Blog #4: "Insta Famous"

Essena O’Neill was a nineteen-year-old Australian social media celebrity with over a million of followers on Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube. She fell victim to the constant pressure of her fellow social media personalities in that she would edit, filter, and let corporations exploit her and her followers to get them to buy their products. O’Neill admits that she allowed herself to get caught up in the pressures of the glamour of social media in that she felt as if she was getting some sort of gratification from being the prettiest, skinniest, ideal looking girl with millions of followers all while making money on advertisements on her social media pages. You would think that her life really doesn’t sound that bad and that she’s just complaining about all of the things that she is privileged by but it must have taken a toll on her mental health and sanity with living a double life. O’Neill says that her social media fame is the main cause of her forgetting who she really is as a person as she was too busy fluffing up her online persona and selling products to actually experience her real life. O’Neill expressed that there is nothing glamourous or inspirational about the digital world as she was forced to always post perfection and maintain an online persona that matched the profile her followers and sponsors wanted to see. “I don’t blame anyone for my actions or how much I was absorbed by social media, my appearance and this 2D world. It was me, I was being deceitful, I was lost, I was sick and I needed serious help. But of course I didn’t know that at the time. At the time I thought more money, more of these friends, being thinner… that would solve this internal misery.”

Van Dijck explains the culture of connectivity as :

“A culture where the organization of social exchange is staked on neoliberal economic principles. Connectivity derives from a continuous pressure—both from peers and technologies--to expand through competition and gain power through strategic alliances.  Platform tactics such as the popularity principle and ranking mechanisms… are firmly rooted in a ideology of that values, hierarchy, competition and a winner take all mind set” (page 21)”

This quote explains O’Neill’s feelings about the way in which she was sucked into her online persona and forced to post things that weren’t necessarily things that wanted to post. She was forced to maintain a certain image that will not only sell certain products but to sell her personal image as a brand itself. She knew that the only way to keep her celebrity was to essentially exploit herself. O’Neill got tangled up in her social media façade that she found that her true self was fading away. In her emotional YouTube video announcing her dismissal from social media she states that “social media isn’t real. It’s purely contrived images and edited clips ranked against each other…and it consumed me.” Some people believe that by pulling herself off social media that she was just trying to pull an attention-seeking stunt to gain more followers and go with the new trend of pulling away from the media. Some of her “friends” even posted combat YouTube videos saying that this whole thing is a hoax that needs to be shut down. That’s the thing with all forms of celebrity – the friends you think you are your friends aren’t really your friends at all. They’re just strangers who follow your life hoping to catch a free ride.

One year later her accounts are still deactivated except for her Instagram profile which now features only two photos – both inspirational quotes. The one quote says “I like the real you better than the Instagram you.”

References

Kircher, M. M. (2016, November 4). Where Are You, Essena O'Neill? Retrieved from NY Mag: http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/11/esenna-oneill-one-year-after-quitting-social-media.html

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford:

            Oxford University Press.