Living like common online personas

Dedicated to perceptions, Pulp (the band), and the fabricated ease of the Instagram selfie

At what point does our living become a performance?

Not long ago, a friend asked what I had prepared for the coming Sunday’s newsletter. I said that I hadn’t prepared anything, that I often write it the night before, without clear direction, almost breathlessly, discovering what I want to say as I go (bad writing advice by the way), but that since we’d spoken about social media and his intentional absence from most platforms, maybe I’d talk about that, about the ways in which we establish our online personas and how they match and don’t match our real selves (whatever a real self is anyway). His reaction caught me off guard: a half-concealed roll of the eyes, his arms stretched away from his torso, palms up in hurried resignation, the audible trace of a cautionary smile as he said “please, don’t”.

And I didn’t. I wrote about the fragility of plans and personal experience instead. But then I read this essay by

Maybe Baby

’s Haley Nahman and it got me thinking. I thought about my evolving relationship with my image, the troubled ways in which we perceive ourselves being perceived, and the vicarious joys of online voyeurism. I thought about my social media-reluctant friend and wondered why he had warned against my intellectual pursuit in the first place. Was his remark plain scorn or a cry for help?

In an essay titled “On Keeping a Notebook”, published in her 1968 anthology “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, Joan Didion writes: “We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing.” Talking about her stake in journaling, she goes on: “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

This scrutiny of self, its observation and preservation, seems to be the point of modern Instagram record-keeping too. With an eerie edge though: we secretly want, expect even, others to participate in our visual diaries with likes and comments and saves and shares, the more the better. We wish, in other words, to be witnessed, seen and accepted, not just by the few people with whom we share an intimacy in real life, but by strangers on the internet, the same strangers who are always more interesting than ourselves, and always present, millions of them, only a half-renounced scroll away.

Because I’m only human, I want to be seen too. I also want you to think that I don’t. So there I am, iPhone in hand, face strategically angled, eyes lowered to the screen, not too eager to be seen, my features arranged in some natural-looking, extensively rehearsed composure, my other hand where? And I’m cued by the memory of a modeling agent who told me I had a large waist and advised I posed with my hips aslant, my front leg bent, so I’d look slimmer in photos. Another voice in my head belongs to a drama school teacher who urged me to keep my shoulders down and back, my neck long, so I had more space to work with. And the most alarming and alarmingly helpful advice of all, from a photographer (a man much older than me, important to note): think of something naughty.

In other words, simplicity takes effort.

I look at my feed - a mix of art, quotes, and aestheticized mess, with the incursion of small Italian celebrity gossip (something that’s unclear how it made its way there but that I’m enjoying becoming well-versed in nonetheless) and the occasional beauty enthusiast tapping away at make-up and skin care products with impossible nails - and wonder if social media had ceased to be a tool for connection and self-preservation, and became a platform to facilitate the commodification of personalities instead.

If we are so self-aware of our image and online personas, so clinical about the content we decide to post and not post with such apparent nonchalance, is there any space left for authenticity, especially when real life happens, as it seems, mostly on the internet? At what point does our living become a performance? Are we all in the business of trading our privacy for attention?

“I wanna live like common people”, sings the speaker in Pulp’s Common People, a girl from Greece whose dad was loaded, and the song is about the permanence of class, specifically how the well-heeled can never really understand the poor, no matter how immersed they become in their reality. I find platforms like Instagram and TikTok to be nothing but magnifiers of class, mirrors held up by and for us common and uncommon people, or at least for those people who are willing to look.

An online community is still, after all, a community. It still satisfies our need to belong, to feel part of something, less lonely. Yet you don’t see the very privileged, the very unprivileged, the very enlightened, or the very snob (with a few exceptions) posting carefully edited, self-indulging videos and gnomic-captioned, haphazard-looking carousels; you don’t see them engaging with the power dynamics of social media.

What you see are common online personas, like you and me.