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On Chinese gay dating apps, “fake profiles” are a constant concern: photos might have been altered or biometrics might have been fabricated. Offline, the person might barely resemble their profile. The lived experiences of Chinese gay men, however, show us that the fake is not always antithetical to the real. The fake, under certain circumstances, could enact material realities of its own. Gay socialites (同志名媛, tongzhi mingyuan) in urban China’s gay community are cases in point.
One aspect of my research among gay socialites focuses on the in-between zone of “real” and “unreal,” and how exactly the transformation from unreal to real can be achieved in a specific socio-technological context—contemporary urban China—in the digital age. I argue that we need to go beyond a binary of “real” and “unreal” to understand a social world where human actors are using digital technologies to create intermediate zones that are neither squarely real nor completely unreal, with the purpose of fulfilling their desires. These blurry, intermediate zones are liminal (Turner 1969), existing in the form of fantasies, constructed personas and lifestyles, and intoxicated states. It is through concrete human actions, and sometimes their unintended consequences, that liminal realities become full realities.
Fourteen years ago, in Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff (2008) argued that virtual worlds are in and of themselves cultural worlds distinct from the physical world, and that it is not only possible but suitable to study the culture of a virtual world with ethnography. Contesting the “false opposition” that fails to recognize that “the myriad ways that the online is real” and mistakenly assumes that “everything physical is real” (Boellstorff 2016, 387), Boellstorff states that “[c]hallenging the derealization of the digital is of pressing importance” (2016, 397). There have been consistent efforts in anthropology and related social sciences that echo or take up Boellstorff’s intervention. Anthropologists caution that design features and affordances of apps are deeply shaped by socio-cultural contexts, and that these new technologies bring about not only new possibilities, but also new risks and hierarchies in users’ lived realities (Batiste 2013; McGuire 2016; Edelman 2016). They pose a collective challenge to the misconception that the virtual and the actual are separated (McGuire 2016; Hu 2015). These pioneer studies have, from various perspectives and with meticulously constructed ethnographic details, highlighted the fact that the virtual and the actual are not only increasingly integrated, but on many occasions the virtual is real in every sense of the word.
Speaking more broadly, Lisa Messeri (2021) cogently points out that what she calls the “anthropologies of the unreal” have continuously expanded what counts as real in anthropological worldview by demonstrating how the seemingly “unreal,” such as illusions, dreams, digital technologies, intoxicated states of mind, and so on, are real or made real in specific socio-technological contexts (Boellstorff 2008; Mittermaier 2010; Messeri 2021; Zigon 2019; Pearce 2009).
In this case study, I use the term “liminal realities” to better conceptualize these in-between realities that were neither absolutely real nor undeniably fake. I draw on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality (1969) to highlight not only the transitional nature of these realities but also their uncertainty, malleability, and fluidity. Indeed, a gay socialite in China is not born; he is made.
The lives of the Chinese gay men I met during fieldwork provide a fruitful lens to understand the in-betweenness of life as a liminality between “real” and “unreal,” when boundaries, or thresholds, are not always clear or absolute. In this blog post, I will show how my interlocutors—mostly rural-to-urban migrant gay men—use digital technologies to create “fake” personas; that is, personas whose lifestyle, socio-economic status, and overall social status were different from their offline ones. In these urban Chinese men’s cases, however, “fake” is not the opposite of “real.” It was precisely through meticulously constructed “fakeness” that these men accumulate attention from China’s gay community, build a large fan base, and increase their social status. Eventually, this “fakeness” materialized and turned into tangible economic gains and social recognition. In other words, the fake became something undeniably real.
A “gay socialite” was one of the multiple identity categories created by urban Chinese gay men that placed gay men into an always changing hierarchical system according to their upbringing, education, class status, sexual practices, and more. My interlocutors described a gay socialite as someone who was young, good-looking, muscular, financially well-off, and fashionable. Most importantly, however, being a gay socialite was about enacting a particular lifestyle. Indeed, without a Louis Vuitton bag, or comparable luxury brand-name products, a good-looking, muscular, young gay man was considered a “wild chick” (乡下野鸡, xiang xia ye ji) ridiculed for their assumed rural, financially tight, and unsophisticated “nature” (本性, ben xing) despite their good looks. In contrast, hard labor was considered a foreign concept to gay socialites. A socialite must not work yet still have the financial means to travel around the world, stay in luxury hotels, and post their experiences on social media for fans to admire and/or evaluate.
Image 1: A well-known gay socialite posting on social media an image from a luxurious high-rise hotel room. The caption reads: “This is what a vacation is supposed to look like.” (Image screenshot by the author)
Image 2: On a different day, the same socialite posted a picture of a fancy breakfast at a luxurious hotel in Hangzhou, China. The caption reads: “A beautiful day begins with two Americanos.” (Image screenshot by the author)
During my fieldwork, however, I found out that most gay socialites actually came from humble backgrounds and that their financial position was not exactly as their social media posts suggested. Their luxurious lifestyle was, in fact, performed. It was common for gay socialites to rent a hotel room together. They took turns taking individual photos in each corner of the room and planned to post their pictures on social media at different times. During my fieldwork, I also learned that these gay men often borrowed brand-name products from others—from either individual people or companies specializing in brand-name rentals—to enhance their upscale persona on social media.
What’s the point, one might ask? Many socialites are looking for “gold masters” to look after them. In the gay lexicon, a “gold master” (金主, jin zhu) referred to a wealthy and usually older gay man who took care of younger and less monied gay men. However, in this gay social hierarchy, gold masters were not just looking to take care of any physically appealing gay men. Due to the equally intense hierarchical thinking among gold masters, and a social environment that measured a person’s social worth partly through the identity of their intimate partners, gold masters were looking for “worthy” (配得上，pei de shang) gay men—a position well fit by gay socialites. If a gold master ended up with a “nobody” (谁也不是, shei ye bu shi, translated literally as “who is nobody”) the reputation or social worth of the gold master would deteriorate as well. After all, the number of wealthy people in China grew to such an extent that some felt the pressure to differentiate themselves even further, pursuing a form of distinction from the so-called “vulgar new rich” (暴发户, bao fa hu, translated literally as “people who got rich as quickly as an explosion”) (Osburg 2020). During my fieldwork, gold masters and gay socialites were common couples. While the former gained face by having an attractive intimate partner, the latter eventually lived a material life that used to exist only in the virtual sphere.
There was more than one way the “fakeness” on social media could turn into material and financial realities. Not every gay socialite could find a gold master. Some took advantage of China’s vast “sunken market,” referring to the vast number of consumers who purchased cheaper products with their more meager incomes. Numbering in the billions, these individuals form the biggest market with the strongest potential one could hope for. By creating a fake persona, gay socialites accumulated a large number of followers from this market, many of whom could never keep a socialite like a gold master could or afford the socialite’s lifestyle for themselves. This is beside the point, however: most fans knew that the social media gay socialite life was often staged. Rather, these virtually mediated personas and lifestyles served not as truthful representation of another person’s reality, but snapshots of the fantasy of a good life, of an otherwise, of an alternative of a life (hopefully) yet to come. The power of fantasy was strong, leading to loyal fanfare, who would click the link and purchase whatever their idols recommend to them.
Brian, for example, was one of the most well-known gay socialites in China. Brian started his entrepreneurship and accumulated his fortune by selling affordable protein power on his social media accounts back in 2010s. When I returned to China for my dissertation fieldwork in 2019, Brian already owned a couple companies, multiple properties in China and Thailand, and was a major sponsor for one of Asia’s biggest dance parties in Bangkok. Even though Brian is still ridiculed by other gays for his highly photoshopped, “fake” pictures on social media, it would be hard to deny that the real and tangible changes in his life originated from purposefully constructed fakeness.
Indeed, the persona and lifestyle put on social media by these socialites might be “fake.” But “fakeness” is not always the opposite of realness. Mediated by virtuality, fakeness—understood in this context as a form of purposefully constructed liminal reality with the intention to craft a better life—is generative, productive, and performative; it brings new realities into existence. For Chinese gay socialites, many of whom migrated from rural China or lower-tier cities to the metropolis such as Shanghai, virtually mediated fakeness was their attempt—sometimes a very convenient and efficient one—to “make it” in China’s urban centers. In their cases, the fake, instead of standing in sharp opposition to the real, stood right beside the real. Here, the differences between the fake and the real were not quite ontological but temporal and conditional. The fake, in this sense, bears the potential to transition and transform into tangible and material realities that are no longer constrained in the virtual world. The fake, then, can be seen as a specific kind of real—the liminal real.
Batiste, Dominique Pierre. 2013. “‘0 Feet Away’: The Queer Cartography of French Gay Men’s Geo-Social Media Use.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22 (2): 111–32.Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.———. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57 (4): 387–407.Edelman, Elijah Adiv. 2016. “‘This Is Where You Fall off My Map’: Trans-Spectrum Spatialities in Washington, DC, Safety, and the Refusal to Submit to Somatic Erasure.” Journal of Homosexuality 63 (3): 394–404.Horst, Heather A. 2013. “The Infrastructures of Mobile Media: Towards a Future Reseach Agenda.” Mobile Media and Communication 1 (1): 147–52.Hu, Tung-Hui. 2015. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Ito, Mizuko. 2010. “Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes.” In Mashup Cultures, edited by S. Sonvilla-Weiss, 79–97. New York: Springer.McGuire, M. L. 2016. “The Problem of Technological Integration and Geosocial Cruising in Seoul.” New Media & Society, 1–15.Messeri, Lisa. 2021. “Realities of Illusion: Tracing an Anthropology of the Unreal from Torres Strait to Virtual Reality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (2): 340–59.Mittermaier, Amira. 2010. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.Nibbs, Faith. 2016. “Hmong Women on the Web: Transforming Power through Social Networking.” In Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women, edited by Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang, 169–94. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Okabe, Daisuke, and Mizuko Ito. 2006. “Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps toward Techno-Social Ethnographic Frameworks.” In Mobile Communication in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Views, Observations and Reflections, edited by Joachim R. Hoflich and Maren Hartmann, 79–102. Berlin: Frank and Timme.Osburg, John. 2020. “Consuming Belief: Luxury, Authenticity, and Chinese Patronage of Tibetan Buddhism in Contemporary China.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1086/708547.Pearce, Celia. 2009. Communities of Play Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.Wallis, Cara. 2011. “Mobile Phones without Guarantees: The Promises of Technology and the Contingencies of Culture.” New Media & Society 13 (3): 471–85.———. 2013. Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones. New York and London: New York University Press.Zigon, Jarrett. 2019. A War on People: Drug Users Politics and A New Ethics of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.
This morning, I realized how much of my current suffering is grieving the lost time from when Dad passed about a year ago. I had already incurred enough distraction and time debt before that, but Dad’s passing pushed me over the edge. This was also about the time Cory exited the team. We’d brought him on to help with Momentum growth, and with his departure, it left me with two big growth projects to juggle — and I couldn’t push the book forward and grow Momentum at the same time.
The residue of those losses lingered on everything. I hadn’t seen the residue because it’s not about the losses themselves, it’s about the time debt and tough choices they created in the midst of those two major projects.
In a beautiful irony, it was reading Michelle Varghoose’s reflection about how Start Finishing helped her that helped me see what was going on with my own journey. She wrote that letting go of projects as part of the life projects exercise freed her to focus on the projects that really mattered. In a LinkedIn comment on Isabeau Iqbal’s post, I mentioned that the underrated gift of getting to good enough is the freedom it brings.
Both threads were about the freedom and peace that comes from letting projects go.
This morning, I realized that it wasn’t the projects that I needed to let go of, but my story that I could do anything about being behind and recovering the lost time since Dad’s passing. I’ve been doing the best I can every day to do the essentials, reduce the scope of the business, and slowly reabsorb the rest of the work that’s come back to me. Most importantly, I feel like I’m doing all this in an integrous way and asking for help and grace from teammates in ways I never would have before.
Lost time can’t be found; our best is all we can do. Sometimes, our best is not enough to catch everything that’s coming our way with the time, energy, and attention we have in the moment.
Those are the breaks and are the occasional pains of being human. We can’t change those breaks and pains, but we can change the suffering we add to the pain.
And, by ‘we’, I mean ‘I’. And, if this is hitting you in the feels, I mean ‘you’.
I wrote in Start Finishing that to trade up, you have to let go. In that context, I meant trading up to better projects. In this post, I’m taking a broader perspective on trading up.
Trading up to freedom and peace is even better than trading up to better projects. It’s easier for most people to entertain trading up projects because projects = doing = contributing = being valuable = deserving (love, respect, pleasure, etc.). Choosing freedom and peace is harder because it makes you center yourself and your needs. (Reminder: you and your needs matter, regardless of the doing you’re doing.)
I’ll leave you with three questions:
Life presents us with enough to carry all on its own. Careful that you don’t add more to it than needed. There’s an important person who has to carry that additional, needless burden.
The post What Do You Need To Let Go Of? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Our culture glorifies youth. Even the word “old” is one we would prefer to avoid. Negative messages about age come at us our entire lives.
Throughout my life, I have heard people say: “So-and-so can’t do that, they’re too old.” Or there’s the notion that as a woman, you shouldn’t say your age. But the stigma around age is such nonsense, because getting older is a natural part of life. It happens to every person on the planet! Getting older should not be something to be feared.
At 43, I love my age.
Almost all of us know that ageism is out there. It’s a type of discrimination that touches almost every person at some point in their life or career.
Discrimination is unfortunately a subject I know far too much about — not only when it comes to age, but also because of my gender and race.
I live as a black woman in America. My race and gender are two things in this country that are constantly under examination. Every time I walk in a door, who I am and my capabilities are perceived differently once people see my face.
Having been through that my entire life, not only my adult life, but also as a child, I used to get so exhausted by the burden of caring what others thought. But what I learned from it was that being too tired to care anymore can be a powerful thing.
It’s good when you don’t want to put up with it anymore — that same old thing the world is giving you. Then it’s time to change the world.
My experiences inspired me to not care what people thought of me, and that remains the case now, with my age. I no longer allow myself to be limited by other people’s perceptions of me. Instead I focus on my inner strength, and the part of me that says, “I have to do this.”
Age Is Just a Number
Many people encounter ageism at some point in their career. And it’s not only reserved for women, or older people.
In a survey by Glassdoor, 30 percent of workers report experiencing ageism at some point in their careers, and most of the people who report it are actually younger (between ages 18 and 34).
Ageism is also insidious because it’s difficult to identify. Age means something different for everyone. Being a particular age doesn’t reveal a static truth about your person, your experiences, or your skills. As a black woman over forty, I reject people treating me worse or differently for my race or my gender, but I also reject discrimination based on my age — in the workplace or anywhere else.
When I had the life-changing opportunity to go to Africa last year for the first time, I witnessed firsthand that age there is associated with wisdom, as it is in many other places around the world. If you’re over the age of sixty, you are revered as a walking source of information, wisdom, knowledge, and life lessons.
You’re a living lesson for your children and grandchildren. We ought to respect that older individuals are sources of wisdom since they’ve been here longer. There is value in the time they’ve put in on this earth.
Younger people also have a different type of insight to share. Diversity of age, like every type of diversity, enriches our lives and the organizations we work in.
Embracing and Valuing Aging
Ten years ago, I likely wouldn’t have told you my age. Now, on the contrary, I am proud that I’m 43 and thriving. Age is not a curse; it’s a blessing. That I’ve been able to live for 43 years in this body with this face, these hands, or these teeth is a gift.
I’m grateful for the fact that I’ve lived this long, and come this far in the world — and I don’t take it as a given.
Your age is part of the magic about what and when you came into being on this earth. Your particular place and role on this planet, including how long you’ve been here, is all a part of what makes you special.
That’s how I always chose to confront racial discrimination when I encountered it. Instead of letting myself take on shame, or other people’s feelings about how I look, I chose to view my skin color as part of what makes me special.
I see my age as a sign of wisdom, which is built on a set of important experiences and years of building skills. I was not created to be anyone but me.
Coming Into My Own Power
The invisible ageism that we know is so widespread in society was still stuck in my head when, at age 29, I decided I wanted to become a fitness model.
At that point, I never told anyone how old I was. I knew in theory no one ought to be denied opportunities based on age. But the negative culture surrounding age has had an impact on me, as it has for so many of us.
In the modeling world, fifteen is considered the ideal age to start out.
At some point, I had to decide that my will was stronger than just a number. Part of it was I wanted to change the fitness modeling world so girls like me would be given more of a chance. I didn’t worry about how it was going to happen.
What motivated me was remembering how as a teenager, when I looked at fitness magazines in the checkout aisle, there were never faces that looked like mine. I remember thinking, why shouldn’t there be women who look like me? And after that: Why can’t it be me who proves that a woman who looks like me can be featured in a spread in a magazine?
Back then, I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t know anybody in the fitness industry. There was no blueprint.
Oxygen is one of the most influential fitness magazines for women of any skin color. I decided to contact the magazine directly with my portfolio. I created a mega-sized poster, superimposed with my own face and body, wrapped it in cellophane, and shipped it to the editor-in-chief of the magazine.
She called me the next day and told me everybody on staff couldn’t stop talking about it. Her exact words were, “You did what you were supposed to do, which was to get our attention.” In the next breath she asked if I could meet her in New York City for lunch; she wanted to see my abs in real life!
After our meeting, she said she didn’t need to see anything else. She was going to feature me. Flash forward a couple of months later; I was flown to Canada for a shoot. I was featured in Oxygen four more times within two years. Then I was featured in Shape magazine as one of the top three trainers in the United States (out of 300,000 trainers). Fitness RX for Women came next, and my portfolio just kept growing.
Why did all of this happen? It was simple. I saw the problem. I didn’t see girls like me and wanted to see a different reality.
What you create, at any age, doesn’t have to reach millions of people.
If there’s something within you that you have to pursue, it’s never too late to do so.
Maintaining Your Power and Tending Your Flame at Any Age
Modeling in my late 20s and early 30s led to other opportunities including, in my late thirties, headlining a major event at ESSENCE Festival — the kinds of achievements I hadn’t even dreamed about when I was younger. I also had my first child at 38.
Everything that’s happened to Nicole Chaplin has always happened later. It’s just always been that way.
And I like to think, what if all this is just the beginning?
People often ask about the choices I make to be as active as I am (and not just “at my age,” either). If I had to distill the mindset that allowed me to embrace my power, regardless of age, it would come down to the following:
Being devoted to a healthy lifestyle at any age often means making different choices.
As just one example, my friends know they cannot invite me anywhere if the event starts late, because I’ll definitely be going home before midnight. I value my early mornings; doing otherwise would throw off my whole week.
I live a holistic life, and I’ve been that person my entire life: always active, roller-skating, cheerleading, track and field. I was also a dancer, and a choreographer at the University of Miami. Fitness for me hasn’t been about wanting to be strong for its own sake. It’s about stamina. It’s as basic as this: I like to do a lot of things, and to keep doing all the things I like, I need energy.
As a result of the way that I live, my energy stays high (and sometimes it’s even hard to turn it down). My aim is always to have stamina and endurance, and to be heart healthy. God forbid I trip on the stairs — am I able to catch myself?
It’s the simple stuff. I want and need to be able to keep up with my five year old, Dominic Zion. My own mother used to work very hard, so that on Saturday mornings, she would lie in bed exhausted. I knew I didn’t want to feel like that with my children, and wanted the energy to play with my child.
Now DZ is playing soccer, and I am able to keep up. When he wakes up on a Saturday morning, I’m already up and ready for him. I want to enjoy life to the fullest — going to East Africa, swimming with turtles.
For a lot of folks, if something doesn’t happen by the time you’re like 25, they say, “Oh well, that wasn’t my path.”
What if instead we ask: What if we’re far from done?
The post Owning Your Power at Any Age appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
In this post, we unpack the meaning and many works of creating and maintaining digital multiples, a term we coined in our recent ethnography, A Filtered Life, to explore the multiple, dynamic expressions of self across online contexts (Nichter and Taylor 2022). This concept emerged from our ethnographic research with more than 100 college students exploring sociality, emotional expression, and online identity work. Our methods for this study included in-depth interviews, focus groups, writing prompts, and long-term participant observation in students’ social media sites.
Colette, a college junior studying marketing at a large public university, prides herself in curating clever posts across her social media. After a difficult day, her Instagram post would feature an artsy photo of a glass of wine, using her signature colors as background. On Twitter, she would post a funny meme about getting drunk. Snapchat would show a video of her drinking the wine (since the post would disappear quickly). Colette’s Facebook post would include a short narrative about why her day was hard without any mention of wine (since her parents might see it).
Posts from one weekend include a filtered close up photo on Instagram of Colette dressed in fitted jeans and a tank top taken from a flattering birds-eye angle with the caption, “Getting ready for fun with my girls (heart emoji).” On Snapchat, her photo was a blurry image of a half-empty pizza box and several crumpled tissues on her cluttered bedside table with the caption, “Had better days.” Facebook featured a candid selfie of Colette snuggling with her golden lab on the couch with the caption, “Just a quiet night at home.”
One Thursday night, Colette posted a curated photo of herself laughing with friends in front of an iconic graffiti wall in Austin that reads, “I love you so much.” Snapchat featured her bare legs in bed with a bandage and scratch marks along with the caption, “I’m a fucking mess.” On Twitter, she retweeted a popular cartoon meme of a woman falling down stairs.
These examples from Collette’s social media illustrate the strategic presentation of self across social media contexts, a process guided by site-specific affordances, social norms, and perceived audience expectations. The term “polymedia” refers to a dynamic model which incorporates the proliferation of new social media that “each acquires its own niche in people’s communicative repertoires” (Madianou 2015, 1; see also Madianou and Miller 2013). The concept of polymedia underscores that today’s users rely on an assemblage of media to accomplish their online goals.
If we consider the multiple contexts that college students traverse without factoring in social media, impression management is complicated enough. We can imagine that a typical day for college students might include interacting with peers, co-workers and supervisors, and professors in a variety of contexts such as home, campus, parties and bars, and workplaces. Once we layer in social media contexts that overlap and integrate with those offline realms, the idea of managing one’s impression, performing appropriately for the particular platform, and segregating audiences becomes infinitely more complex. Additionally, the digital multiples that one presents on various online platforms reach diverse audiences, a factor requiring consideration in the creation of a post.
Cover of A Filtered Life, by Nicole Taylor and Mimi Nichter
Engagement with multiple online contexts is not a new area of study. Tom Boellstorff has highlighted the interconnected nature of interactional contexts, arguing that digital worlds are as real as offline worlds (Boellstorff 2016). He illustrates that what we do online affects life offline, challenging a pervasive assumption in research on technology and sociality that understands “digital” and “real” as binary opposites. We found that digital multiples necessitated fluid identities—that is, being flexible in one’s presentation of self in relation to specific contexts and social spaces. Yet, the mandate to remain consistent with online and offline presentations of self further complicated the creation of digital multiples.
Here we explore the many works involved in creating and maintaining digital multiples alongside the impossible imperative of authenticity. Maintaining digital multiples required intensive labor as college students competed for likes amidst an attention economy where the half-life of a single post was short. On the one hand, site affordances, social norms, and perceived audience expectations constrained self-presentation; on the other hand, engaging across multiple sites, each with its own unique set of cultural mandates, provided an opportunity to cultivate digital multiples.
Daniel Miller and colleagues point out that since most people now engage across multiple sites, social media has become an ecology that offers many choices for sociality, ranging from small, private exchanges to public broadcasts (Miller et al. 2016). Miller and his colleagues refer to this as scalable sociality, a term they coin to describe the interconnected nature of social media, where individuals have a range of platform choices, degrees of privacy and size of audience that they want to reach. Interactive dynamics between social media users and their audience are key for understanding digital multiples.
Sociologist Erving Goffman described social life as a theater with interactions representing the interplay between actors and their audience (Goffman 1959). Goffman contends that we are always performing to create an impression for an audience. We need an audience to see our performance and a backstage area where we can both relax and do much of the work necessary to keep up appearances (Hogan 2010). Importantly, the self is not “a fixed, organic thing but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance” (Tolentino 2019, 14). In our study, we observed that students portrayed themselves differently across social media platforms, depending on site affordances, audience expectations, and aspects of their identity they wanted to highlight.
We found that the process of constructing and maintaining digital multiples not only requires strategic tailoring by site, but also needs to be sufficiently aligned with one’s offline self and appearance to maintain an “authentic” identity. The concept of “authenticity”—revealing one’s true self—emerged as an important theme in our study. Students emphasized the importance of “being real” online as a marker of honesty, trustworthiness, and integrity. They scrutinized social media posts for signs of over-editing, a faux pau that signaled inauthenticity and elicited derision.
Among young women, authentic expression online translated into beauty practices that highlight physical appearance. The name of the game was to present both an authentic and an edited self that appeared effortlessly attractive. Successfully navigating this contradictory imperative required great skill, attention to detail, and vigilant monitoring of editing norms and feedback on posts. Men felt less pressure to post a flawlessly edited image, making it easier to achieve an appearance of authenticity. However, some still struggled with their online image and sense of self.
Both women and men were cognizant of the superficial nature of their editing practices. Students who did not edit risked critique for visible flaws and imperfections; those who did edit risked critique for being inauthentic. Successfully striking a balance between real and fake in social media was a highly valued skill and getting it right was important. This pressure underscores the importance of impressing an imagined audience, one that appears to value both perfection and authenticity, an impossible contradictory imperative.
Using social media. Image via Pexels.
Throughout A Filtered Life, we highlight the many works involved in creating and maintaining digital multiples, which include the following: editing work, the work of identity and gender performance, beauty work, emotional work, the work of remaining visible, and the work of managing social relationships. This is mostly invisible labor. Editing work, for example, is an intricate process for perfecting social media content, involving taking multiple photos, attending to angles, lighting, posture, spacing, and background, as well as editing out perceived flaws and strategically posting during peak times to attract maximum attention.
Another important work is that of identity and gender performance, shedding light on cultural prescriptions for self-presentation, which remain equally robust online as they do offline. Physical appearance, emotional expression, and lifestyle must be carefully surveilled and curated differently across contexts, yet it is important for a unifying thread of authenticity to remain intact. Under the constant surveillance of multiple imagined audiences, some were able to maintain the appearance of a seemingly “natural” aesthetic despite the tremendous effort required to produce content so that the “look” of their posts was eye-catching.
Beauty work describes the imperative to post your most attractive self and the production process required to achieve such perfection, including the work of micro-targeting each body part to discover and then conceal one’s flaws. In this process, social media practices are shaped by viewer expectations and site-specific conventions, as they converge with an online social milieu that values maximum visibility, adherence to cultural and gendered beauty norms, and promotion of the self as a recognizable brand image.
Students engaged in the emotional work of anticipating audience desires and developing tailored content across sites designed to get as many likes and positive comments as possible, vigilantly monitoring feedback on posts, and the emotional vicissitudes of counting likes and reading comments. Emotional work also included the imperative to always portray a happy, upbeat self and package one’s sad or angry emotions in socially acceptable ways, which differed by site. In this way, students needed to carefully produce and manage their emotional state.
The work of remaining visible by posting regularly was also important. Posting infrequently suggested a lack of social life. Students worried that if they did not post frequently friends would forget them. Being online constantly and seeing other people’s posts of how they were living their best life often resulted in frustration and jealousy, especially when comparing your own life to that of people in your friend network who seemed to “have it all.”
Finally, the work of managing social relationships involved scrolling through sites and liking others’ posts. Students said it was especially important to like the posts of friends who regularly liked their posts. It was common for a student to call out their closest friends for failing to reciprocate in this way. The timing of a like was important as well. Being the first to like a post signaled a sense of desperation; conversely, students said it was strange to get a like on an old post, explaining that it could signal a sudden and intense focus on them. Through the lens of these various works, we can see how the creation and maintenance of digital multiples becomes infinitely more complex and labor intensive.
The title of our ethnography, A Filtered Life, is multi-layered in meaning. On the most obvious level, it refers to the use of filters available on many platforms to alter and enhance one’s physical appearance and the background of an image. Beyond this interpretation, filters are a metaphor for strategically repackaging the self on different sites. Filtering the self is about every aspect of self-presentation, from the aesthetic of a person’s feed and their physical appearance to the personality characteristics and lifestyle they want to convey. Yet, all of this is bounded by a generational desire to remain authentic, meaning that there are limits to strategic self-expression online. Collette, like others in our study, carefully walked the fine line of achieving the impossible imperative of maintaining both filtered and authentic digital multiples.
The maintenance of digital multiples across online spaces—each with their own set of rules, editorial mandates, and audience expectations—intensified identity work. Everyone knew images they saw online were heavily cultivated, yet many students worked hard to perfect the ability to mask their editorial efforts in an image that appeared natural and effortless. While this editorial tight rope was stressful to navigate, students took pride in cultivating their skills and enjoyed the positive feedback from others when they got it right.
On the one hand, students expressed cynicism and frustration with social media—they struggled with the seeming inauthenticity of editing and self-presentation imperatives. On the other hand, students enjoyed the creative freedom to play with their identities, from the more superficial elements of fashion and physical appearance to deeper aspects of emotional expression and authentic self-presentation. As we look toward the future, it will be important for research to explore how the production of digital multiples shifts after college as young adults take on different roles and responsibilities.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57(4): 387-407.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Hogan, Bernie. 2010. “The presentation of self in the age of social media: Distinguishing performances and exhibitions online.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30(6): 377-386.
Madianou, Mirca. 2015. “Polymedia and Ethnography: Understanding the Social in Social Media.” Social Media + Society, (April – June): 1-3.
Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller. 2013. “Polymedia: Towards a New Theory of Digital Media in Interpersonal Communication.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(2): 169-187.
Miller, Daniel, Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman, and Xinyuan Wang. 2016. How the World Changed Social Media. Vol. 1. London: UCL Press.
Taylor, Nicole and Mimi Nichter. 2022. A Filtered Life: Social Media on a College Campus. New York: Routledge.
Tolentino, Jia. 2019. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. New York: Random House.
I’d like to float the idea that self-worth is a fundamentally different thing from self-esteem or confidence.
People talk about these ideas as if they were each one and the same. But self-worth, I would argue, is our essential value as humans — our internal sense that we’re good enough no matter what happens on the outside. Ultimately, we need to be looking at our self-worth — our inherent value — if we want to fuel our best work.
This is also relevant when it comes to teams, even if folks may think self-worth is always a personal development discussion. Teams can also struggle with the gap between their abilities and the level they’re achieving at as a result of invisible floors and ceilings.
Over the years, in all the time that we’ve been running the Monthly Momentum Calls, I’ve often used the floors and ceilings metaphor for this catch-22 about our self-worth and ability to achieve at the level of our potential.
Ceilings are false limits that are imposed on us from outside, which we eventually accustom ourselves to, and which limit our ability to rise to the natural level we might belong at.
But the floors part is where things get interesting.
Floors equal our stabilizing force. We’re talking about the base of the house or structure you have built for yourself to live inside. That’s to say, what you built to keep you safe and comfortable, also limits you. (That’s a different take than the typical one on confidence, self-worth and limiting beliefs.)
It’s good to have stability, and to have safety, and especially if you had an experience where you lacked that, it will seem reaaally appealing to stay where you are rather than take any risks — except when that structure also starts to limit your growth and ability to do your own highest value work.
The problem with remaining just safe and comfortable is eventually, we forget that we’re the ones determining the confines of our lives. We wonder why we aren’t living and working at the level we are dreaming of.
Sometimes those limits are built for us by others, and sometimes we are the ones responsible for them. That can be a tough pill to swallow.
In a lot of cases, people have outgrown certain limits but still abide by those earlier limits without noticing.
Our issues with self-worth, and trust — and how this impacts our floors and ceilings — can arise no matter what stage or level of success we’re at in life.
Some people would probably call this “imposter syndrome.” Essentially though it’s all the same thing, where we haven’t done the necessary work to develop our sense of our intrinsic value.
Issues with our self-worth often show up especially when we run into big challenges.
Our courage to break through our floors and ceilings often shows up in relation to whether we let ourselves be seen and heard.
Big challenge moments, or leading through a turnaround, can change your life if you’re willing to embrace those challenges, rather than balking and backing down out of fear, and/or the desire for ease and security.
Those challenges can arise for us in different ways over time, depending on the point we’re at in our career, whether that’s as an individual employee, freelancer, leader or business owner. It can be uncomfortable to push your boundaries — which is usually a good thing — but the resistance comes when you don’t want to break the stability you’ve created within certain parameters.
For introverts this might become about protecting their privacy, or for many folks, we end up resting on the financial stability we’ve worked so hard to create — and in the process we end up having difficulty pushing beyond our comfort zones.
The point of course is that sometimes it’s the externally imposed ceilings that are holding you back, but other times it’s you that’s holding you back — out of fear of unmooring yourself from your stable ground.
If you’ve recognized that these forces influence you, and you’re ready to push outside your comfort zone (but maybe still encountering resistance), it may be worth asking yourself some questions:
What is hiding protecting you from? Is it a fear of burnout? Of being unmasked?
In order to break out of this pattern, we have to remind ourselves that there’s also pain or frustration — and often an even greater, deeper, and longer term sense of disappointment — in knowing what you’re capable of, but not ever reaching for it.
If you’re aware of what you don’t want to compromise on, it becomes a question of creating better boundaries.
You can think of your new boundaries as a new house, or structure with floors and ceilings YOU have chosen, rather than ones that have been chosen by other people or by your subconscious.
You’ll want to create boundaries in terms of how much space you want to give other people’s thoughts about you. You might not want to live within their idea of you anymore.
If you work in a particular industry, or with a particular type of client, for example, you might not immediately want to quit what you’re doing.
But you’ll want to ask yourself: What’s the floor? That is, what is the minimum amount of time or energy I can keep spending on X? What’s the ceiling? What is the maximum amount of energy I’m able to spend on it?
When you’re clear on your floors and ceilings, and you know you want to attend to all the things, you can also rest in the knowledge of what the limits are for the amount of time or energy that you are going to be able to put forth.
You’ll also need to know when to let it go and walk away. Knowing when to walk away is different than never standing up, and never letting your light shine.
For a lot of people I’ve worked with, the floors and ceilings we’ve grown accustomed to can be really difficult to shake, because they operate on autopilot. Even when you’re trying to change your behavior around self-worth and your boundaries, you might only realize two hours later, “Oh shoot, I did the thing again!”
Or sometimes you know in the moment that you’re playing it safe.
Sometimes you might be able to rely on someone else — a trusted friend or advisor — to see these dynamics with more clarity than you can yourself. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an adult you trust either.
Kids, for instance, are incredibly intuitive. If you have them, you’ll know that to be the case. And they pick up on everything. That means that when you’re planning and leading in your life, and through your work, you want to be thinking about what you’re modeling for them on the day to day.
Modeling often means showing them how they can live their hopes and dreams. So when you see the ways you’re modeling, try to consider shining as you really are. You don’t want to just pass down the stories that we got when we were kids, which might have been limiting — whether about our abilities, creativity, abundance.
When teams run into their floors and ceilings in terms of their performance, managers often look at what or who on the team is broken and needs to be fixed or replaced.
In my forthcoming book, Team Habits, I take a long hard look at that knee jerk reaction within companies. One of my basic assumptions is that people are not broken, incompetent or lazy.
Teams have the same capabilities as individuals when they dig deeply and help transform their floors and ceilings. If you have a rapport and trust with the four to eight people you work with on a daily basis, this is a conversation you might want to consider having.
Human talent can shift quickly when it’s given space to thrive. You teammates can rise to the occasion in ways you, and they, individually, could not.
The primary way you can start to shift your team’s floors and ceilings is through team habit shifts. Probably the first habit you might think about is how to increase team belonging and performance.
Belonging is the habit that most closely links to trust, which is the foundational issue when it comes to floors and ceilings.
Many teams will need to learn how to trust each other before they can perform. Their ability to excel beyond expectation will mean breaking through floors and ceilings that have been imposed from outside, or higher ups — or as a result of their individual doubts.
But trust and belonging is the key that will get them there. Once we start to figure that out, the bonding starts happening more, which means the performing starts happening. Then you get a reciprocal spiral in action. And that’s how you get on the road to having a great team.
Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if you’re curious about identifying your team’s strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take our Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.
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