Personas R Us
we shop for new identities so others will perceive us the way we want them to, even if it's not who we truly are
Now, more than ever, you can open an app on your phone, record a video, or post other forms of content, and gain a following. People want to see seemingly normal people’s lives. Instead of turning on a TV, we scroll through our phones and watch whatever content people provide to us for free. Social media platforms have given everyone the opportunity for their voice to be heard. We all have the potential to be influencers because people are the content we consume.
Some of these social media influencers seem to have attainable lifestyles. They turn on a camera, talk, crack a joke, show their outfits, take you around in their day, and they seem normal. The niche micro-influencers with 500K followers are not big enough to where their lifestyle is completely out of reach. They still feel like a normal person, which is why people gravitate toward them so quickly. We’re attracted to creators that appear authentic.
But can someone be truly authentic on social media?
Social media is not real, but we’re making it our reality. In many ways, we act like every moment off our screens is still for a screen. We might need to take Instagram pictures to show followers what we’ve been up to. People make content by filming in public places, so we dress and act as if we’re going to be filmed. We’re constantly aware of the fact that we may be judged by people across the world.
And that’s terrifying. How do you present in a way that people can guess what you’re like, and hopefully, save you from scrutiny?
Different aesthetics and sub-cultures help us determine what someone may be like off the phone screen. If someone wears bright vibrant colors and flowery prints, we expect them to be a happy and excitable person. We expect them to be the nicest and kindest person we’ve ever met.
This is us branding ourselves. In a world where people thousands of miles away can perceive you, you need to make a good impression. Not everyone will know what goes on in our heads, but if we dress according to stereotypes and aesthetics, we can trick people into thinking they know who we really are at first glance. We create a barrier between the real us and the us we let others perceive.
If I was walking past a girl dressed in a baby-tee and thrifted mom jeans, I’d assume their indie outfit meant they would be liberal on a political spectrum. I would also guess she listens to Tyler, the Creator, Rex Orange County, and others in that music genre.
In the past what we wore directly correlated to our political views and other interests. Hippies were pro-weed and anti-war. Punks were anti-establishment. These sub-cultures are a mixture of beliefs and fashion that go hand in hand.
But in this era, I get whiplashed by white indie or alt people that reveal that they’re on the right of the political spectrum, or that they have a republican boyfriend who is racist and homophobic. Bands that create punk/alt/ pop-punk music turn out to have histories drenched in bigotry. Indie artists say some of the most outrageous takes about rap and other art within black culture.
It’s so easy to hide behind your aesthetic now. We move in and out of trends so fast that it doesn’t matter what you think, but it does matters what you wear or how people perceive you because of what you wear. Because we only see bits and pieces of people through social media, we must make these quick assumptions about them based on what they look like. This has created a disconnect between the visual aesthetics of certain pop cultures, and the true movements behind them.
We see this in certain cases of cultural appropriation. White girls who have long fake eyelashes, big hoop earrings, and long acrylic nails take parts of Chicano and Black American cultures to play dress-up. They try to use AAVE and pretend they’re from the hood. Once they grow out of this “phase” they turn around and bash women of color who follow these trends because it’s their culture.
When these white girls revert to the dominant cultures in their suburban areas, they feel embarrassed that they ever participated in the “Cheeto girl” aesthetic, not because they feel bad for being a cultural appropriator, but because they hated the way they pretended to be someone they’re not.
At home, these girls would talk to their parents like any other white kid. It was a constant and unnecessary performance to go out of their way to say “finna,” and “period,” at school. How they presented on the outside was because they thought they looked cool and trendy. They were able to rebrand themselves so easily because it wasn’t really who they were.
If you want to grow your brand to a certain demographic, you need to at least appear to believe in the same morals and politics as them, especially if you don’t plan to speak out on current event issues. You must make people buy into your brand. I see this branding so often on my TikTok FYP.
Celebrities and social media influencers rebrand when they realize they could make more money with a different audience. Take Christian Walker for example. His Tiktok used to be solely Trump-supporting propaganda bullshit, but now his viral videos are when he jokes about the men he’s dating in relatable ways. Christian realized that he could make a career out of being an internet personality, rather than a guy who spews terrible political takes online. He’s marketable when he doesn’t show what he truly thinks.
Men trying to gain social media clout have perfected this version of branding themselves as something they’re not. Those soft indie boys who wear oversized t-shirts and rings pose as feminists or at the very least boys who understand women.
They’ll post content showing off how they read romantic comedies, or long paragraphs explaining a woman’s psyche. He’ll say she has “daddy issues”, and that he knows how to help her heal, and yet he continues to be a raging misogynist who does not respect women at a fundamental level. He knows that posing as the golden-retriever boy will garner him support from girls, so he plays into it. He pretends he cares, all the while, behind the screen he disrespects women and profits from the false perceptions.
We have to stop acting like we know someone when they’ve only shown us what they’ve allowed us to see. Everyone goes out into public spaces (online and in real life) after they’ve dressed and curated a personality they think people will like. Every time we go out, it is a performance.
We create these para-social relationships with our favorite content creators based on how the performance they give, and when they don’t match the expectations we have of them in our head, we lose our minds because how could this person I only see on a phone screen not actually be whom I thought they were? When their performance slips or they give us a hint as to who they really are, we can’t comprehend that this person is not what we imagined in our head.
The truth is, I have this practiced nonchalance in my personal brand. I let my voice stay deeper than most, I lean back in chairs with my arms crossed, and I don’t show that I’m overly interested in many things. I only post two times a year on my public Instagram, and maybe once a month on my Instagram story.
I’m being the cool girl. I’m keeping it so tight. You can only imagine what goes on in my head because I don’t say what I’m thinking or feeling. I want people to think that I’m chill and I don’t care because I’d rather them not perceive me at all.
But what does that gain me? Sure, people can’t perceive me as much as they could if I chose a different aesthetic, but why am I so adamant about not letting people know the real me?
That is a question for my therapist, but I think the answer I’d get is that I’m insecure. Like truly, this culture of constant rebranding, or rebranding as something you’re not, is not only a symptom of consumerism but also because we don’t like ourselves.
Consumerism culture tells us we need the newest clothes. It tells us we need to continue to reinvent ourselves to meet the fast-paced, changing society we live in.
It’s so hard to feel good about who you are because if you post about it on social media, there will always be someone who says you’re stupid for liking certain things if they are not “in”. Insecurity is what drives this “I’m too cool to like things,” mindset. (This is a plug to read my first article, ‘Insecurity is Feminine”)
We need something to mask who we truly are. Something surface level that people who are just looking at us will see and perceive us how we want them to. You can hate yourself all you want, but if you look like someone people like, you decide to hate yourself a little less.
At its core, our personal brands are about acceptance. We want to belong to a group, or we want to create a following on social media so badly that we turn ourselves into half-realized people who are two-dimensional.
But the thing is, half-realized people are the exact people we want to see. We don’t want to know people’s terrible actions when they’re not on our screens. We want to be able to consume someone’s life, guilt-free, so we allow people to present two-dimensional because we know three-dimensional people are complex. It is so much harder to appreciate someone who has flaws.
There is a trend on Tiktok that highlights this exact issue (pictured above). The premise is that the identity you share with everyone contradicts a normal human emotion you experience. For instance, “sorry I snapped at you for pointing out my insecurities. That wasn’t very chill girl who bottles everything up of me.”
We don’t let our outside appearance coexist with what goes on in our heads. People are multi-faceted, but we don’t know how to react to the flawed side of others. So, when someone breaks down their own brand and allows us to see that they are human and they have issues, we can’t comprehend it because they were never a real person in our heads in the first place.
Rebranding ourselves constantly is usually a deflection. You can fix how you appear on the outside as often as you want to, but when it comes down to it, if you don’t like the person you have living in your head (whom you spend all your time with), you will never stop rebranding. You will always have to run away from the fact that the problem is not the clothing you wear that you don’t like; it’s your personality and insecurities. Rebranding and reinventing your outside perception will never stop if you don’t rebrand or change the mental part of yourself to something that you want to be around. Focus on being someone you like, not someone you think others will like.