Argumentative Essay: Social Media Destroys Individuality and Personal Relationships

📌Category: Entertainment, Interpersonal relationship, Social Media, Sociology
📌Words: 911
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 27 January 2022

The advent of late capitalism goes hand in hand with the rise of social media. Social media is an omnipresent entity that permeates every aspect of our lives. It revolutionizes our communication, changes our shopping behaviors, engineers new addictions, and leads to the emergence of influencers. In this paper, I will argue that social media destroys our individuality and personal relationships by promoting our incentives to optimize and adhering to social norms. 

Influencers are the contemporary manifestations of the spectacles and are usually portrayed as entrepreneurial because they optimize the Internet. Despite being coined back in the 19th century, Debord’s definition of the spectacles - "not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” - still stands. Influencers are the images that Debord refers to and act as middlemen between consumers and brands. Their testimonies and endorsement of a product occupy a significant portion of brands’ marketing budgets. The influencer economy is a promising industry with a developed ecosystem of influencer consulting and influencers' metric tracking firms. This 10 billion dollars industry encompasses not just beauty influencers but niche gurus from travel, health to kid influencers. It is not surprising that influencers often view themselves as “entrepreneurs” in charge of their small “Internet startups”. The media often uses flattering language to describe them: risk-tolerant individuals who recognize opportunities where others neglect. In Tolentino’s words, these influencers optimize the Internet and social media for their branding. Optimization refers to the sustained commitment to presenting the idealized versions expected on social media. For example, moms optimize their homes as studios where their children wear sponsored clothes while carrying on their daily activities. Children’s dynamic facial expressions and fixed routines and make it easy for moms to incorporate photoshoots. The imperative for moms to optimize their homes blurs the traditional distinction between work and home. Before the rise of social media and late capitalism, homes are rendered off-limits to businesses and a haven for workers. Now even home is a serious business where moms carefully plan and edit their photoshoots to “everydayness” of family life. This is a dilemma in itself. 

By optimizing their home life, these moms passively submit to the influence of the spectacles. Moms “move away from directly living their lives” into living through the lenses of representations. Their children are now commodities, reflections of what the audience desires to see and what brands demand to present. Princeton, a 10-year-old influencer highly aware of his Instagram presence, replied in an interview: “Do you think my fans would like this?” This quote troubles me a great deal. His individuality wá compromised the moment he took into consideration the expectations of his audience. Instead of trying on clothes for the pure sake of “playing dress-up and bonding” with her mother, he acknowledged the influence of spectacles on his decision-making. This is another example of false consciousness where the actors are disillusioned into believing that they have agency over their decisions. They are dictated by their audience’s demands. This challenges the motivation that prompts moms into creating these accounts in the first place. These moms and child influencers do not derive satisfaction from doing what they want but from representing the lives that the spectacle wants to see. 

As proven above, social media alienates not only influencers from their individuality but also child influencers from their family. Marxist theory of alienation is applicable in this contemporary example of child influencers. Alienation refers to the disjunct relationship between wage workers and products of their labor whose characteristics are made by the bourgeoisie. Owning the means of production, this social class can decide what to produce, how much to produce while laborers passively follow their orders. To some extent, children resemble these workers in that they have no control over their social media profiles. These decisions are unilaterally made by moms. In an interview with The Atlantic, Colette Wixom, the manager behind her sons’ 300,000 followers accounts recounted that she did all the fieldwork herself - reaching out to potential sponsors, brainstorming the concepts with the brands; her sons simply needed to get into full-on wrestling matches. In other cases, these photos are even uploaded without their consent. Then raises the unavoidable question of where these profits go. Even when moms assure that the money is reserved for their children, it remains elusive who benefits most. In the short run, moms may argue that these photoshoots bring families closer together. However, in the long run, as children age, conflicts will arise over ownership and revenues from these accounts.  

Despite growing concerns over its influence, social media’s images-saturated culture and the spread of toxic positivity reinforce the status quo. Influencers and actors are somewhat similar because they both follow prewritten scripts, put on certain facial expressions, and exude vibes that their brands represent. Influencers show off their wealth and happiness behind heavily edited photos. These distorted representations please the mass audience and enable omnipresent affirmation. Debord argues that the spectacle “demands [...] passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.” The fact that influencers uniformly post glamorous photos of their lives urges their loyal followers to copy their lifestyle. The subconscious message is that if you go to the same gym, buy the same beauty products, and wear the same clothes, you might eventually attain the same life as your idol. This monopoly of appearance of positivity on social media confirms its dominance, creating a vicious circle that traps both influencers and their followers inside. 

Social media has been such an integral part of our daily life, especially tech-savvy generation Z, that many do not question its influence. While it is undeniable that social media has brought people together during the Covid pandemic, it also shapes our perceptions of self and may indirectly damage our interpersonal relationships as in the child influencer case. Recognizing social media presence is the first step towards finding a balance for ourselves.

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