web as performance

how social media rewires our brains for performance/audience/vanity, not connection

Post-Authenticity and the Ironic Truths of Meme Culture

Our Instagram feeds professionalised: the quality of photography improved, the captions were strategically wittier. The relationship to our real lives became more complicated.

alex

I've never really met anyone else who oscillates so frequently and fervently between an intense desire for anonymity, to disappear even, and to crack oneself open entirely for the whole world to see. To be the maximum version of oneself in public, consequences be damned.

Alara

I’ve heard we’re all comprised of two selves: the experiencing self and the narrating self. The experiencing self submits always to our circumstances—it feels, needs, desires. The narrating self, meanwhile, is removed—it reflects, rearranges, regales. These modes of being may directly concern a way of living, like being present versus being... See more

sari

sari

andrea

the metrics, outward success, markers of “making it”, numbers, likes, popularity, visibility, praise or criticism or being ignored, awards, highlights, or trajectory that might come from what we make don’t matter much if we aren’t enjoying the process of making what we make.

andrea

social signals 2025_v5

sari

"Life in the Instagram bubble requires a constant calibration of how it will be viewed from outside. That need to make life itself aesthetic, to ask, over and over “What will this look like in a square?” exerts a slow, constant pressure of its own." (Jacob Mikanowski)

alex