Everyday social media as storytelling, and the imperative to narrate our own stories on our own terms.

“we are taught to fear the truth, to believe it always hurts, we are encouraged to see honest people as naïve, as potential losers. Bombarded with cultural propaganda ready to instill in all of us the notion that lies are more important, that truth does not matter, we are all potential victims. Consumer culture in particular encourages lies… Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism.“ (bell hooks, p47, all about love, 1999)

As for new years resolutions, I imagine a lot of ppl will say they are taking a break from social media. Too much time online means something is wrong with you, right? What is it with the world’s immediate assumption that social media is bad?

I am very much a social media optimist. I grew up on Runescape, club penguin, gaiaonline, maplestory. I was of the generation and economic class to play on computers and the web as early as 10, downloading art software, reading blogs and illegally downloading youtubes to mp3. The internet is like the world’s largest library, quarantine friendly dance hall, a temple that transcends country borders. I’ve written about how technology has disrupted our experience of linear time and caring relationships (its not narcissistic to share an ig post from a year ago, its archival). Online, we are in a unique position that enables asynchronous conversation with ourselves and with others to a threshold NEVER before experienced by humans. This is the medium we find ourselves in, as we peer at eachother thru the screens.

My idealistic view of the internet, however, is before you add in economic, political, and social forces that shape experiences online.

with the acquirement of instagram, meta’s chokehold is concerning. The way algorithms sell us what we say out loud is concerning. Then there is the commodification of images, meaning visuals have market values. A sexy swimsuit pic impacts multiple markets: it will make you order a swimsuit, buy a gym membership, a tanning lotion, subscribe to OF. NFT’s are a badly planned attempt to rein in the internet’s democratic stronghold (screenshots) in the name of benefit for artists, but commodifying creativity will always be contorted into opportunistic/ capitalistic hedonism.

As an artist that makes money via my social media page, I see the contextual realities of social media and consumption, but I need to act in this cultural space so that I can pay rent while making space to play and rest and dream. We all need to act more intentionally in online spaces. My guiding principle is not the algorithms. It is not the number of likes or the number of followers! (but how seductive those numbers are…) I have to constantly remind myself because these incentives are shoved in our face every moment of every day, the impetus to go viral ascertains that success (i.e. happiness) is sure to follow. Certainly, it’s harder than ever to be authentic in a world that is hyper visible, but perhaps there is more at stake when we aren’t.

I’ve always hated the discourse that selfies are vain and that social media is ruining peoples perception of themselves. Noooo baby, that’s the capitalist male gaze that says bodies are meant to look a certain way, that says if you like how your body looks, you’re evil. Liking how you look and how you live means you are satisfied, and means you aren’t the ideal consumer (lulz this is real, read more). An interconnected network online is not what is degrading our self worth or our connections with others, it’s the dominant HUMAN CREATED discourses that have shaped online spaces the same way they shape offline spaces. However, it’s actually very exciting to realize that online spaces are shaped by dominant discourses, bc it means that other, alternative discourses can shape spaces. What would it be like if we chose love and pleasure and compassion and honesty as our reasons for sharing?

“Gestures, posture, clothes, habits, and certain distinctions, from the way one holds a cigarette to the manner in which one crosses one's legs, to the way one wears a hat-they all are performed differently depending on the gender, race, class status, and sexual orientation of the performer. How the body moves about in the world, and its various mannerisms, styles, and distinctions, is inherited from one generation through space and time to another and demarcated within specific identity categories. Therefore, these performativities become the manifestation of gender, race, sexuality,  and class. You have heard the saying, "Act like a man," or the stereotypes, "She acts like a boy," "He doesn't act black,"  "He acts like he's gay,” or "She acts like she has no class." These expressions are common in the vernacular because identity is performed, and to perform outside these inherited constructions is to break through these taken-for-granted and commonsense notions of what a specific identity is or should be. These performativities are engrained in the way we understand and order social behavior to the point that we often think it is not only natural, but proper and as it should be.” But what happens when performativity is disrupted? What happens when a boy acts like a girl? When a woman acts like a man? When a black person does not act black? When an old person does not act old? Performativity is up for examination and reflection in cultural performance.” (D. Sonyini Madison, Critical Ethnography p192, 2012)

Imagine it is your first day of school. It’s new, you don’t know anyone. You are whatever age you are right now, reading this. How would you want to act? Who would you want to meet? What classes would you be the most excited about? PE, Art, home ec? Geology? What if we came online with the same curiosity and the same energy of connecting over interests, not market valued things like wealth, false beauty standards, or hyper productivity?

As the Omicron variant spreads and people are feeling very lonely, negative feelings have potential to be exasperated by being on social media spaces that nourish jealousy, fatigue. We must care for eachother by reshaping our actions online to be guided by love and compassion, rather than the immediate gratification, click bait, and false aesthetics of capitalism such as new clothes, extravagant vacations, and quickly formed opinions based off of a few tweets . Like other “pleasure activists”, I full heartedly believe that moving through spaces, yes even digital ones, with love and with boundaries allows for imagination, creativity, and healing in ways that are very human. I’m talking about authentic connections and using social media as the tool that it has the potential to be— if we take space from it and engage with it in meaningful ways.

My age group (1994-1999) we were not rlly taught by anyone about how to be online. They just said things like be careful what you post it will follow you, people will track you, it will be unprofessional, etc. As an adult, I see that professionalism is a false performance of white cis hetero patriarchy. I want to move beyond these oppressive perceptions of what is ‘right’ and ‘moral’!! The future (the now, the past), is queer, collaborative, expansive, and non-human (tech, environment, animals on equal planes as humans). The same way our authentic selves inherently deserve respect and compassion IRL, so do our digital avatars as archetypes of our self, our dreams, who we want to be, and who we cant be in real life.

So what about a tool kit for actually acting this way online? How do we escape the influx of images selling things to us? how do we view social media as anything other than a fake highlight reel of people we don’t actually interact with IRL? “Embodied experience and affective forms of interconnection are both facets of our online and offline worlds” (Devin Proctor & Tariq Adely). This means that the ways we relate to eachother, how it makes us feel in our bodies and feel emotionally, is not just a thing of the offline world, though ofc it will have different texture and reverberations online. The advice is not that bullshit ‘treat people behind the screen like people’, that’s so vague and it isnt actual instructions for creating boundaries nor acting with love. Our online worlds need to be safe to be regenerative, creating opportunities for individuals to perform authentic versions of themselves. (I act different at home then I do in the office then I do on a first date than I do at a bar with my best friends than I do at home alone. Which is the authentic version of myself? Are they not all real? Am I not a sum of these performances?). To disrupt patterns of habit online, we must take space away to stop cycles, and think intentionally about how we want to move in online spaces before going back in with curiosity and intentionality.

Going online needs to be energizing and inspiring. Like any artist will tell you, inspiration and work come in cycles. Inspiration without discipline, without trying, prevents our dreams from becoming reality. Ideas require integration, require kneading out bubbles, time to rise. This is where the work of boundaries with the internet comes in. I feel like boundaries are such a buzz word that seem like a solve-all, when in reality it is a vast umbrella that covers actions, thoughts, and words that differ for every person in every context. My boundaries with social media WILL look different than yours. And when people criticize social media for being life draining, they’re actually feeling the impacts of our social pressures manifested in an online space. What do energizing online spaces look like? Gardening facebook groups, potluck dinner posters, upcycling tiktoks. Its funny bc the recent Meta ads and FB group ads sell this sense of community back to us, but I really think most people are so jaded from social media that we dont see that kind of connection anymore!

What is our tool kit for mitigating social pressures IRL, and how can we translate that to online space? There is a long history of dreamers who aspire towards justice, freedom, and compassion. Its up to us who grew up online to lead the way, testing how these principles might be practiced online. We must be the generation that disrupts the current trajectory of social media into a nihilistic world where the only option is to buy happiness.

Posting to any social media is the opportunity for an intentional curation of sentiments, colors, shapes, and forms. Reject the idea of curating wealth, aesthetic beauty values, and hyper productivity. If we are inserting ourselves directly in the perception of others, ought we not be more careful of what it is we are showing them? Ought we not see it as an opportunity to present our dream world, how the world could be, how things might be? It’s true that our individual actions and words are mere lines in the sand of The Great Discourse Desert. It is also true that what each person notices about the world in their quiet moments is something of a revelation. And if we were to collectively draw our own little lines with intention, aiming to align them with each of our different values and how we might imagine a world, maybe the winds will blow dunes into the shape of community.

“it is a metaphysical illusion that one can speak only for oneself: we are collective caught in an intricate, delicate web in which each action I take, discursively or otherwise, pulls on, breaks off, or maintains the tension in many strands of web in which other find themselves moving also” (Linda Alcoff, the problem of speaking for others 1991, p 20)

We are the subject and the artist, the avatar and the one who holds the controller, who will you perform as next?

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