How Are Smartphones Exacerbating Our Longing for Expressive Individualism?

I Could Be a Star

Expressive individualism is a problem that predated smartphone technology and social media, but it has been totally exacerbated by these technologies because social media, in particular, is nothing if not a platform for the public display of your expressive, authentic self. It dangles a I could be a celebrity dream in front of all of us. It basically says, You, too, can be famous! You, too, deserve to be seen and known by the masses, just like celebrities are!

And so if it’s already a problem and a fleshly temptation to want to express a very individualistic sense of who you are and what you believe about the world, social media gives you a megaphone and invites you to do that. Interestingly, the influencer has become one of the most desirable professions for Gen Alpha.

If you ask them, What do you want to be when you grow up?, social media influencers or YouTube stars are a couple of the top choices. That just shows you how much the expressive individualistic drive is amplified by these technologies. They want you to lean into that narcissistic temptation to want people to have eyes on you and to be significant in the eyes of people.

I think about the quote by Andy Warhol who said, “We used to talk about fifteen minutes of fame, but in the future, it will be that we are all famous to fifteen people.” I think that’s what social media is doing. Everyone thinks that they’re going to become a breakout star, but most of us, if we’re honest, are only ever famous to a small group of people.

That’s life online. But even to a small group of people, that kind of “fame” can lead you to make choices and to live your life publicly in a way that is pitched as authentic but is actually inauthentic, because you end up doing things and saying things that your “audience” wants to hear. You see stories of highly successful social media influencers who are living their best expressive individualistic life. They end up having this audience capture dynamic, where they’re projecting a persona to a large audience of millions of people.

What ends up happening is the audience comes to expect a certain sort of person to show up on camera with a certain sort of content. You become is a purveyor of content, not a real person. You’re not someone who could change, but a person who is fixed in a certain niche of content, a person who is defined by a certain genre of entertainment. A lot of those influencers lose themselves because they end up living their lives and making choices that are dictated only by the audience. What are they going to want me to do in this situation?

In fact, there are some situations where they literally give the audience a choice. What should I do with my day today? You guys pick. How should I live my life?

These are the weird dynamics of online life where we are living publicly in a way where we’re all tempted to be performers more than we are fully orbed humans who live in a tangible community. We’re performers in an abstract online stage.

Brett McCracken is the coauthor with Ivan Mesa of Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age.

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