The Social Gaze: On Watching and Being Watched
The Social Gaze: On Watching and Being Watched
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
– Susan Sontag, On Photography
Sontag’s remarks were deemed controversial in the late 70s. In the digital age of image saturation, however, she’s the disseminator of the gospel truth. Everything today from our casual interests, beliefs, interactions across mediums, and even our personality – exists to end up in a 1080 x 1080 pixel and 4:5 aspect ratio photograph, nestled in a thoughtfully curated grid – for the feasting eyes of the other.
The malleability provided by social media platforms to alter our identities has been a matter of discourse since its inception. Our online personas have never existed in a vacuum. As social creatures, we’re in constant anticipation of the outsider’s gaze, in both awe and fear. The inherent need to be seen is always accompanied by the fearful clasp of judgment tight around its neck. The human herd instinct to seek approval makes most of our behaviour in social settings performative. From the clothes we wear and the movies we watch to the opinions we hold more often than not arise from the need to achieve a sense of belonging – the one slated third in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs[1].
While the performances persist, it’s only human to slip up at times.
Entrée the power of social media.
Social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and X (formerly Twitter) allow us to not only create a production out of our existence but up the ante as well – we get to control who views our performance, along with the parts they get to see.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine you’re (doom)scrolling through Instagram when you come across a post by a conventionally attractive, white woman. She’s seated in an outdoor cafe. The sunbeams bounce perfectly off of her black sunglasses. Her profile faces the camera as she peers into her phone’s screen, carefully reapplying her lipstick.
Seems cool enough right? What if you zoom in just a bit?
Those sunglasses are the coveted Tom Fords in Whitney, and her lipstick is the classic Rouge Dior. What else, the bottom half of the picture seems to cut off a pack of Marlboro Lights and what appears to be an incredibly expensive lighter!
There’s at least a fifty per cent chance that you’ll believe you’ve stumbled across the feed of an heiress out to lunch in Italy. Such is the power of branding. The mere association with brands established as luxurious converts a simple photograph into an identity definer, as Professor Nita Mathur notes, “commercial brands and luxury commodities have come to serve as signifiers of identity in society”[2], allowing individuals to construct, deconstruct or reconstruct their social identities.
This influence of brand voices on an individual’s perceived identity and personality has been summated in a rather innocuous copypasta that trended on X (formerly Twitter) last year and continues to prosper:
Why we begin to associate with certain brands in the first place is a question Alice Cappelle asks in her YouTube video, “Why do we follow brands?: capitalism and our loss of meaning”[3]. Cappelle explains this affinity to brands with the disillusionment the younger generations face from politicians and leaders when it comes to ideas about society and our futures as a whole. “Brands own our collective imagination” by providing us with aspirational ideas of what society could be, even if the application of said ideas in the real world remains next to null.
With the popularisation of social media marketing, brands have innovated their strategies to target and attract the social media generation – Gen Z and beyond – in the name of building better B2C (business-to-consumer) relations based on these aspirations, with zero follow-through. When these consumers buy into the ideas offered by these brands, their consumer identities bleed into and stain their social identities.
In her substack essay titled, “Standing on the shoulders of complex female characters”[4] writer Rayne Fisher Quann expands on how consumer identities, even if purely aspirational further influence our deceptively manufactured social (media) identities:
“it’s become very common for women online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of the things they consume, or aspire to consume — and because young women are conditioned to believe that their identities are defined almost entirely by their neuroses, these roundups of cultural trends and authors du jour often implicitly serve to chicly signal one’s mental illnesses to the public. one girl on your tiktok feed might be a self-described joan didion/eve babitz/marlboro reds/straight-cut levis/fleabag girl (this means she has depression). another will call herself a babydoll dress/sylvia plath/red scare/miu miu/lana del rey girl (eating disorder), or a green juice/claw clip/emma chamberlain/yoga mat/podcast girl (different eating disorder). the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would.”
The woman we conjured earlier in the essay may be wearing Tom Ford dupes. Her Dior may have been a gift, and the lighter just an exquisite thrift find. The Khan Market visitor from the copypasta may simply be recycling photos of a singular visit for an entire week. All of this would remain irrelevant for the fleeting eyes of the other – they’ve not only bought the performance but already reviewed it in their mind.
Whether we truly believe in or attempt to emulate who we follow, claim to wear, watch, listen or speak to becomes a matter of secondary concern on the farcical platform that social media as we know it – blurring the lines between aspirations and reality multifold. The onslaught of decoy marketing and advertising has turned it into a convoluted nexus of consumption, where expressions of true human individualities are relegated and our profiles become personal brand images that piggyback off of fake, pretentious, capitalist bullshit.
However, since hope will forever be the final thing left in the box (or grid in this case), one could daresay that as is the case with all trends, this trend too will eventually pass.
The transition from 2023 to 2024 has witnessed a massive shift in attitudes towards social media, especially from Gen Z. By disengaging from ad-heavy platforms and the ultimate social media validation race of the “like”[5], an inclination towards genuine connection has been witnessed. The wave of nihilism that this generation emerges from is channelled positively[6] towards breaking free from algorithm-driven ideas of happiness and success and instead seeking out both attachments and inspirations from people similar to them. This in turn, as speculated in The BOF and McKinsey & Co Fashion report of 2024[7], could lead to consumers demanding more authenticity and reliability from brands, expected to reflect in influencer marketing strategies – the ultimate deceivers.
So if all of social media no longer proves to be a stage,
And all the brands and people no longer performers,
Chances are that we might finally lower those sunnies,
And meet eye to eye.
References
https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
https://sk.sagepub.com/books/consumer-culture-modernity-and-identity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14JGQ1JWSgc&t=632s
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2023/01/26/why-and-how-to-implement-social-media-branding/?sh=3c975389793b
https://internetprincess.substack.com/p/standing-on-the-shoulders-of-complex
https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/32/1/171/1796334?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.wired.com/story/business-gen-z-social-media/
https://creative.salon/articles/features/is-social-media-over-for-the-younger-generation
https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/new-nihilism-how-gen-z-is-embracing-a-life-of-futility-and-meaninglessness-20231016-p5ecra.html
https://www.businessoffashion.com/reports/news-analysis/the-state-of-fashion-2024-report-bof-mckinsey/
Appears in —
Kai
Kai is a student of literature and a fan of stories in all forms. Currently fidgeting behind a camera lens, she’s always struggling with thinking too much and not writing enough.
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more from this issue —
“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
– Susan Sontag, On Photography
Sontag’s remarks were deemed controversial in the late 70s. In the digital age of image saturation, however, she’s the disseminator of the gospel truth. Everything today from our casual interests, beliefs, interactions across mediums, and even our personality – exists to end up in a 1080 x 1080 pixel and 4:5 aspect ratio photograph, nestled in a thoughtfully curated grid – for the feasting eyes of the other.
The malleability provided by social media platforms to alter our identities has been a matter of discourse since its inception. Our online personas have never existed in a vacuum. As social creatures, we’re in constant anticipation of the outsider’s gaze, in both awe and fear. The inherent need to be seen is always accompanied by the fearful clasp of judgment tight around its neck. The human herd instinct to seek approval makes most of our behaviour in social settings performative. From the clothes we wear and the movies we watch to the opinions we hold more often than not arise from the need to achieve a sense of belonging – the one slated third in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs[1].
While the performances persist, it’s only human to slip up at times.
Entrée the power of social media.
Social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and X (formerly Twitter) allow us to not only create a production out of our existence but up the ante as well – we get to control who views our performance, along with the parts they get to see.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine you’re (doom)scrolling through Instagram when you come across a post by a conventionally attractive, white woman. She’s seated in an outdoor cafe. The sunbeams bounce perfectly off of her black sunglasses. Her profile faces the camera as she peers into her phone’s screen, carefully reapplying her lipstick.
Seems cool enough right? What if you zoom in just a bit?
Those sunglasses are the coveted Tom Fords in Whitney, and her lipstick is the classic Rouge Dior. What else, the bottom half of the picture seems to cut off a pack of Marlboro Lights and what appears to be an incredibly expensive lighter!
There’s at least a fifty per cent chance that you’ll believe you’ve stumbled across the feed of an heiress out to lunch in Italy. Such is the power of branding. The mere association with brands established as luxurious converts a simple photograph into an identity definer, as Professor Nita Mathur notes, “commercial brands and luxury commodities have come to serve as signifiers of identity in society”[2], allowing individuals to construct, deconstruct or reconstruct their social identities.
This influence of brand voices on an individual’s perceived identity and personality has been summated in a rather innocuous copypasta that trended on X (formerly Twitter) last year and continues to prosper:
Why we begin to associate with certain brands in the first place is a question Alice Cappelle asks in her YouTube video, “Why do we follow brands?: capitalism and our loss of meaning”[3]. Cappelle explains this affinity to brands with the disillusionment the younger generations face from politicians and leaders when it comes to ideas about society and our futures as a whole. “Brands own our collective imagination” by providing us with aspirational ideas of what society could be, even if the application of said ideas in the real world remains next to null.
With the popularisation of social media marketing, brands have innovated their strategies to target and attract the social media generation – Gen Z and beyond – in the name of building better B2C (business-to-consumer) relations based on these aspirations, with zero follow-through. When these consumers buy into the ideas offered by these brands, their consumer identities bleed into and stain their social identities.
In her substack essay titled, “Standing on the shoulders of complex female characters”[4] writer Rayne Fisher Quann expands on how consumer identities, even if purely aspirational further influence our deceptively manufactured social (media) identities:
“it’s become very common for women online to express their identities through an artfully curated list of the things they consume, or aspire to consume — and because young women are conditioned to believe that their identities are defined almost entirely by their neuroses, these roundups of cultural trends and authors du jour often implicitly serve to chicly signal one’s mental illnesses to the public. one girl on your tiktok feed might be a self-described joan didion/eve babitz/marlboro reds/straight-cut levis/fleabag girl (this means she has depression). another will call herself a babydoll dress/sylvia plath/red scare/miu miu/lana del rey girl (eating disorder), or a green juice/claw clip/emma chamberlain/yoga mat/podcast girl (different eating disorder). the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would.”
The woman we conjured earlier in the essay may be wearing Tom Ford dupes. Her Dior may have been a gift, and the lighter just an exquisite thrift find. The Khan Market visitor from the copypasta may simply be recycling photos of a singular visit for an entire week. All of this would remain irrelevant for the fleeting eyes of the other – they’ve not only bought the performance but already reviewed it in their mind.
Whether we truly believe in or attempt to emulate who we follow, claim to wear, watch, listen or speak to becomes a matter of secondary concern on the farcical platform that social media as we know it – blurring the lines between aspirations and reality multifold. The onslaught of decoy marketing and advertising has turned it into a convoluted nexus of consumption, where expressions of true human individualities are relegated and our profiles become personal brand images that piggyback off of fake, pretentious, capitalist bullshit.
However, since hope will forever be the final thing left in the box (or grid in this case), one could daresay that as is the case with all trends, this trend too will eventually pass.
The transition from 2023 to 2024 has witnessed a massive shift in attitudes towards social media, especially from Gen Z. By disengaging from ad-heavy platforms and the ultimate social media validation race of the “like”[5], an inclination towards genuine connection has been witnessed. The wave of nihilism that this generation emerges from is channelled positively[6] towards breaking free from algorithm-driven ideas of happiness and success and instead seeking out both attachments and inspirations from people similar to them. This in turn, as speculated in The BOF and McKinsey & Co Fashion report of 2024[7], could lead to consumers demanding more authenticity and reliability from brands, expected to reflect in influencer marketing strategies – the ultimate deceivers.
So if all of social media no longer proves to be a stage,
And all the brands and people no longer performers,
Chances are that we might finally lower those sunnies,
And meet eye to eye.
References
https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
https://sk.sagepub.com/books/consumer-culture-modernity-and-identity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14JGQ1JWSgc&t=632s
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2023/01/26/why-and-how-to-implement-social-media-branding/?sh=3c975389793b
https://internetprincess.substack.com/p/standing-on-the-shoulders-of-complex
https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/32/1/171/1796334?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.wired.com/story/business-gen-z-social-media/
https://creative.salon/articles/features/is-social-media-over-for-the-younger-generation
https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/new-nihilism-how-gen-z-is-embracing-a-life-of-futility-and-meaninglessness-20231016-p5ecra.html
https://www.businessoffashion.com/reports/news-analysis/the-state-of-fashion-2024-report-bof-mckinsey/
Appears in —
Kai
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