We are not brands, we are human beings
Living in a social-media world isn’t merely transforming us into brands, it’s corroding the essence of what it means to be a real person
The dismantling of Tiger Woods fascinates me for several reasons. Sure, everyone loves a scandal involving a seemingly perfect icon in sports, especially when it involves sex. It goes further than that for me though.
As Gawker pointed out, this celebrity news story encapsulated the perfect media story that could only have developed at this very point in our history because of the Internet tools that enabled its dissemination and could devour it.
But while most of the reaction and analysis surrounding the story has focused on how Wood’s “handlers” mismanaged the entire situation and let it get out of hand to the point where he’s dropping sponsors and costing lots of people and companies money and embarrassment, I think the fallout has a lesson to teach — and it’s not the obvious one you’d expect.
I think we’ve all accepted the fact that celebrities exist now to be brands that others use to leverage other brands. Literally, we buy and sell people like we would the stock of a company. I’m honestly a bit shocked that no one sees this as a depressing development in society, that we find it an acceptable practice that we’re willing to support the dehumanization of real, talented people to be speculated and valued like a commodity. On a fundamental level, this is disturbing.
Whatever happened to the idea of, “I am not a number. I am a man”?
So to add to the chorus of lessons we can all learn from the Woods scandal — from “don’t cheat on your spouse” to “stay in front of the story” — I would add that as we enter an age where we voluntarily position ourselves to transition from individuals into brands that we have to be aware of the consequences of this mentality and look at how utterly destructive the results can be if we place ourselves in a situation where your name is bought and sold by forces larger than yourself.
While the Internet bred the trends of microcelebrity and microfame for the past few years, I don’t think we’ve seen it reach the nadir just yet. Simply put, we haven’t felt the widespread negative consequences of its pursuit as a generation. Instead, we’re still learning (quickly, mind you) how to become the masters of self-promotion to sell and expand our brand.
And I’m not just talking about those chasing a chance to be on reality television or even something to the equivalent of YouTube famous. I’m saying this is occurring on a granular, Dunbar-number level for almost anyone who has a nearly-daily online presence, which is pretty much all of us.
Obviously, we’ve always strived to put our best foot forward and the act of crafting a public persona the world sees isn’t some practice the Internet caused to happen. But the Internet allowed us to use tools that separated the persona from the physical person and being of who we really are.
No longer did our “happy face” have to fade as we exited a situation that required it. Instead, it could remain always “on” in some absolutely perfect format online. We could tweak it, crafting a static portrait from photos, text and video. Our personalities and values (or lack thereof) expressed in HTML (or, heavens forbid, javascript) to be called up at any time.
In reality, these masks we show to society as we interact with others are susceptible to flaws and as we wear them we have a conscious idea of the role we find ourselves in. We knew when the “real” us came out and who we could be such a person with.
The Internet’s tools, however, changed the way we interact with people and essentially forced us to adopt not just a static profile, but it’s now since morphed into an ongoing, dynamic personality punctuated with status updates. Smartphones and virtually constant access to the Internet feed our compulsive desires to continue crafting a narrative for a personality that is not truly us.
And I know it’s not who we truly are for several reasons. When you have complete editorial control over the content that your life produces, you opt to publish only that which you believe cultivates how you want others to see you. The whole point of publication is to put it in front of other people, and we tie ourselves to feedback. Likes, favs, diggs, reblogs, comments, etc., all provide a feedback loop that encourages us to produce more of our lives for public consumption. To continue this, we are discouraged from sharing the things that aren’t the us we want people to see, or at least that which doesn’t play well. As we adjust this content algorithm, we slowly eliminate that which our audience dislikes and focus on what garners the response we like.
It’s a relatively new movement for the masses — crafting a public personality at such a complicated level typically reserved for celebrities, who lived life on a stage. Before, personalities were rampant, but anonymous was the norm. And those who used their real names weren’t exactly out to build their names as brands like celebrities.
Facebook placed an importance on using your real identity online. And then this combined with MySpace, which encouraged the crafting of a personal brand and chasing the “friend” count.
And now here we are — turning elements of our lives into disposable, fast-food content and turning the idea of friendship into something superficial and worthy of mockery. (At least Twitter tried to draw a distinction using the term “follower,” but even this has become futile as users strive to “follow” more than they realistically can pay attention to in an effort to get others to pay attention to them.)
In theory, I really don’t have a problem with people crafting a persona online or even chasing fame if that’s what they want to do and it makes them happy. But most of us aren’t really chasing high-level fame, yet we act in this faux-celebrity, alter-personality way. And let’s get realistic for a moment and really ask ourselves if spending hours on these social networks is making us happy.
Does Facebook make you react negatively to some of your friends? Does Twitter make you think the world’s trite? Does Tumblr make you think you just wasted hours of your time scrolling down your dashboard? Does reading the comments on a newspaper article, blog post, YouTube video or Digg thread disgust you?
What depresses me greatly though isn’t that we voluntarily engage ourselves in these activities — as we all deserve a chance to do some mindless stuff — but that we spend an excessive volume of time occupying this persona instead of being who we really are when we’re not sitting in front of a glowing screen adding to the narrative.
Worse still, we’re encouraging others along this same path and ignoring those who say we shouldn’t spend so much time online — obviously they don’t “get it”!
I’m not completely sure how all of this started to happen. It might be because we’ve grown up with the Internet and it logically intertwined with all of our communications as broadband and mobility became commonplace. Perhaps combined with the fact many of us are overeducated for the jobs we perform we’ve got excess time and this is the only way we can get away with killing our boredom and our creative minds have nowhere else to go. Or maybe it’s a coping mechanism against our generation’s quarterlife crisis. If life is some sort of game and we can’t figure out how to win in the real world, maybe we can take our avatar and compete elsewhere and win over there.
I’m not sure where this delusion of using social media to break through to some sort of success comes from, but I think we ought to strongly caution against it — or at least really think this whole thing through to the end by asking some hard questions.
This isn’t the selling of our souls. We’re actively participating in the dismantling and altering of who we really are to form something entirely new without knowing the societal consequences of what happens when the Internet we used to build ourselves up tears us down. If it does happen, then it’ll happen quickly and thoroughly.
When you fail in real life, you might have someone there to help you deal with it. When you fail on the Internet, you’re alone and others flock to mock you. I’m not sure we’re ready for the long-term psychological effects of such an incident.
We’re building this idea of the “perfect me” online, but we’re forgetting that “me” has flaws, imperfections, limitations and was never intended to be hidden away. We’re running away from parts of us that make us different and force us to confront adversity. Our lives shouldn’t be constructed to project the expectations and perceptions others have of us.
We are human beings. We are not brands.