Wondering this evening, thought it’s in fact well past evening and on into the night by now, wondering about the imperative for self-censorship in a world in which everyting you do is marketing for your personal brand. If you have to keep yourself saleable, you have also to keep yourself likeable, and so you have to say as few things to offend people as possible. Unless, I suppose, your brand is that of being an asshole.
I mean, I get it, how well you are liked determines (generally speaking) how well you do in the world, but it just seems strange that we are now all expected to perform publicly as if we were all celebrities, as if we were all spokes-folks for some corporation or another. And, the idea these days is that we are, Me Corp. The fact of which is insidious and gross and horrific and yet so completely in tune with the Zeitgeist that to do anything else is crazy. It is now officially in all of our best interests to turn ourselves into marketable products and that is totally insane. And yet we’re gradually becoming the insane ones for even pointing it out.
What emerges from less sleep than I would like is the feeling of being put upon, hooked into by a mode of being that isn’t natural me, or, really, to anyone. Relationship maintenance, even for the sake of keeping high social status has always until now been a one-to-one thing (for the non-rich and non-famous, anyway), I keep myself on good terms with you and you and you and you and you, and in aggregate, I am liked and popular.
It’s not unheard of for a group to turn on an individual, or for a performance to win the hearts of many, of course, which is the level we now think we ought to be thinking on: all the world’s a stage and everybody’s watching. Which is a deeply paranoid state to wander around in. If social media is anything it’s a narcissism generator, a paranoia generator.
I am not the first to make these comments, but so many people talk about hating social media and yet have assented to make their entire lives totally dependent upon it. I’m confused and frustrated by this, and find myself drawn to it myself via that ever-frustrating feeling of “if they’re doing it, I ought to be too.”