A society of glamour

Some unpolished thoughts about social media

I was thinking about my 17-year-old sister who is emerging to be an adult. Immediately, I think about the online scoieties that she is growing into. It is a mixed bag of real and artificial glamour, that constantly puts on her a pressure to perform.

Instagram and LinkedIn

• On Instagram, I see people post only glamorous things¹.
  • Highschoolers nowawadays having to stand so much pressure about their appearance. Every single mistake in their photo will be mocked “friendily” by their “friends”.
  • There is definitely a pressure to look good on Instagram. According to Daniel Miller (2015), “Instagram thereby takes us one more stage than Facebook, from photography as memory to photography as social communication, where photographs are posted to elicit comments and ‘likes’.”

• On Linkedin, I saw over-reaching efforts to be professionally glamorous.
  • Every small achievement must be shown exxaggeratedly.
    • “Completing a 5-hour video course” becomes “an honor to receive a certificate from Stanford University” and “a deep dive into the world of Big Data”.
    • “Attending a 2-hour workshop” becomes “a great chance to connect with like-minded professionals”.
    • Especially, training a new model with slightly and single-sidedly better performance becomes “advancing the state of the art” and “one step closer to AGI”.
  • In user’s biographies, fancy adjectives are used a lot by them to describe how good they are.
    • Popular adjectives: self-motivated, fast-learning, aspired, open-minded
    • I think past-tensed verbs have more substanced and harder to be faked.
  • To be fair, I understand the pressure for each young associate nowadays (including me) to be outstanding so that they hopefully can get a decent job that pays well enough while does not crush their sanity. The big words are a result of such competitive pressure. Also, LinkedIn does have benefits such as enhanceing timely access to careerly information and broadcasting your good work. But the bad side-effect is obvious.

Social media in general

• It seems like the more accomplished people are, the fewer they have to say on social media. I think about the “silent” doers. The people who taught me the most in my career so far are not glamorous.
  • The good mentors that I have worked under shared two things in common: they are accomplished in many ways, and they are not glamorous on social media. They don’t post every single paper/product they have produced on LinkedIn for reactions. Some don’t even bother to post about their most prestiged achievements. The most they have done is to accumulate their publications and put them together on their website to demonstrate their research agenda.
  • I know a lady who is a senior advisor of national policians. On social media, she posts about the hopes and dreams she has for her kids, not the appointments and fame that she has accummulated (she actually has).
  • (This is a good idea for data analysis. Measure the correlation between the accomplishedness of someone and the length of their LinkedIn biography. I hypothesize the slope to be negative.)
• In general, I think the decision of posting on a personal website vs a social media account speaks something about people’s intentions. A post on a website is a passive source of information that require an active search of the audience. A social media post is an active one that jumps onto people’s face when they scroll down their newsfeed. How aggressively do you want people to see your good things?
  • This is not a causation claim. Instead, it is just a hypothesized correlation between social-media sharing and the actual excellence of a person.

Remarks

I know there are a ton of caveats. Social media, in its ideal form, is meant to improve communications while not turning the society into place of fakes. A lot of work is being done to get us there. I don’t think everyone should shut up on Instagram or LinkedIn. But being aware of such social pressures is helpful.

I would ask myself: (1) What is the best way for me to save and share my memories visually without a pressure to always look nice on Instagram? (2) What is the best way to expand my professional network without bragging on LinkedIn? (3) Given my definition of self-worth (which does not depend on my online profiles), what should I spend my time and energy on doing? I believe the answer will have almost nothing to do with social media. It’s probably around the neighborhood of sleeping, having genuine conversations, and tackling problems.

1. Based on my experience of seeing things in my Vietnamese and American network. ↩