every chunk of time you encourage your followers to spend listening to you online is a chunk of time that’s those followers are not engaging with the real people around them.
Now, this writer – a professor of English – has a particular focus, and it’s not the army of 30-40something women encouraging you and building their brands. No, he ventures to a Tik-Tok collab house to hang with kids who are making tens of thousands of dollars a month posting dances and hijinks. It’s a good read, but I’ll resist my usual verbiage and focus on a couple of points.
For the past thirteen years, I’ve taught a course called Living in the Digital Age, which mobilizes the techniques of the humanities—critical thinking, moral contemplation, and information literacy—to interrogate the version of personhood that is being propagated by these social networks. Occasionally, there have been flashes of student insight that rivaled moments from Dead Poets Society—one time a student exclaimed, “Wait, so on social media, it’s almost like I’m the product”—but it increasingly feels like a Sisyphean task, given that I have them for three hours a week and the rest of the time they are marinating in the jacuzzi of personalized algorithms.
As someone who suffers from Churchillian spells of depression, it was easy for me to connect this to the pervasive disquiet on campus. In the past ten years, my email correspondence has been increasingly given over to calming down students who are hyperventilating with anxiety—about grades, about their potential marketability, about their Instagram followings. The previous semester, for instance, during a class on creative non-fiction, twenty-four of my twenty-six students wrote about self-harm or suicidal ideation. Several of them had been hospitalized for anxiety or depression, and my office hours were now less occasions to discuss course concepts—James Baldwin’s narrative persona, say, or Joan Didion’s use of imagery—than they were de facto counseling sessions. Even students who seemed happy and neurologically stable—Abercrombie-clad, toting a pencil case and immaculate planner—nevertheless displayed unsettling in-class behavior: snacking incessantly during lectures, showing Victorian levels of repression. The number of emotional-support service animals had skyrocketed on campus. It seemed like every third person had a Fido in tow, and had you wandered into my lecture hall when we were still holding in-person classes, you might have assumed that my lessons were on obedience training or the virtues of dog-park etiquette. And while it seems clichéd even to mention it, the students were inexorably—compulsively—on their phones.
And
Not to sound like an English professor or anything, but as a professor of English, I can’t help thinking of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin suggests that fascistic governments aim to maintain the status quo by providing citizens with the means to express themselves aesthetically without reforming their lives materially. Thus the aforementioned government that Brandon thinks TikTokers have scared shitless actually, as Benjamin writes, “sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights.” More to the point, any countercultural voltage these influencers purport to possess gets nullified by the fact that they have clear incentives not to talk about controversial matters, lest they get dropped by their brands. “I don’t talk about politics at all,” Brandon says. “It’s like there’s always another opinion. It’s always better to be neutral. I feel like everybody avoids politics on social media. Besides that, though, everyone feels like they have a voice.”
And
At one point that weekend, Baron will say to me: “Yo, Barrett, man. I need this article. Is this gonna be about me? I need that blue check.” Getting “blue-checked” is this generation’s form of existential validation, sort of the way being knighted must have felt to merchants in the mid-fifteenth century. That securing this blue check requires incessant and frequently extreme self-disclosure, that it encourages likability, brand-friendliness, and a willingness to conform to one’s audience—none of this is mentioned. Because these influencers are laboring in a system that asks them to create themselves in full view of the public, all of the calisthenics of the body are willingly displayed for their viewers. Think of the most common forms of influencer content: There are makeup tutorials and exercise regimens and tips for heterodox diets. There are bathroom selfies and self-portraits in bed and endless I just woke up confessions. In a way, the essential premise of the collab-house business model is not far from that of pornographic entertainment.
And:
So the truth is that the influencer economy is just a garish accentuation of the economy writ large. As our culture continues to conflate the private and public realms—as the pandemic has transformed our homes into offices and our bedrooms into backdrops, as public institutions increasingly fall prey to the mandates of the market—we’ve become cheerfully indentured to the idea that our worth as individuals isn’t our personal integrity or sense of virtue, but our ability to advertise our relevance on the platforms of multinational tech corporations.
And yet one of the sadder ironies about all my hemming and hawing is that I, too, frequently mobilize the very tactics of ingratiation that I’m accusing the influencers of. How about the fact that, as a university professor, my prospects for getting tenure rely, in large measure, on student evaluations, meaning that I have a forceful economic motivation not necessarily to challenge my students or give them the grades they deserve, but instead to make sure they feel safe and supported and to pad their grades so they don’t take out their animus on those crucial end-of-semester evaluations. So worried have I become about my numbers and long-term job security that I have lately begun to overhear myself talking to students with the same deferential manner as a RadioShack manager.
Call it the Yelpification of the academy. Call it the retail logic of higher education. I mention this only to observe that if we sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, it might be because they serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways in which we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands. It is a logic that extends from the retailer’s smile to the professor’s easy A to the politician’s capitulation to the co-worker’s calculated post to the journalist’s virtue-signaling tweet to the influencer’s scripted photo. The angle of our pose might be different, but all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm.
Charlotte was Both 