Instagrammability is now the No 1 consideration for millennials when deciding where to go on holiday. When did everyone lose touch with reality?
I once interviewed a pop star who earnestly told me that he had stopped
smoking weed and that, ever since, he had a clearer mind and more focus
on his music. Five minutes later, while we were still talking, he lit
up one of the biggest spliffs I have ever seen.
We know that celebrities are different people in private than in public; that someone reading out the birthday cards on CBeebies could be racking up lines in a club on their night off. But what happens now that social media makes nanoscopic celebrities out of us all? Who are we being real with and who are we performing for?
It’s a question I ask myself when I hear research revealing that, for millennials, Instagrammability is now the No 1 consideration when deciding where to holiday. Or the news last week that half of cosmetic surgeons in the US say that people are asking for procedures to look better in selfies, and that there is a disconcerting increase in the number of people asking for procedures to make them look more like how they do in Snapchat filters: enhanced cheekbones and digitally smooth skin.
Those holiday Instagrams are not for the benefit of the friends who were there – who know that one lagoon Instagram involved a €150, 30-minute-long boat trip and was preceded by a three-hour-long, airless journey in a car where burnt, bare thighs were sweat-sealed to the upholstery. This isn’t old-fashioned peer pressure, which mostly dissipates as you get older and realise that your friends’ lives are bogged down in their own struggles. It’s a new kind of pressure from another group: the people who only get to see the celebrity version of you. This is the group we watch the daily machinations and monologues of, but would never call and say: “Do you fancy a drink this evening?” When my close friends talk to me about relationships, jobs, mental health and loneliness – the oldest topics of conversation in the world – I feel as if they are now soundtracked by the sound of sorta-mate Instagram stories, always laughing, always on a beach; people who seem to have it all figured out only because we don’t know them.
This blurring of the line between friendship and infatuation, between our online and offline realities, only becomes more complicated when more of our genuine social interaction becomes mediated through technology. Recently, there was a story of a mother who paid for someone to tutor her son in the video game Fortnite so that his friends at school didn’t mock him for being bad at it. Can anyone draw a neat line of reality in that child’s life?
The danger is that we become snobby; that we think these problems are just for people who have applied to be on Love Island or are still in year 9. But the power of our not-really-friends looms large over even those of us who think they’re savvy to fakery, not least because we unwittingly perpetuate the same illusion, posting the moments we are doing something exciting, so, somewhere, someone we once went on a course with thinks everything is going better for us than it is for them.
We know that celebrities are different people in private than in public; that someone reading out the birthday cards on CBeebies could be racking up lines in a club on their night off. But what happens now that social media makes nanoscopic celebrities out of us all? Who are we being real with and who are we performing for?
It’s a question I ask myself when I hear research revealing that, for millennials, Instagrammability is now the No 1 consideration when deciding where to holiday. Or the news last week that half of cosmetic surgeons in the US say that people are asking for procedures to look better in selfies, and that there is a disconcerting increase in the number of people asking for procedures to make them look more like how they do in Snapchat filters: enhanced cheekbones and digitally smooth skin.
Those holiday Instagrams are not for the benefit of the friends who were there – who know that one lagoon Instagram involved a €150, 30-minute-long boat trip and was preceded by a three-hour-long, airless journey in a car where burnt, bare thighs were sweat-sealed to the upholstery. This isn’t old-fashioned peer pressure, which mostly dissipates as you get older and realise that your friends’ lives are bogged down in their own struggles. It’s a new kind of pressure from another group: the people who only get to see the celebrity version of you. This is the group we watch the daily machinations and monologues of, but would never call and say: “Do you fancy a drink this evening?” When my close friends talk to me about relationships, jobs, mental health and loneliness – the oldest topics of conversation in the world – I feel as if they are now soundtracked by the sound of sorta-mate Instagram stories, always laughing, always on a beach; people who seem to have it all figured out only because we don’t know them.
This blurring of the line between friendship and infatuation, between our online and offline realities, only becomes more complicated when more of our genuine social interaction becomes mediated through technology. Recently, there was a story of a mother who paid for someone to tutor her son in the video game Fortnite so that his friends at school didn’t mock him for being bad at it. Can anyone draw a neat line of reality in that child’s life?
The danger is that we become snobby; that we think these problems are just for people who have applied to be on Love Island or are still in year 9. But the power of our not-really-friends looms large over even those of us who think they’re savvy to fakery, not least because we unwittingly perpetuate the same illusion, posting the moments we are doing something exciting, so, somewhere, someone we once went on a course with thinks everything is going better for us than it is for them.
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