Fifteen Seconds of Fame
I’ve been wanting to write an essay like this since summer 2021, but I never brought myself to do so. Was it out of fear? Perhaps. I was quite scared to come to terms with something that made me happy over the pandemic. But alas, my Purposive Communication class has (again) shoved me into a mental corner and I had to bring out the big guns for the sake of a good grade. This isn’t my best work (I got an 88/100. LOL), but I’m just happy that I’ve been able to write it and share my story. Hope you enjoy ❤
There was a span of time over the course of late 2020 to mid-2021, that if you ever happened to look up “Monique” on the social media application, TikTok, you’re most likely going to come across the profile of a fair-skinned, dark-haired teenage girl– a Filipina, judging by the Philippine flag in her bio. She is most probably smiling, exposing a set of silver braces, with jewelry visible around her neck. She has around forty one thousand followers, eight hundred and twenty thousand total likes, and around six hundred, 15-second long videos posted on her page. That girl was me.
With that sort of TikTok profile, it would be safe to assume that I was a budding content creator, climbing up the social ladder of the internet in the hopes of someday becoming an “influencer”. I would post a perfectly curated video, staged as “casual”一 every single day for two years. Posing in front of my iPhone’s camera, I would do a little dance. I would lip sync to the latest hot single. On good days, I would make a quick montage of my daily activities, exaggerated by nice lighting and flattering angles.
Along the lines of all the PR packages and growing number of followers, I felt as if there was a clout-hungry creature breeding inside of me, feeding off of superficial success. Social media usage entails power and freedom, but there comes a price of unraveling your identity for the sake of participation. I have been a social media user for the entirety of my teenage years, and putting my life online created repercussions on my mental and physical health. Every time I looked in the mirror, I was physically the same. But I couldn’t recognize the person in front of me. Every day she tried to live her life the way the internet expected her to. She documented every part of it, and put it online for the world to see. This girl was obsessed with perfection.
Anyone who has used or been exposed to social media for a significant amount of time, knows that TikTok is built differently. Like most applications, its algorithm is based on recommendation systems and user interactions. But what sets it apart from its forerunners like Instagram, is the “For You Page”一 a stream of videos specifically curated to the user’s interests. TikTok, in its essence, is built to reach a very wide range of audiences in a short amount of time. This allows anyone within the web of its users to become a viral one-hit wonder, and have their own taste of internet fame, literally framed within fifteen seconds (more or less) of a video.
Social media exists as a platform for communication and self-expression. But what happens when your “self” gets lost in the translation of what the internet tells you it should be? In 1957, social psychologist Erving Goffman presented a theorized definition of identity that revolved around acting. He writes, in The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, that people put on dramaturgical performances to create impressions for their audience. In other words, we are busy brewing the version of ourselves that we present to other people in every given context. In 2019, Fil-Am writer Jia Tolentino, in her essay entitled “The “I” in Internet”, contextualizes this theory of identity onto the online experience. Assuming that we conform to this dramaturgical framework on the internet, the system becomes a wreck. For social media users, there is a stage, and audiences persist. But the internet, as Tolentino writes, adds “nightmarish metaphorical structures”一 in the form of algorithms that position one’s personal identity at the center of the world wide web, surveilled and critiqued by millions of people behind a screen.
Internet users tend to avoid conversations about how social media trends and engagements get attached to self worth. All of us are in denial. I denied the complications that arose with my unhealthy habits in the hopes of becoming like the girls I saw online. I denied that I wanted to be perfect– even though that was all I obsessed over for the past two years. The problem is that we are constantly being fed false perceptions on what is “normal” in terms of appearance and success, and influencers are at the forefront of creating these unrealistic expectations. I wanted nothing to do with misleading identities, not only because I was misleading others, but because I was misleading myself.
But slowly, I began to fall off the interface of TikTok. The internet is not going to be less intrusive or pressuring than what it is today, and I don’t think it ever will be. Regardless of how many followers or likes you have, we need to accept an individual idea of selfhood on social media– one that is inclusive and open to culpability. We need to value our own privacy and boundaries amidst a world with so much unrealistic expectation. Perhaps someday, non-participation and being unapologetically authentic on the internet can be normalized.
After leaving TikTok for good, my life grew silent. In a world that continues to revolve around the wide web, taking a step back into reality, taking a “social media detox” and looking beyond the screen is the best way to stay true to your identity. It is with silence that I was given the opportunity to re-introduce myself to myself. The girl in my mirrored reflection is no longer a stranger to me. She’s not perfect, but she tries her best to do good. She’s not always smiling or put together, and she makes mistakes and learns from them. She knows how to apologize to others, but more importantly, she knows how to apologize to herself. I’m slowly getting to know her again. But this time, the world isn’t dictating to me who she is, rather, who I am, because at the end of the day, the only “follower” that matters and the only “follower” I aim to please, is myself.
Works Cited
Chadha, Kashish. “Toxicity of Influencer Culture: Looking at a Clearer Picture.” Eat My News, 19 October 2020, https://www.eatmy.news/2020/10/toxicity-of-influencer-culture-looking.html.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre, 1957.
“How TikTok recommends videos #ForYou | TikTok Newsroom.” Newsroom | TikTok, 18 June 2020, https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok-recommends-videos-for-you/.
“The Pros and Cons of Quitting Social Media.” SCL Health, https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2018/10/quitting-social-media/.
Tolentino, Jia. “Chapter 1: The “I” in Internet” in Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. Random House Publishing Group, 2019.
