Thesis Irma - Essay: I'm followed therefore I am

Personal recognition and appreciation are basic needs of every individual. In this social media era, we often give each other some recognition by "liking" pictures and messages online. A simple change of a profile picture often gets someone more compliments than wearing a new outfit to work. Most of the social media applications provide the option to "follow" someone, which is an accepted activity even if they have never met in real life. I imagine that getting compliments and having people's interest in a daily routine would make a person feel like a relevant part of society, that one’s opinion and lifestyle is a contribution to others and worthwhile to follow. If one has enough followers they could even earn money, however, does everything change when sharing one’s thoughts and lifestyle becomes a job?

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

Emily Dickinson 1830 - 1886

I'm Nobody! Who are you? is a short lyric poem by Emily Dickinson and was first published in 1891. In many documentaries, Dickinson is often described as a shy person -- she only shared her writing with a few people during her lifetime and after her death a drawer full of poems was found. From the almost 1800 poems she wrote, only 10 poems were published in public newspapers. Her sister Lavinia decided that the poetry must be published, and now Dickinson is known as one of America’s most famous poets (Young, 1988). Working in the creative field, I understand the hesitation of going public with one’s work, finding the right platform and climbing on the stage for some attention. In Dickinson’s case, one could not speak of a strategy or business model and yet, perhaps by luck, the right friends, or an enormous amount of talent, she became a legend. How would an artist like Emily Dickinson deal with our society today? She doesn’t seem to be a person who would have a Facebook account or who would join a television program like "America’s Next Top Poet". But would her work survive lying around in a drawer waiting to be found? Can one exist as an artist if one does not promote one’s own talent? And is everyone forced to be on the stage of the world wide web -- the web where everyone is connected and the audience is ready to judge. This quick and often harsh mass judgement calls for some awareness before publication. Who do you want to be and how do you want to go down in history, on this unerasable cloud of information? Many people create a strategic plan in the way they share information.

In the PBS documentary Generation Like (2014), we learn that most of the successful vloggers started young and innocent by sharing their life with friends. One young man named Tyler Oakley, for example, started to post videos on YouTube to stay in touch with friends after going off to college. At some point, he noticed he got more views than friends and realized strangers were also following him. Feeling honoured by the attention, he continued to post new videos on a regular basis. As he is obsessed with pop-culture, Tyler talks about everything he desires and buys. His number of followers increased every day and at the time of this documentary, he had 3 million followers. This popularity combined with this subject matter made him interesting to businesses. Brands sent him clothes and products, invited him to events and organized contests to involve him. Sharing his opinion became a business -- he became a so-called "Influencer" who earns a decent living with it. Companies know that when kids like something it becomes part of their identity and it is an old marketing trick to connect your brand to a person. With Tyler’s new lifestyle comes an income but also a responsibility; for this financial reward you have to share information on a regular basis.

Max Chafkin, a writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, researched Instagram’s professional class, the people who turn good looks and taste into an income because brands pay them. For his article, Confessions of an Instagram Influencer (2016), he got influencer guru, Daniel Saynt of the agency Socialyte, to help him to become an Instagramer influencer himself. He went undercover for a month with the goal of finding someone to pay for his influence. Daniel’s company usually represents influencers with 100 million followers, but for Max, they made an exception. To help promote Max on Instagram, they hooked him up with professional stylists and photographers, with eighteen new outfits and shot several fashion looks in a paparazzi-style to promote his image. Through that experience, he discovered the most influential portraits involve standing in front of a textured backdrop, like a wall that’s brick or painted in some stylish way, and the subject should look away into the middle distance without a smile. Instagram posts provide the option to use a keyword, combined with a hashtag so that it is easier for strangers to find and follow one. The advice is to use at least 20 hashtags a picture. If a person does not feel creative, there is an application called Focalmark to help guide one and generic hashtags such as #liveauthentic are used often. If one needs more followers it is important to be active oneself, liking and following other people with the hope they do the same. However, as this is very time consuming, there are many services such as Instagress to achieve this goal. For 10 euro for 30 days, they provide "bots" (short for web robots), that will like and comment on one’s behalf to other Instagram pictures with comments like ‘High five for that!’ or ‘Pretty awesome’. These interactions often get someone more followers. On a typical day, “Max” would leave 900 likes and 240 comments. Although in 2017 the company Instagress was shut down due to a “request” by Instagram (Maheshwari, 2017), there are many alternatives who offer similar services. The advising agency Socialyte told Max to post three pictures a day, at least one of them with lifestyle content, and one picture of something other than himself. (they suggested sunsets, cityscapes, and food). These are also often stock pictures made by professionals. The agency told him that if someone accumulates more than 10.000 followers, that person could earn $ 100 for a sponsored post, but to keep up this work he had to spend $2000 a month on professional photography. However, the amounts change when one gains more followers. The most successful influencers demand upwards of $10,000 for a single sponsored Instagram shot. After 800 followers Max got his first free sponsored t-shirt and after one month of full-time effort, he went from 200 to 1400 followers, still not enough for a decent income. The researcher concluded it was quite a stressful job to be an influencer. He would compare these social media influencers with fashion magazines, where, in a similar way, the communication is not honest. He wonders if this job would be actually sustainable since a lot of work is done automatically by bots already (Chafkin, 2016).

Most young people don’t have the finances for a promotion team but there are some parents who are willing to help. The mother of Daniela Diaz, for example, who is also interviewed for the PSB Frontline documentary Generation Like (2014) explains that if her teenage daughter posts a full body picture she gets thousands of likes. That is just the reality. Or the mother of teenager Emma Keuven who explains in the Dutch documentary Goudzoekers in YouTube-land (2017) broadcast by VPRO Tegenlicht, how a good "thumbnail" picture is very important, and although titles like ‘Emma bares it all’ could be considered too provocative and sexually inappropriate for an underage girl, this sort of "clickbait" is a well-known marketing trick, and her mother thought it was pretty innocent.

Instagram requires accounts to be managed by people above the age of 13; nevertheless a lot of parents open an account for the children on the day they are born. A so called "Instamom" is described by journalist Hayley Krischer in a New York Times article from 2015 – a Ms. Cannon, who promotes her 5 year old son Princeton. At the time the article was written, he had more than 5000 followers and a lot of sponsors of free clothes. His mother often hired professional photographers to take her son for a couple of hours to make fashionable pictures. According to his mom, Princeton is happy to be in the spotlight, she explains that a lot of followers will actually recognize him in the street and tell the boy he is adorable (Krischer, 2015). This article raises a number of issues. Do you have the right as a parent to invade the privacy of your child? And when will the child realize the impact of this staging? According to the theory of Lacan’s Mirror Stage, a child's first confrontation with himself in the mirror is the moment he realizes he is an individual, and this awareness wakes up the "ego", one's idea of oneself. So could this be comparable with the storyline of the Hollywood movie The Truman Show (Weir, 1998), the moment where the main character Truman Burbank is devastated when realizes that his life has been part of a television show everybody has been following since the day he was born.

It is widely accepted that an online identity could be different than real life, as rhetorical tricks that are commonly used in commercial marketing have found their way into social media communication. One could assert based on our growing collective familiarity with these tricks, that nobody gets really upset by misleading thumbnails, product placement or fashionable pictures. But when does one cross the line with misleading information?

Artist Zilla van den Born created an art project where she manipulated her private pictures on social media to create awareness on manipulation of social media communication. With the project called Sjezus zeg, Zilla (2009), the artist fooled her friends and family by editing her holiday pictures, faking a trip through Asia while staying in Amsterdam. With this project, she proves how easy it is to fool people using Photoshop. In this case, although her family felt betrayed, no damage was done. (van der Velden, 2014)

While some people use manipulation techniques innocently, and others to make a point as an artist, another group of people master the skills to create their own unrealistic identity or to become part of a community they feel emotionally connected to. An interesting example of this occurs in the case of Nkechi Amare Diallo. Although she feels her intentions were sincere, I was very impressed with her ability to employ high-level manipulation skills to create a believable fake persona. She is commonly known by her previous name, Rachel Dolezal. Dolezal is a civil rights activist who worked as an African studies instructor. She was president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in The United States and chair of Spokane, Washington's Police Ombudsman Commission. Throughout the years, she was well known and respected for her civil rights activism (Aitkenhead, 2017). She used social media to express her beliefs, to fight against race influenced police violence, and to promote African American hairstyles. Dolezal says in one of her videos, 'What happened to our hair here in America when slavery meant certain kinds of styles were banned' (Elgot, 2015). Everything suddenly changed in 2015 when Dolezal’s white parents released photographs of their daughter as a blonde, white child. They appeared on TV to denounce their daughter as a liar and a fake. When Dolezal was confronted with this in an interview (CNN, 2015) she walked away. It was a big scandal, as both white and black communities took offence. Nowadays she calls herself trans-black and explains she was just trying to be herself (Aitkenhead, 2017). So, was she lying all this time or just really good at pretending to be a black woman? Letting other people assume she was black is not a crime. Should it be her responsibility to constantly point out she was born white? A male transsexual also would not say he is a man if there is an assumption that he is a woman. He would be proud that others see him the way he wants to be seen. In fact, there is a term for this within the LGBT community – it is called "passing". However, would it be different if he claims to be a feminist that fights for the equal rights of women? One could say, that he would also feel discriminated against, because he is treated like a woman and therefore has fewer equal rights. This means he does have a reason to be an activist, because he feels connected to this group that is discriminated against. His intentions perhaps are good, he just does not have the body of a female. Of course Dolezal is a liar, and a convincing one, however one could argue that her lie is mediated by passion and love for the group she so much wanted to be part of. Rachel Dolezal is also an artist. She majored in art at Belhaven College (BA) and in sculpture and painting at Howard University (Dolezal, 2017). If she had created a conceptual art piece that made a point about the subject of a trans black lifestyle, she would have been much more appreciated for her actions. In art, visual manipulation and misinforming one’s audience to create some awareness is, in my opinion, a very interesting and valid method of expressing a point of view. It could have all worked out so differently for Rachel Dolezal. Yes, there would be people hating her for her deception, but she could have used her platform as an artist to make a proud statement about racial identity. Instead, she became a powerless object of mockery and exposed as a fraud.