Thesis Irma - Essay: I'm followed therefore I am
I'm followed therefore I am.
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Recognition and appreciation are basic needs of every person. In this social-media era, we often treat each other with some recognition by liking pictures and messages online. A simple change of a profile picture often gets you more compliments than wearing a new outfit to work. Most of the social-media applications give the option to follow someone, this is an accepted activity even if they don't know them in real life. I imagine that getting compliments and having peoples interest in your daily routine would make a person feel like a relevant part of society. Your opinion and lifestyle is a contribution to others and worthwhile to follow. If you have enough followers you could even earn money, but does everything change when sharing your thoughts and lifestyle becomes your 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. Emily was a shy person, only shared her writing with a few people during her lifetime. After Emily died they found a drawer full of poems. From the almost 1800 poems she wrote, only 10 poems got published in public newspapers. Her sister Lavinia decided that the poetry must be published, nowadays Emily is known as one of America's most famous poets. Working in the creative field I understand the hesitation of going public with your work, finding the right platform and climbing on the stage for some attention. In Emily's case, you could not speak of a strategy or business model and still, maybe by luck, the right friends or the enormous amount of talent she became a legend. How would an artist like Emily deal with our society? 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? Could you exist if you don't promote your talent and is therefor everybody forced to be on the stage of the world wide web? The web where everybody is connected and the audience are ready to judge. This realization 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 created a strategic plan in the way they share information.
In the PBS documentary from 2014 Generation Like, we learn that most of the successful vloggers started young and innocent with sharing their life with friends. Such as Tyler Oakley, who started to post video's 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 honored for the attention he continued on a regular base. As he is obsessed with pop-culture, Tyler talks about everything he desires and buys. His amount of followers were increasing every day and this combination made interesting for businesses. Brands sent him products, invite him to events and organize contests where he is involved. Sharing his opinion became a business, a so-called influential that earns a decent living with this. 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 base.
Max Chafkin, a writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, researched Instagram's professional class, the ones that turn good looks and taste into an income because brands pay them. For his article in November 2016, he got influencer guru, Daniel Saynt of the agency Socialyte, to help him to become an Instagram influentialer himself. He went undercover for a month with to goal to find someone to pay for his influence. Daniel's company usually represents influentials with 100 million followers, but for Max, they will make an exception. They hooked him up with professional stylists and photographers, with eighteen new outfits they shot several fashion looks in a paparazzi-style to help promote Max on Instagram, he discovered a few methods:
Most influencer portraits involve standing in front of a textured backdrop, like a wall that’s brick or painted in some stylish way. They look away into the middle distance without a smile.
Instagram posts give the option to give a keyword, combined with a hashtag it will be easier for strangers to find and follow you. Something like #liveauthentic is used often, the advice is to use at least 20 hashtags a picture. If a person doesn't feel creative there is an application called Focalmark to help you.
If you need more followers it is important to be active yourself, liking and following other people with the hope they do the same for you, but since this is very time consuming there are many services to help you, like Instagress, for 10 euro every 30 days they provide bots, short for robots, that will like and comment on your behave to other Instagram pictures with comments like “High five for that!” or “Pretty awesome” these interactions often gets you more followers. On a typical day, “Max” would leave 900 likes and 240 comments. Although in 2017 this company is shut down was due to a “request” by Instagram, there are many alternatives who offer something similar.
The advising agency Socialyte told Max to post three pictures a day, one of them with a lifestyle content, a 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 would get more than 10.000 followers he could earn a $ 100 for a sponsored post. But to keep up this work he had to spend $ 2000 a month on professional photography. Although the amounts change the more followers you have, the most successful demand $10,000 and up for a single 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.
Most young people don't have the money for a promotion team but there are quite some parents who are willing to help. Like the mother of Daniela Diaz who is also interviewed for the PSB frontline documentary 'Generation Like' (2014) she explains that if her teenage daughter posts a full body picture, she would get ton's of likes, that is just the reality. Or the mother of teenager Emma Keuven who explains in the Dutch VPRO Tegenlicht documentary program 'Goudzoekers in YouTube-land' how a good thumbnail picture is very important. Although titles like 'Emma bares it all' could be considered as a click bait, a well-known marketing trick, 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 or the children on the day they are born. A so-called Instamom is described by Hayley Krischer in the NY-times article from 2015, Ms. Cannon promotes her 5-year-old son Princeton. At that moment 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. “He kind of loves it,” Ms. Cannon said. “A lot of followers will actually recognize him in the street. And he’ll say, ‘How do people know me?’ or ‘People think that I’m adorable?’ This article raised a lot of discussions, 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 before even realizing he had an identity? According to the theory of Lacan's Mirror stage, a child first confrontation with himself in the mirror is the moment he realizes he is an individual, this awareness wakes up the ego, the idea of yourself. So what is the effect on a child when they realize that not only they have an identity, also this identity is already branded online by his mother. Is this comparable with the storyline of the Hollywood movie The Trueman show? Where the main character Truman Burbank realizes that his life was part of a television show who everybody was following since the day he was born.
It is widely accepted that the online identity could be a different than real-life, rhetorical tricks that are being used in commercial marketing found his way into social media communication. You could conclude that nobody gets really upset by a misleading thumbnail, product placement or fashionable pictures. But when do you cross the line with misleading information?
Artists Merel Brugman and Zilla van den Born both made similar art projects where they manipulated their private pictures on social media to create awareness. With the project Zjesus Zila from 2014, the artist Zilla van den Born fooled her friends an family by editing her holiday pictures faking be on a trip through Asia while staying in Amsterdam. With this project, she proves how easy it is using photoshop to fool people.
Some use manipulation techniques with innocence but some mastered the skills to create their own unrealistic identity. Although she feels her intentions were sincere, I consider Nkechi Amare Diallo as one of the best manipulators presenting her persona, both online as offline. Nkechi is commonly known by her previous name Rachel Dolezal. She always was very determined as a civil rights activist and used to work as an Africana studies instructor. She was president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and chair of Spokane’s police ombudsman commission. Throughout the years she was well known and respected for her civil rights activism. She used social media to express her believes, fight against race-influenced police violence and promote African American hairstyles, as she describes on a youtube video “what happened to our hair here in America” when slavery meant certain kinds of styles were banned. Everything suddenly changed in 2014 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 "she had been living a lie, pretending to be black." When Rachel was confronted with this in an interview she didn't know what to say and walked away. It was a big scandal as both white and black citizens reacted annoyed. This is a remarkable story. Personally, I think she can be whoever she wants but I'm really impressed with her presentation skills. I can imagine how hard it must be to create the look of an African American woman, it feels like a full-time job, no wonder she started to believe the lies herself. During an interview with ITV's Lorraine, Rachel revealed she pretended to be a black woman for more than ten years.
Nowadays she calls herself transracial, she was just trying to be herself. So was she lying all the time or just really good pretending to be a black woman? Is it her responsibility to constantly to point out she was ones born white when people assume she is black? Why should she if it is in her benefits and how different is this from all the people pretending to happy?
Bibliography
Emily Dickinson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLeMZ5WIdrI https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/posthumous_publication Documentay : Emily Dickinson - Voices & Visions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFeYPCv5F48 (51.10 Sister after death) Social media
Insta moms article
- https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/fashion/meet-the-instamom-a-stage-mother-for-social-media.html
- http://stylecaster.com/instagram-famous-kids/#ixzz4zvONkVAu
Rachel Dolezal
- Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/25/rachel-dolezal-not-going-stoop-apologise-grovel