what happens when the online “It Girl” is not actually it?
“I kind of want it to go on and on and on because it’s who I am,” she said in her TikTok. I wonder about that. What does it mean to fully self-identify with your artistic output, or marketing concepts, or public reception? What is sacrificed when your primary mode of relating to the world is by way of attention received rather than by attention exc... See more
#221: “The tension of staying too long”
Online culture encourages young people to turn themselves into a product at an age when they’re only starting to discover who they are. When an audience becomes emotionally invested in a version of you that you outgrow, keeping the product you’ve made aligned with yourself becomes an impossible dilemma.