On Being Real

Thinking about private life as entertainment, "Social Media Is Not Real Life", and what it means to be authentic online.

The other day on my Instagram story, I shared an article from The Atlantic titled “There Is No Reason to BeReal”. The article questioned the premise of the app, saying that it might not provide the authentic experience users were looking for. I asked my followers for their thoughts on the matter, and the first response I got was this:

Oh my lawd just let people live tho 😭 the platforms themselves are not always the issue, it’s this constant picking apart of every tiny detail of everything that we have which is what really makes us all unhappy.

The concept of BeReal is so simple, and from my experience people document the high points of their day, so what if that’s a party rather than the cab ride there 😂

I think this person has a point. This morning, I woke up to a camera on my face. My sister got her BeReal notification and, as I laid in bed half-asleep with an ugly T-shirt on, I mumbled “don’t take a picture of me. I don’t want to be real right now.”

I don’t have a BeReal account, mostly because I have fought over the years to diminish my own desire to contentify my life online.¹ Even though I posted the article with the intention of sparking a debate, part of me disagrees with the starting point of the entire conversation. I don’t think we should ask “Is BeReal is authentic enough?” but rather “Why are we aiming for authentic social media?” Or, as Instagram user @unclosedeyez put it in the comment section of The Atlantic’s post:

more social media apps to fix the social media debacle is like more guns to fix gun violence

If you were a teenage girl with creative ambitions and a Tumblr account circa 2015, you may have found yourself on a corner of the internet full of vegan American and Australian girls who shared their journal entries alongside beautiful pictures of Brandy Melville tops and flat stomachs. On that corner of the internet, I made a home for myself. While the girls in my school wanted to become Kylie Jenner, I aimed to be more like Essena O’Neill, an Australian 19-year-old with a 600,000 follower count who posted pictures of her ‘healthy’ lifestyle between Coolum and Los Angeles. She seemed to have many friends, among them Emma Czerwinski and Cybelle Corwin, creators of the now-deceased The Messy Heads, an online platform that aimed to show that “perfection is unattainable, and life is better lived messy.” From a Messy Heads post by haleyymadison on February 17th, 2016:

The deeper I dive into my own true self, the clearer my vision becomes as I look out over others’ blurred perspectives of reality. They put one large ego of an egg in an unstable, broken, holey basket. Why? Why is it so hard to use logic and common sense to see that social media is not a real world? […] I often see girls promoting strictly looks on social media, just running a personal life as a business, as if she is more valuable than someone on the other side of the screen.

These posts were the first time I encountered a way of using Instagram that questioned its inner workings and, for a long time, the idea of social media as “not the real world” stuck with me. I thought these women were the hallmark of innovation online, and I started making my own posts (archived now) where I shared my messy life with no regard for perfection.

It is weird to write about these girls here.² After all, these people are not A-List celebrities but rather girls who were only a few years older than me when they accrued a semi-large social media following. And, even though they were completely unreachable for me as a shy kid based in Rio, as an adult in Europe I have met or engaged with several of them. The ones I don’t know, some of my friends do, and now I see that these online “personalities” were just people who probably felt as confused about their internet “fame” as I felt about my anonymity (cue Hannah Montana’s 2006 song Just Like You).

I think this discomfort I feel in writing about them is at the core of why I am always questioning the invasion of privacy that comes with being authentic online. On the internet, people become connected more by a commonality of interests than by accidents of proximity.³ And, while this can be a great way of finding a community, it also creates a false sense of intimacy with people you have never met before, which means some random person on Substack can end up writing an article about you even though you’re only tangentially connected to each other and live in different continents. Guilty as charged.

Their attempt—and, by extension, my attempt—to utilise Instagram as a more authentic platform way back in 2015 seemed noble for some time, but it’s clear now that it was unsustainable. In October 2015, Essena O’Neill ended up going viral for renaming her account ‘Social Media is Not Real Life’ and quitting all social media platforms after a series of posts stating how unhappy she was with her online fame. Since then, her public appearances have become very few and far between. As for Czerwinski and Corwin, they became romantically involved, published a series of sold-out magazines, and then suddenly and with no explanation deleted the website sometime in 2020.⁴ Then, on a series of Instagram Stories in early 2022, Corwin spoke in detail about a disturbing and unhealthy relationship and, although she did not mention Czerwinski by name, it was clear to anyone who had followed them for years who this whole conversation was about.⁵

In 2018, I created my own platform dedicated to sharing journal entries and “real” feelings online, and then I stopped posting less than a year after its launch due to a bad bout of burnout that came from constantly exposing myself and others on the internet. The posts I wrote shared my experiences with eating disorders, first love, and anxiety, and at the time I was praised for the authenticity of it all. But the feelings I shared were fleeting, and four years later I often find myself thinking about how my attempts to transform social media led to a self-imposed violation of my privacy, an over-exposure that I don't regret but would not recommend for anyone. Although I never went viral, I could write a whole book about uncomfortable interactions I had as a consequence of my public candour. (An example that stands out: in a job interview for an admin role earlier this year, my boss-to-be told me he had Googled me and read one of my essays. This essay in particular was about a breakup I had gone through at 18, and it is not representative of my writing skills or mindset now. I was mortified that he’d read my poorly written descriptions of my teenage sex life, and after that I stuttered all the way through the interview. Needless to say, I did not get the job.)

My social media presence now encapsulates everything that I fought against at the time: bikini selfies and nights out that don’t tell the real story of what’s going on in the background. I just spent a month in New York with my family which included many highs and many lows, but I feel no need to share the lows here or anywhere else online. My mental health is now the domain of my close friends only, and if you want to know how I am doing don't look to my feed for a response. What I share now is a purposefully curated version of my life that insulates me from having a random acquaintance at a pub think they know me when they don’t.

In response to an Instagram Q&A I conducted a while back, a follower said:

I don’t think social media is a medium that can effectively communicate emotion in a way that’s beneficial. I think emotions are more effectively communicated via present energies so if people are trying to articulate what their emotional experiences are via social media people might start to confuse their authentic emotional experiences with their projected emotional experiences.

A few years ago there was a big switch on Facebook/Instagram from trying to get new users to trying to exploit their existing users. […] When you are being actively exploited to create content so people will engage with it, I don’t think using that as a space for emotional discharge is a good thing. I think a lot of people end up romanticising the bad things on social media not on purpose but because of the way the app is built for reacting, interacting, and creating content.

Social media is real life. From the organising of the January 6th storming of the American capital to mutual aid campaigns making healthcare accessible to people who cannot afford it to incels on Reddit who go out shooting people—it has social, political, and economic consequences that affect the real lives of people even if they are not online themselves. To dismiss the effects of the medium by claiming anything other than that would make no sense. But saying social media is real life is not to say it is an authentic representation of life outside of the online. After all, how could it be? It works in parallel to the offline and transforms it. Tinder is not an accurate representation of a first date but it has shifted the way we approach first dates. Instagram pictures are not an accurate representation of my body but they affect the way other people perceive it. I am not the first and I will not be the last to say that techno-electronic prostheses make us rethink who we are and the boundaries of our bodies. Following McLuhan:

the wheel is an extension of the foot / the book / is an extension of the eye / clothing, an extension of the skin, / electric circuitry, / an extension of the / central / nervous / system⁶

The tools we use, including social media, affect our understanding of self and blur the lines between the human and the non-human. Our interaction with these tools is, however, limited to the possibilities for which the tool was invented, making the medium an important agent in what can and cannot be expressed. And, as the follower above rightly pointed out, we also shouldn’t forget we’re all posting to give someone else money. Going back to haleyymadison’s post on The Messy Heads in 2016 where she criticised girls on Instagram for “running a personal life as a business,” I want to ask: what else are we meant to do with that space? Whether we’re personally making money or not, Instagram is a business and someone else is profiting off of our posts regardless of what the content is. The product Mark Zuckerberg is selling is life itself, or at least life as we choose to share it. A push for more authentic social media seems counterintuitive to its very mission; it is not a reinvention of the tool but the creation of a new one.

Autobiographical content shared online is limited by (1) the medium itself and what is possible to share on it (2) the mediation of content on the part of the author as they seek to navigate the borders of private and public online by exerting self-censorship and deciding exactly what they will reveal and what they will keep private.⁷ In this way, social media can only be a trace of people’s lives, filtered, magnified and resonating with the processes that determine what is curated, maintained and exhibited online.

Any idea that you can share an authentic self online also takes for granted that there is an authentic self to be found. Or, as James Baldwin put it in Giovanni’s Room:

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced.⁸

Nothing has been misplaced, you cannot “find yourself” anywhere on or offline. There is no such thing as a fixed identity that you can share for people on social media to see. My followers range from family members to close friends to people-I-see-occasionally-at-the-pub to my ex’s friends to people-I-went-to-primary-school-with to random strangers to work colleagues. The Ella Monnerat that each group knows is a different person as I adapt what I share of myself depending on the environment I am in. At the end of the day, there is nothing I can post that I would feel particularly comfortable sharing with all of those different groups except for pictures of my body — the only facet of my self all of them have seen before.⁹ My displays of intimacy online now go no further than pictures of me smiling in a park because that does not go beyond the scope of what is reasonable for everyone to see.

Be real or don’t, it’s really none of my business what anyone does with their online presence. I have nothing for or against that particular app, to be honest. I am only using it as a starting point because it has a provocative name, and it has sparked interesting conversations around me about the nature and value of social media.

I have tried using social media in so many different ways: to truly express myself (didn’t work), to promote a glowed-up version of me (didn’t work), to observe only (didn’t work). I have also tried being offline and that did not change much for me either. I spent so much time as a teenager obsessing about how I came across online that now I post mainly on impulse. This essay itself will be posted less than 24 hours after it has been written because I know that, if I take too long to think about it, I will start to second guess my opinions. Is this the way to go? I’m not sure.

In the opening to her book Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi wrote:

I don’t believe writing has the power to do anything grand enough to help us. I would just like a space to set down my despair.

I write this newsletter with the same intention. Maybe this will be the first of many essays, maybe this will be the last. I am tired of sharing all of my heart and soul online, but I am also not the kind to delete my social media accounts and live a life in silence. Don’t look for the real Ella Monnerat online because you will not find me. Here I share what I feel comfortable, but if you want to hear about the personal you’ll have to invite me out for a drink instead.

---

An afterthought:

I wrote this essay in an afternoon and, when I finished it, I met a friend at a pub. Not knowing I was writing this, he told me he had a conversation with a girl who had replied to one of my Q&A stories a year ago. He said, “you left her on read and unfollowed her after she said something controversial.” I was very confused. I don’t believe I ever followed her in the first place and, after some digging through my DMs, I found her messages and realised I fully agreed with her ‘controversial’ take. It made me think about how the way we interact with people online through private messaging is so inherently different from real-life engagement. If someone said something to my face I would never ignore them, but online conversations have a way of seeping into the back of my mind and suddenly it’s been four months and that friend who invited me for coffee never got a reply. Sometimes I think of my DMs as a room full of people screaming at each other. The conversations tangle up and are always interrupted, always already in the middle. This is to say: the nature of the medium transforms communication, and any expectation that the online can mirror the offline disregards the nature of the medium completely.

(Later that night I posted a picture of that friend on my story and he got annoyed I did not ask him before doing so. Delete that, he said, I look horrible. I guess I should know better by now.)

1. I borrow the word “contentify” from an article on The Face Magazine entitled “BeReal and the non-stop urge to contentify our lives”.

2. Emma Czerwinski’s pronouns are they/she. I am using “girls” here to refer to this group of people because I believe girlhood/womanhood was at the centre of the image they were promoting at the time and to phrase this online phenomenon as gender neutral would be inaccurate. In the same way, I am referring to myself as a girl even though I identify as non-binary. I just wanted to make it clear in the footnotes that I am not attempting to misgender anyone. I am only using gendered words because, in 2015, femininity was a marker of the internet subculture I am talking about.

3. This idea is not new and is not exclusive to social media. In fact, I am paraphrasing a text from 1968. From J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor’s essay The Computer as a Communication Device:

Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity.

4. I am writing this from memory. Don’t quote me on it. As I am not writing about famous people, there are no online archives I can rely on. The best I can do is offer my version of events.

5. While I cannot write about my experience of “being real” online without mentioning semi-public figures who were actually just regular people writing from their bedrooms, I am hyper-aware that they did not sign up to have some rando on Substack writing about their personal life. I am not by any means well-known online but I have spent the past two years phasing in and out of a turbulent relationship that included many public breakups. Once, at The Feminist Library in Peckham, a volunteer told me she would miss my breakups with my ex because they were “very entertaining”. I replied that there was nothing fun about my experience of abuse, and I have not volunteered at The Feminist Library since. I use this anecdote to say: I know how horrible it can be to have the most traumatic parts of your life exposed and banalised by others and that is not what I am trying to do here. I have included as little detail as possible about Corwin and Czerwinski’s relationship because I do not feel entitled to use other people’s breakups for my entertainment, no matter how public those breakups may be.

6. McLuhan, M. (1967) The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.

7. My thoughts on this matter have been informed by Martin Pogačar’s 2016 book Media Archaeologies, Micro-Archives and Storytelling.

8. Italics mine

9. My sister pointed out that this is inaccurate because people at work see me dressed differently from my friends etc. This is further complicated by the post-pandemic Zoom meetings that have transformed our online communication. “I have had music lessons online with the same woman for three years but I have never seen what she looks like below her neck,” my sister said. “If I saw her on Instagram wearing a bikini that would be really weird for me.” I appreciate my sister’s comment but think I will elaborate on this point in a different essay.