“We suggest that the culture and practice of neoliberal impression management amplifies the human potential to selfishly seek fame and admiration. Given the necessity of tending to one’s public image and garnering attention and praise, it is only natural that whatever human propensity to relish the attention and praise of others would be fed. When ‘playing the game’ is key to material, social and possibly even psychic survival (Lasch 1984), it is an adaptive strategy to learn to love the game, to internalize the game as one’s own.” (Jeremiah Morelock and Felipe Ziotti Narita)
Source: The Society of the Selfie: Social Media and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy. Jeremiah Morelock and Felipe Ziotti Narita. Published By University of Westminster Press.115 New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6UW. www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk. 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book59. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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The Society of the Selfie: Social Media and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy
Jeremiah Morelock and Felipe Ziotti Narita
3.5 Personal Branding and Attention Seeking
On social media, many people are trying to get noticed, and in particular ways. Savvy online self-marketers know that if you care about how people perceive you (not just that they perceive you) it is not enough to say anything you want to online. Sure, there are some tried and true methods of gaining attention, such as being intentionally provocative, but this only works if one wants to build a reputation for being provocative. In the attention economy, where self-image and career prospects are bound up together and depend on online presence, it is important not just to get noticed, but also to be consistent. If a user is a doctor, popular worldly wisdom says they should post about medicine, or about things that fit with the upper middle-class doctor stereotype, such as family vacation pictures. A musician should tweet about music, perhaps displaying how they know all about their genre’s music scene, maybe posting pictures of themselves at shows or playing an instrument. Whatever one does, the script must be served. Users should build themselves up as important people in whatever fields they work in or want to work in. There is even a name for this: ‘personal branding’.
The notion of branding the self became popular starting in the late 1990s (Vallas and Cummins 2015; Whitmer 2018), being first directly articulated in Peters’ (1997) article ‘The Brand Called You’. Yet the dynamics that characterize ‘branding’ were clearly described by Fromm (1947) in the middle of the twentieth century in his discussion of the ‘marketing orientation’. Recent authors have identified antecedents of the trend in even earlier times (Pooley 2010; Khamis, Ang and Welling 2017). Today, there are many self-help guidebooks that teach all about personal branding – Me 2.0 (Schawbel 2009), Personal Branding for Dummies (Critton 2014), and so on. For the most successful people, personal branding and online presence are one and the same. Every time they go online and make noise (and it should be very often), they will effectively portray the commodified version of themselves. In Peters’ seminal article, he indicated it was important to do nothing more and nothing less than advertise and sell one’s ‘brand’ (self) with every click and every keystroke. In his words:
When you’re promoting brand You, everything you do – and everything you choose not to do – communicates the value and character of the brand. Everything from the way you handle phone conversations to the email messages you send to the way you conduct business in a meeting is part of the larger message you’re sending about your brand. (Peters 1997, n.p.)
People who successfully build up massive social media followings are sometimes referred to as ‘influencers’. Some of these, like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, really do make it to the level of true celebrities, and have a life of fame and fortune that extends well beyond their newsfeeds. Others – what Theresa Senft (2008, 2013) coined as ‘micro-celebrities’ in her study of ‘camgirls’ – amass considerable followings, but remain below the radar of many people outside of their fields, and their social media metrics and attention may not translate into financial gains. Emotional gains, maybe. But there is a downside. Many people love to hate celebrities. And the trouble with success in building a following is that despite the many pressures that push a person to do so, in many social circles it is still a social faux pas to want to do so. ‘Wanting attention’ is often used as a discrediting indictment that is wielded at one who receives attention, from toddlers to tennis pros. It is associated with selfishness and narcissism. Back in 1947, Fromm stated:
Modern culture is pervaded by a taboo on selfishness. […] [T]his doctrine is a flagrant contradiction to the practice of modern society, which holds the doctrine that the most powerful and legitimate drive in man is selfishness and that by following this imperative drive the individual makes his best contribution to the common good. (Fromm 1947, 119)
His statement is still pertinent and applies just as well to attention-seeking. Material and social success – intimately bound as they are – are increasingly related to if not dependent on the amassing of human capital in the form of verified, documented, quantifiable attention from others, often in the form of praise and accolades. And ‘success’ could mean a six-figure salary, but it often simply means getting any salary at all, rather than contract work. Even for those fully involved in the ‘gig’ or ‘platform’ economy, it is still important to consistently direct efforts to maintain a positive public image simply in order to continue to attract temporary employers who will give you short-term contracts (Vallas and Cristin 2018; Gandini and Pais 2020). For example, take care.com, an online service for independent childcare providers to find work, and for parents to find childcare. Every nanny has an avatar, with a photo (or multiple photos) and space for a short bio. They also receive star-ratings and verbal reviews from past employing parents, similar to reviews on Yelp. Attracting employers is not so different from attracting customers, especially when you relate to yourself as an entrepreneur.
We suggest that the culture and practice of neoliberal impression management amplifies the human potential to selfishly seek fame and admiration. Given the necessity of tending to one’s public image and garnering attention and praise, it is only natural that whatever human propensity to relish the attention and praise of others would be fed. When ‘playing the game’ is key to material, social and possibly even psychic survival (Lasch 1984), it is an adaptive strategy to learn to love the game, to internalize the game as one’s own. Marx (1962 [1867], 335) said that capitalists are compelled incessantly and inexorably by the ‘coercive laws of competition’ to upgrade their means of production and increase the rate of exploitation of workers. Human capitalists (i.e., people) are in much the same situation in relation to themselves. As Brittany Hennessy puts it in her popular guidebook Influencer: Building your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media: ‘You may not love the idea that your follower count may be seen as more important than your actual skills, but you need to adapt, because those who don’t adapt won’t make it very far’ (Hennessy 2018, 8). In their book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge and Campbell (2009) refer to the ‘fantasy principle’. They say ‘any force in society that allows an individual to present a grander image of his or her self than is actually warranted is a potential amplifier of narcissism’, and note that social media is full of it (Campbell and Twenge 2015, 361). They explain that in the United States, varieties of narcissism have been growing along with various cultural practices that support individualism and positive views of the self since at least the early 1970s, so rising narcissism in America is not because of Web 2.0 so much as greatly facilitated by it. The social media landscape systemically lends even more fuel to a ‘culture of narcissism’, as Christopher Lasch (2018) famously called it.
Yet when an individual is ridiculed for seeking fame and admiration, it is likely to be on the level of a personal failing to live up to moral responsibilities, that the ‘narcissistic’ or ‘shallow’ person is individually guilty for their social and psychological transgressions. The label of ‘attention-seeking’ is often used to shame and discredit, in a fashion that might carry the explicit or implicit injunction to rescind attention and esteem away from the accused attention seeker. ‘They just want attention’ may often carry a connotation along the lines of: ‘what they are doing is disingenuous or not worthy of attention’ as in the famous story ‘the boy who cried wolf ‘. In this case, the criticism never steps outside of the neoliberal discourse. Especially when accused attention seeker is a winner in the ‘digital reputation economy’ (Hearn 2010) – such as an influencer or micro-celebrity – it is plausible that part of the impetus to tear them down stems from the competitive urges of the accuser, who might not be as successful at garnering online attention and accolades. The norm against individual attention-seeking in a culture that promotes – if not demands – attention-seeking, constitutes a double-bind.
This is not to say that the accusation of ‘attention-seeking’ has no legitimacy. Far from it, it is simply to say that the criticizer and the criticized are subject to the same broad cultural pressures, and so playing the game and decrying the game both occur within the cultural framework of the game. In the society of the selfie, nobody is above the game, they just occupy different positions within it, and so relate to it with different emphases. On the one hand, attention-seeking and the tearing down of attention-seekers can both be adaptive responses to a competitive and alienated society. Research has shown, for example, that presupposing online trolls to have implicit attention-seeking motivation is a psychologically resilient response associated with less negative affect (Maltby et al. 2016). On the other hand, attention-seeking and attention-seeker discrediting both involve the placement of the attention-seeker in a kind of spotlight to have their individual value assessed. Both positions can participate in reproducing the context of competition and alienation. Just as social media amplifies neoliberal impression management it also amplifies tendencies towards public shaming and ridicule. As we will discuss later on, alienation, sadism and authoritarianism go hand in hand in the society of the selfie.
3.6 Conclusion
Impression management is how an individual works out on himself to project the spectacle and maintain a positive and consistent image of themselves for others. It is grounded in the social pressures for individuation in neoliberal society, with self-investment in human capital and the individual as an entrepreneur of themselves, dealing with personal branding and attention seeking. The dovetail of impression management and neoliberal cultural landscape marks the axis of the society of the selfie.
The spectacular self is a solo creation by self-authors practicing impression management. It is an individual affair that – to be properly executed – requires people to pay a lot of attention to themselves. Yet it is also part of a broad tendency towards self-tracking and self-monitoring that is intensified with a particular flavour in ‘neoliberal culture’ (Elias and Gill 2018). We are very self-conscious – in the sense of general self-monitoring, self-analysing, selfscrutinizing and self-helping. As Anthony Giddens (2002, 37–38) insists, this reflexivity is a defining characteristic of life in the ‘late modern’ era. With the decline of traditional morality, the rise of transnational networks and a constant barrage of information, people are faced with lots of lifestyle options, as well as conflicting and changing opinions of various experts. They are also faced with a taken-for-granted moral prescription that they are individually responsible to evaluate and choose between expert opinions and lifestyle options. In Giddens’ sense, modern reflexivity comes from the expansion of ‘abstract systems’. (2) Socialized into this world of diffuse specialized knowledge, and with a variety of available tracking technologies for everyday personal use, people are compelled to monitor themselves and morally assume sole responsibility for their own trajectories. The self becomes an ongoing ‘reflexive project’ (Giddens 1990, 2002).
Sociologist Deborah Lupton (2016) discusses how contemporary self-tracking cultures are grounded in a new measurability and record-keeping of the self. With wearable devices like FitBit and the smartwatch, and with smartphones that are often more or less attached to their owners all day, data about an increasing amount of what people do is recorded and quantified on various electronic platforms. And these tracking devices and apps are more than just tools for self-analysis. They are also stages for the spectacular self to go on display. The rise of the ‘quantified self’ (as Lupton calls it) is also an ethos. Tracking oneself for self-improvement is a lifestyle that has a moral force behind it. In this sense, self-tracking ‘represents the apotheosis of the neoliberal entrepreneurial citizen ideal’ (Lupton 2016). Compulsive self-monitoring for self-improvement dovetails with the self-entrepreneurship that Foucault describes. The conversion of leisure time into self-improvement time fits snugly with a relentless ‘work ethic’, and the extent of one’s private efforts can be publicly broadcast, putting on exhibit the play-by-play of one’s career achievements, exercise regiments, eating habits, travel destinations, and so on.
We will explore some political implications of this in Chapter 6. Here we mainly want to emphasize that the spectacular self is not just a fragmented, fabricated self – a limited representation of a person’s full, true self. It is also an active production from a hidden human atom, through activities conducted in isolation, akin to ‘the man behind the curtain’ in The Wizard of Oz. The internet is a place where people are literally alone together: alone in their organic corporeal fullness typing, clicking, swiping and tapping, and together – as spectacular selves – in the virtual dimension. They are not just subjected to the alienations of Debord’s spectacle, as passive witnesses or receptacles of the onslaught of images. They actively create it as they construct and project their spectacular selves.
In the next chapter, we will discuss a growing style of communication endemic to the society of the selfie, epitomized in the ‘status update’. The soundbite of text is sent out to roll through so many other newsfeeds, maybe seen, maybe not. This communicative style distils a performative and alienated relationship between oneself and the world. Messages sent lack the social feedback loop of embodied co-presence, i.e., speaking to somebody in particular, watching their reaction, receiving their response, and so on. In the case of the status update, messages are not part of social ‘loops’, they are essentially unidirectional, and all about the speaker, words being sent out to a general, invisible audience. What we have is a competitive playground of neoliberal impression management, a bazaar of spectacular selves on display for everyone and no one at the same time. And this bazaar also points to a decisive feature of the society of the selfie: the growing fragmentation of the public sphere.
Notes
(1) It is important to understand that in Foucault’s actual theories, the self – or ‘subject’ – is not impinged upon by society, per se. This does not mean people are free from society’s impacts. The opposite is closer to the case. The Foucauldian subject is not something separate from society that engages in struggle or dialogue with it. The Foucauldian subject is not a ‘core’ self that can be contorted or filtered or channeled or repressed. Instead, it is produced by society; formed out of building blocks that society provides, and into a shape that society recognizes. In this way, the neoliberal subject is a new human being: homo oeconomicus, the self who is an enterprise.
(2) An abstract system is basically anything complicated and abstract that people use for guidance, be it an institution like the healthcare system or a genre of technical expertise like medical science.
Citation: Morelock, Jeremiah and Narita, Felipe Ziotti. 2021. The Society of the Selfie: Social Media and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book59. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit https://doi.org/10.16997/book59.
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