Barbie's Instagram is superficial and inauthentic. So is yours
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Version 0 of 1. Barbie has an Instagram account, and as Wired points out, it’s much hipper than yours. She’s documenting her bohemian life – hiking, watercolors, artisanal ice cream, selfies on train tracks – and proving that she may be a plastic doll of improbable proportions but by god, she is #livingauthentic. At least, no less authentic than you. Socality Barbie (the name is a reference to a Christian-based movement that is not affiliated) is funny, a sharp satire on a particular kind of Instagram persona and on the way we construct and curate our online personas in general. But in a very real way, it isn’t a satire at all. It’s the puppet show version of a full-length play – a micro-scale, artificial reenactment of the exact same story. Nobody is shocked to learn that everybody’s Instagram is a lie. Even the most laissez-faire point-and-shoot photographer is constructing an aesthetic and a narrative with the pictures she chooses to post. The subject matter, the geotags, even the filters you tend to use are all in the service of a particular self-presentation – after all, if you didn’t have something to prove, you’d just save your photos privately instead of dressing them up and propping them in front of an audience. There’s nothing wrong with this, any more than there’s something wrong with dressing or behaving in a way that supports your preferred image. But it’s fundamentally inauthentic. Related: My 'perfect' Instagram life is a fun refuge from a messy reality. I like it that way | Jessica Valenti Then again, so is everything. That fact is especially noticeable in our social media feeds, where we transparently pick and choose what thoughts and images to trumpet. (This gets particularly stark on the occasions when someone slips up and lets the wrong thought through. Nothing makes effort visible like a mistake.) But our day-to-day appearance and behavior is curated too. A feed like Socality Barbie highlights the inherent phoniness of self-presentation. The self-consciousness feels familiar because we do the same kind of performance every day – maybe not the specific performance of privileged millennials with Pinterest tastes, but performance all the same. It’s like what Jean Baudrillard says about Disneyland: the theme park, a hypersaturated miniature America, exists to distract us from the fact that America is also a fake idea. So yeah, I just went from Barbie’s Instagram to Baudrillard. And maybe that’s taking the fun out of a pitch-perfect spoof of self-satisfied socialites. But when we craft these terrible little puppet shows lampooning all the worst traits of the privileged class, I think it’s worth amplifying the note of nervous giggle hidden in the laughter. Socality Barbie’s Instagram isn’t just funny because, I don’t know, Kendall Jenner posted a picture of herself drinking coffee on a mountain. (I don’t know, did she? She probably did.) It’s funny – and uncomfortable – because you did. Or you made sure to drop your mountaintop coffee-drinking into conversation with your coworkers, or you prominently wore your “Picturesque Hiking and French Press Club” hoodie to the gym. It doesn’t even have to be bougie stuff – every choice about how you dress, talk, Tweet and comport yourself is in the service of a narrative about who you are. Barbie is a plastic doll being posed and photoshopped, and she’s ultimately not that much more fake than most of us. If that truth is hard to look at, well, maybe it would be better with the Crema filter. |