For some people, YouTube is for Stephen Colbert clips and cheap animation, Instagram is for wishing the Nexus 5 could actually take a photo, and Facebook is (perhaps unfortunately) a news channel. Not so for everyone. There are social media role models, adored by hundreds of thousands for their glamorous lives, striking figures and deep connection to nature. Even their view-counts and like-levels are goals to aspire to.
Consider Essena O’Neill, an Australian teenager with 800,000 followers on Instagram, and many more on other social portals across the Internet. She uploaded thousands of images of herself relaxing on beaches, eating, smiling, wearing the latest outfits, and even fishing. She started marketing products to her followers, earning as much as $2000 AUD per post. To most naive onlookers, O’Neill’s life seemed like a parade of beauty and comfort. This made it all the more surprising when she quit.
O’Neill has totally denounced social media. She renamed her Instagram account to ‘‘Social Media Is Not Real Life’ and deleted over 2000 photos “that served no real purpose other than self-promotion”. What photos remained had drastically warped captions; a picture of O’Neill in a bikini was once accompanied with this: “Things are getting pretty wild at my house. Maths B and English in the sun”. The caption was replaced with a self-referential, cynical message: “see how relatable my captions were – stomach sucked in, strategic pose, pushed up boobs. I just want younger girls to know this isn’t candid life, or cool or inspirational. It’s contrived perfection made to get attention”.
The details were laid bare in O’Neill’s final, tearful YouTube video. “I had the dream life”, she said. “I was at a pinnacle of success in what I thought it was”. O’Neill claims that she “had one of the biggest agencies in America want to sign [her] for modelling”, and “was surrounded by all this wealth and all this fame”. The problem was that her fame consumed her. “Everything I was doing was edited and contrived”, said O’Neill. “Everything I did was for views, for likes, for followers”. Her supposedly spontaneous photos on Instagram were the results of many hundreds of shoots, and even the finest details were planned by behemoth corporations. According to her, “Companies will email you with dot-points of what you should say, times of the day to post, with what you should do in the photo, with how you should hold the product or where you should have it in the background”.
Apparently, it all began when she was twelve years old. In those days, she was herself a follower, feeling “worthless” and envying the models and Instagram stars before her. She compared her body to models, centimetre by centimetre. She dreamed of having thousands of likes, follows and views, and left behind all her creative endeavors. Once the ball started rolling, she says, “It was never enough”. Finally, O’Neill felt that her life was deprived of genuine human connections. She made new celebrity friends, some more “successful” than her. It turned out they were all depressed. Now, O’Neill is preaching the virtues of the unplugged, “3D” life. “Go outside, go to a park, go to a beach, go somewhere there are people around you”.
Obviously, not everyone is convinced that someone who fabricated her whole reality can now be trusted. Some other similarly famous Instagram stars feel that O’Neill is generalizing her experience to the whole of Instagram, encouraging a negative view of their supposedly positive pastime. There is also the cynical take on O’Neill’s turnaround: that it is simply another celebrity stunt. After all, O’Neill has gained significant press coverage from this exodus. She is also encouraging her fans to check out her new website, letsbegamechangers.com which is “aimed to inspire constant QUESTIONING”. She explores “veganism, creative imagery with purpose, poems, writing, interviews with people that inspire [her], and of course the finical [sic] reality behind deluding people off Instagram”. In a recent video titled “Love Gets Likes” (uploaded to her new site and to Vimeo) she claims that a male supermodel approached her for a relationship as a business move to boost both their popularity. He even referred to other couples that pulled off this maneuver. With a story like that, it can be difficult to see where the fabrication actually starts.
The dishonesty in social media was never a total secret. Indeed, Instagram stars became so formulaic that they were parodied. One prominent social media satire was the Instagram account “Socality Barbie”, full of photos of Barbie dolls in “inspirational” selfies with snarky captions. Throughout the year, it satirized the supposedly perfect lives of Instagram stars. The account was also discontinued recently: the woman behind the doll, Darby Cisneros, “never intended on it being a long term project”, and felt she had run out of things to say.
While we are still in a “QUESTIONING” mood, it is worth asking whether the medium really is to blame. On the one hand, back in the dark ages of fax and snail mail, communicating with hundreds of thousands was impossible for commoners. On the other hand, the server farms and corporate deals are just enablers, just tools magnifying our fundamental need to belong. Even before the push to develop our personal brands, we had a bit of conformity and image-shaping in all of us. Perhaps the quest for bigger follower counts is just an outgrowth of our fears of being ignored and alone. As Essena O’Neill admitted, “I did everything in my power to prove to the world that hey I’m important, and I’m beautiful, and I’m cool”.
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