Everyday Commodification
They don't do it for the gram, they do it for the paycheck.
When I first started using Instagram around high school, people would dismiss it saying “everyone is pretending to be someone else for validation”. While inauthenticity seemed a vice evil enough to be looked down upon, it was also harmless enough to be condoned. We dismissed social media but carried on, posting our daily lives in heavy sepia. We posted because we craved validation from our peers - most of the time from our peers only. Being dark or artsy or fashionable i.e. whatever version of cool we wanted to be, we only wanted to be for the people we could think of and name. For me, the extent of my vanity was that I HOPED the people in my grade looked at my breakfast and thought “wow, she is so much better than us”.
Yes it crossed our mind that we could get popular and everyone would care about every fleeting thought we have, but we never cared enough to engineer that. We had accepted that if it happened, it was a thing of luck. There was an invisible wall between fame and an average Joe. Our average Joe expectations were realistic and we expected to experience only a simulation of fame, never the real thing.
Today, when you sit scrolling through tiktoks, there are scrolls of perfectly told stories in 30 second segments. Stories that have a beginning, an end, a punchline, background music and hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. The invisible wall separating hobbyists from on-screen performers does not exist anymore. It is no longer about unpolished authenticity or amateur reach for fame or finding a voice. Content creation now is more about production, agents, brands and distribution. Tiktok/Reel/Stories formats feel like microservices of the media industry. Using these formats and cookie cutting the rest of the aspects of social media presence like a doll on a production line, agencies can engineer a path to popularity for hundreds of thousands of people. Fame was fickle, but now it is strategic content, consistent posting, influencer marketing and brand partnerships. The world literally is a stage.
Influencer is now a real job but what is fascinating about it is that we as consumers don’t fully realize it yet. The people on the stage have changed but our understanding of what show we’re watching is still lagging. Sometimes we dig too deep into comparison, without realizing that the influencers we see are just doing their job. It’s not our fault - with traditional media, we had accepted the default that everything on the screen and in the tabloids was intentional and planned. Same with early social media, we could tell it was amateur but real. The default of social media has changed from authentic to commercial. “Authenticity” now comes in various shapes and forms. Creators now have software to create, distribute and iterate faster through these authentic stories. Today’s social media content feels like the creation industry is on steroids.
A fast and high output iterative cycle is great for people who are trying to say something, it is great for people who want to be performers and it is great for anybody who is creative. Creativity is productive and is starting to be paid accordingly. Additionally, the push for monetization by social media platforms makes today’s industry is great for creators who trying to make a living. However, a side effect of this recent drive towards monetization is that it has lead to commodification of stories. An opinion, an experience, a storyline are all commodities that can be co-opted by creators to make their sale.
What this means for consumers is that on one hand, there is truly authentic content. On the other hand, there is content that is using authenticity as a storyline and is highly engineered. For every creator showing us their four step weekly meal prep routine, there is someone out there showing the same steps because the steps are popular (For example, “come load my ice tray with me” videos). Both these things co-exist and we haven’t entirely caught up to tell the difference yet. When you’ve been scrolling for two hours and suddenly realize that the tiktoks you’ve been watching are actually produced by a team and not always by a single person on a phone, it feels quite dystopian.
Every time we see an airtight morning routine on screen or someone telling their life story, we feel tempted to compare. We wish we had that personality, we wish we had that stroke of luck. In those moments, it is important to remind ourselves that a lot of good and authentic content exists out there but so does a lot of seemingly good real authentic content and it is good to know which one you’re comparing yourself with.