The Presentation of the Selfie in Everyday Strife

The other day, I was catching up some newsletters I subscribe to and perusing the comments. On one newsletter, ostensibly about some very expensive pants but really about the way we engage with trends, I saw a very intense comment from an influencer who seemed to take serious offense to this piece. I mean, she was fired up! The author hadn't written about this person, hadn't mentioned her at all, hadn't even alluded to her specifically. But she really liked the pants. She'd bought them, she'd worn them, she'd posted about them. Her comment was kind of defensive, like she'd really been wounded, like sharing a negative opinion was a reprehensible act. It was like she, personally, had been attacked. Over a pair of pants!

Before you run for the hills, don't worry: I'm not going to write about influencers. There are some obvious layers to this response that can best be summed up by "because capitalism," and even though I have a PhD in sociology, this is not a line of analysis that makes my heart zing. Sorry, I know, it's heresy to admit that, but I really feel like the "because capitalism" argument, while valid in some ways, has become an easy go-to, almost a meme at this point, so much so that it short-circuits the conversation and interrupts a deeper line of inquiry.

Because you know what I'm interested in here? Not influencers who feel the need to defend and even celebrate the fact that their job is essentially to get other people to spend money. Honestly, right now I'm not even that interested in the absurdity of trying to frame things like this as if it's a moral imperative: Thou must not yuck another's yum! Or some such bullshit. (Side note: I hate the phrase "don't yuck someone's yum" so much that even typing it makes my skin crawl.) Like, sorry, but just as one person is allowed to talk about (and thus make money off of) how much they like something, so too is another person allowed to talk about how much they don't. No one is innocently sharing consumer goods out of the kindness of their heart with the purest intentions. Got it? Good.

No, what I'm interested in is something scarier and deeper about the human experience. Something insidious that has affected all of us and that I firmly believe has upended society in ways that will haunt us for generations. What I'm interested in are the ways we have allowed tech to collapse the private and public aspects of our lives, eroding any distinctions we try to make. Even more than that, I'm interested in how the evolution of social media narrowed the spotlight's focus so much onto the individual that it burned us. It made us more sensitive than ever so that everything feels personal, and every differing opinion seems like an attack.

See, aren't you glad you kept reading? This is going to be fun!

Cast your mind, if you can, to the days before the modern social media giants dominated our digital lives. The days of forums and blogs, of early social media like Xanga and LiveJournal. This was a time, you may remember, before everyone had taken to uttering the phrase "my personal brand." We did not have brands. If anything, brands were still suspect and associated with the now-defunct notion of selling out. Brands were certainly not sharing inappropriate tweets about national holidays or talking to each other in the comments. Corporations weren't even people yet! And actual people were still in the early-ish stages of spilling their guts to friends online, or to any stranger who might stumble into their corner of the internet.

This was a time when a lot of people were discovering (or re-discovering) how much impact we, regular old normies, have on the culture we consume, engage with and are immersed in every day. We were re-learning that many types of culture – in fact most! – are not a one-way street. The movies we watch only seem to be made in a far-off distant galaxy. Lots of people have something to contribute, even if we're not into 'zines, raving, or some hardcore punk scene. Culture has always been more than passive consumption of mainstream media, whether through magazines or movies or TV or live performance, and the internet was the first new fertile ground for such a renaissance in decades (radio?), if not in centuries.

But even so, the internet of twenty-five years ago wasn't about you. Not just you, specifically, but you in the general sense. It wasn't about any of us. I mean, it wasn't an individualized experience, neither a silo of preferences and behaviors nor a bright solitary spotlight for sharing out into an audience you can't quite see. We didn't have a social graph or a vector for going viral. There was no grid, no endless scroll, no constant connection. There certainly wasn't a little portal in everyone's pocket that opened the world for each one of us, at the low, low cost of opening us to the world.

There were early signs of what was to come, harbingers and coal-mine canaries that I think we only recognize with the gift of hindsight. The stratospheric and unprecedented success of Heather Armstrong's Dooce, for one, and for other bloggers who followed. Even if many of those other bloggers and subsequent social media stars didn't share as personally as someone like Heather did, the element of the personal was very much there, and very much part of the draw. Even those early social media networks, who learned quickly that sharing about common interests (books, movies, music) was not nearly as compelling to all of us as sharing at least a little bit about our lives.

This transformation unfolded across all types of media. It wasn't only true for text-based sharing. If anything, it was more true for photos and videos. Witness the rise of the selfie and the vlog, the need to not only document even the minutia of everyday life but to share it. Paintings and photographs with people in them are more compelling to most viewers, and that seemed to go double – maybe even to the Nth power – for imagery of the self, at least when shared online.

Obviously there was clearly a sense of liberation and democratization in all this. Namely a liberation from the traditional gatekeepers, anyone who had decided what kind of person could get published or what kind of content might even have the chance of becoming popular. The old guard bristled, not only at losing control but at the damn-the-torpedoes way so many of us bared our souls online, without even thinking about the inevitable consequences.

Personal sharing became a form of currency, valuable not only for the actual people who shared it or wanted it shared, but for corporations too. After all, that's what social media existence is predicated on. If we don't share with one another, what unique, differentiating value is there in any of these platforms? What's the difference between flipping endlessly through television channels and scrolling endlessly on social media dominated by brands and content creators? I guess the main difference is who's in charge of programming and production. But without your content – without our content – it's essentially the same.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

One of the fun things about having a sociology PhD is that most people, even those smart enough to not torture themselves by spending time in academia, have read or are familiar with the most famous texts of the discipline. So I feel very confident that the vast majority of you are already familiar with Erving Goffman's work The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, from 1956, then revised in 1959. Even if you think you're not familiar with it, I promise that you are: This is the work in which Goffman develops his theory of self-presentation using the metaphor of the theater. Our behavior is divided between the "front stage," when we think we're being observed by others, and the "back stage," when we're in a more private setting without an audience and feel more relaxed. This is all, of course, about trying to manage the impressions other people have of us and to try to behave in ways that conform to expectations or social norms or whatever.

That makes sense in the context of 1956. It makes sense in the context of 1966, '76, '86. But man, it's 2025. What is public and what is private anymore? Do you have a solid, immediate definition? How you distinguish between your "front stage" and "back stage" selves? I mean, in 1956 people certainly had more than one "front stage" self, especially if those people were Black Americans, were women, were Jews, were any number of things in any number of contexts. You can have more than one "front stage" self, maybe even more than one "back stage" self.

The bigger problem I see is with the larger division of public and private. I don't think we as a society agree on what that division is anymore. There are so many types of public and private. Think how many front stages you have – not just your physical spaces like work, the gym, public transit, activities, your kids' schools, whatever, but the digital spaces too. The simple fact that people will share one kind of content on Instagram Feed, another in Instagram Stories, still another in a finsta or a spam account, and then again on TikTok spam account or on Snapchat or on Reddit or in Discord. You don't even have to be "you" in all of those spaces.

Think as well how much we have invited the public gaze into our private spaces. So much of what used to be back stage is now open for public viewing. And so much behavior that used to be private is now frequently brought into public space. Why do you cringe when you see people recording themselves at restaurants at the gym? Why do I feel like such an asshole taking a selfie in public?

And the private spaces are no longer private in the way we once understood. Most online privates space can be breeched or betrayed by something so simple as a screenshot. Even physical spaces aren't sacrosanct. All it takes is a phone set to record, or a hidden camera. The mundanity of your life, heretofore mostly anonymous and forgettable, may end up in the background of someone else's video or, worse, may itself be the subject of a viral video you have no control over.

We mostly blame Covid for these degradations of our social contract, asserting that people came out of lockdown having forgotten how to behave in public. Or worse, no longer caring how they behave. I don't buy it. At least, I don't buy that Covid, with its attendant social isolation and loss of human life both real and metaphorical, is solely to blame. We were all mad about people filming their meals and putting their bare feet on our arm rests before the world shut down. Is Covid to blame for all the people who talk on their phones while working out at the gym, like it's their living room? Being isolated for however many months isn't the sole reason people seem angrier and more entitled than ever. Social media and the tech industry are also to blame. They narrowed the spotlight so that each one of us stood illuminated alone. They made sure we kept sharing ourselves, not out of some altruistic desire to keep the flames of friendship lit but to guarantee a steady supply of content so our friends would keep coming to the app. The more we eroded the distinction between our public and private selves, the more reward, at first for us, but ultimately for them.

Although sorry, I can't let us off the hook either. Do you really think we're not partly to blame too? I admit we fell for it without knowing what we fell for. In the beginning, how could we have known? But once we did know, why did – why do we continue to fall for it? Why do we trust each new platform that comes out, as if it's somehow going to be different, despite incubating in similar hothouses as the others that came before? Or if not in those hothouses (like TikTok), despite knowing that a company of that scale, with that much influence, will never care about the lasting impact on either its users or the society they inhabit?

One of the things that has most interested me throughout much of my career – yes, I've talked about it before and I'll talk about it until I'm dead, so buckle up – is the fact that we have so few social cues and even fewer agreed upon social norms in most of digital life and especially on social media. The social cues we have tend to be rudimentary tools like "block" or "mute," that, while effective, are also big clumsy bludgeons that smash all problems like so many nails. The social norms, such as they are, tend to either be unilaterally enforced by company policies, or develop organically and are policed by users themselves. Yes, there are exceptions, like Reddit's mods, or the ability of individual Substack owners to manage and police their own chats. But on any given day, most of us are visiting any number of sites and platforms. It's a little like teleporting ourselves in and out of different countries with vastly different cultures, none of which are explicit and all of which we have to suss out on our own and endure at our own risk. And that's on top of trying to manage all the information flying at us, all the opinions and takes and emotions as well as texts, emails, notifications, responses, comments, and more.

This is why we take everything so personally, or at least why it seems like we do. I mean, people have taken shit personally since time immemorial, they just didn't have the opportunity to take quite as much shit personally, or to let you know their thoughts on the matter. It's hard to know what is and isn't personal when so much is both public and private, simultaneously and in equal measure. If I write something that feels personal but is for public consumption, how should I take what someone else writes that seems personal to them and is for public consumption? Is it still personal? Is it public? Is it a weird combination of the two that we can't reconcile because we're too busy trying to keep up with all the other information and responses flying at us?

Look, I'm not pointing the finger at you or at that fancy pants influencer without also pointing at myself. The other night someone on Reddit responded to a comment of mine that I had thought was pretty innocuous, and their response was supposedly a joke but I thought it was rude as hell, especially coming from a stranger. Had a friend said it to me, I would have laughed. But from a random person I'd never interacted with? My immediate response was I WILL FIGHT YOU. And here's the wildest part: In the moment, there's no way to know what the right response is. I'm alone in my living room but I'm also typing away in a sort of public forum. What social cues can I see? How are other people reacting? What should I do? Even if I had been in actual public while this was happening, no one around me would have experienced it, so would I have reacted differently? Every single one of us, when this happens, are experiencing all of this in our own isolation pods, our own little vacuums, trying to navigate a thousand interactions without anything in the way of a guidebook.

Man, that is no way to live. Sometimes on Reddit I'll see a post from someone who says they're visiting NYC for the first time are scared of using the subway. I get it, the subway is daunting. But baby, you are literally navigating a hundred digital subways at any one time, with just as many randos and even fewer signposts. Keep your wits about you, don't engage with people who clearly want to start trouble, and don't put your valuables on display.

I don't have a clear answer for all of this right now, or any sort of neat takeaway. But I want to keep writing about it because this is something we have to stop, as best we can. Everyone has been talking about needing third spaces – physical locations like coffee shops or libraries, places you can be that are neither home nor work, where you can be around other humans and feel like a human yourself. We need more of that online. Unfortunately for all of us, when it comes to online spaces, I think we have to be responsible for them. We have to open our own coffee shops and bus our own tables and police our own rules. It's hard work, and it feels a little limiting. Like we had a taste of unfettered freedom, of the vastness of what the algorithm can bring directly to our doorstops, and will it be boring if we shut ourselves into a smaller, less intense spaces? No, because it doesn't have to be either or. Gen Z may be chronically online, but they tend more than the rest of us to divide their time between big platform content consumption and smaller private spaces for hanging out with friends. Maybe the rest of us can learn something.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx