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Head to the north, feet to the south

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.

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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TW: Death

Sunlight streamed through the windows making every wall look whiter than it was, and there was a flurry of activity. After over a year of staring into space, walking into neighbours’ apartments, forgetting to chew, and eventually lying in a rented hospital bed in my 200 sq ft. bedroom for months, my grandmother had finally died. My mother and aunts bathed and dressed her; they laid her on the cool marble floor, head to the north and feet to the south, decorated the space around her with rice grains, flowers, incense sticks stuck in bananas, and eventually covered her with garlands of marigold. In the stress of finding just the right flowers and fruits, I forgot my grief while still engaging with her death. When we were done, she had her best Kanjeevaram saree on, and her nostrils were stuffed with cotton- my grandmother looked like a dead bride. 

I had reached home earlier in the day and confirmed that my grandmother, cold and covered in beads of sweat, was indeed dead. I was relieved. I remembered the woman she was- the hymns and Kannada folk songs she’d sing for us, her devotion to her alcoholic, abusive husband, her children and us, and her obsession with us getting a good education; in my afternoons filled with fear, whenever my angry young mother picked up the belt, she was a fount of patience, like a warm home in winter. As her dementia progressed, fragments of herself remained- they came back to her for brief periods and left, and the intervals got longer and longer until one day she was truly gone. I realized then that dementia, in its essence, was death. 

We carried her body on the makeshift bamboo stretcher toward the van; her nostril-packed face peeked out of the cocoon made of a white shroud. We walked in silence. I don’t remember the drive to the cremation ground, but I remember the pyre we laid her on. My father, her oldest son, lit the stack of wood on fire. And we watched her burn, right down to her skull.

Appears in —

Varun U. Shetty

Varun U. Shetty is a writer, critical care physician, environmentalist, animal lover, and almost vegan. He grew up in Mumbai and lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio, with his two amazing partners and a loving, stubborn dog. His work has appeared in Complete Sentence, The Wire, Literary Cleveland’s Voices From the Edge online anthology, Olney Magazine, The Bangalore Review, and others. Find him on Twitter @shettyvu.

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