There’s always been a tension humming under everything we do online. But, it’s becoming increasingly less subtle.
It’s not ironic. It’s not even fun. Actually, social media hasn’t been “fun” or silly for a while. But this is the widening gap between the "material" truth and the "performed" truth. The person you are in your body, in your group chat, when you sing Adele unashamedly in the shower - versus the person you are on the internet.
That gap is starting to split open like a bad seam from Shein. Lately the “my private vs my public story” trend did its yearly cycle, as it always does, like some kind of a cultural reflex test. A meme standing in for something far more existential: the modern duality. There's who we want people to know, and who we actually are. Increasingly acrobatic code-switching is needed to keep those identities separated by a thin pane of glass.
What looks like a joke template is actually a kind of gender reveal for your psyche.
The glossy feed (your “television channel”) versus the unhinged dump behind the curtain (your “pay-per-view”). If Instagram is now TV, then the group chat has become social media. DMs are forums, Substack is news, and traditional media is an outdated, biblically inaccurate encyclopedia gathering dust somewhere.
Every platform has shapeshifted into something it never meant to be, and we’ve shapeshifted with it. The original contract of the internet assumed one identity per person, one use per platform, oneself per feed. That contract expired years ago. The rise of finstas already told us the mask needed an understudy. Now, the entire stage is overcrowded. Five identities, three audiences, and one algorithm you’re desperately trying to outrun.
To exist online now requires a four-dimensional gaze.
You’re performing on the main stage for strangers and the side stage for mutuals. Backstage is for close friends, and the three people who actually know you get the green room. Meanwhile AI has become search, YouTube is school and TikTok is television. The group chat is the real social network, and your DMs are where your personality actually lives.
And yes, in case you were wondering, this absolutely bleeds into how we relate to each other offline. Every one of us is starring in a micro-budget reality show: one version for coworkers. Another for situationships. Another for your running crew. Another for your mum. Another for the internet strangers you hope will get the joke. Everything is content.
Anyone can become an audience and nothing is simply lived. It’s documented, bracketed, reframed, and archived.
Derek Thompson recently said everything is television. But if I’m honest, that’s the polite version.
What’s really happening is darker and more absurd: each of us is a panopticon inside the panopticon. We’re performing for each other, for the algorithm, for the imagined viewer we’ll never meet. And we’re doing it while trying to maintain the illusion that all of this is natural, effortless and unmediated.
The mask isn’t even slipping at this point, it’s full blown glitching. Are you paying enough attention to see the pixels?
-Sophie Randell, Writer
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