Brittany Broski’s got me thinking.
I respect and am in awe of people who have the ability to couple humor and sobering analysis into one conversation, offering dynamic points that leave you contemplative in one moment and surprised by a joke cracked in the next.
Give me the potion that makes these people the way they are. I am enamored.
Brittany Broski (kombucha girl from way back when) is one of those people, and a recent podcast episode of hers on the Broski Report got me thinking.
As an influencer herself, she delved into the complexities around the “wild west” of the creator industry—TikTokers, content creators, YouTubers, influencers of every sort—that make their living online, recounting an interview she had with YouTubers Colin and Samir.
The unregulated industry of content creation is a perplexing social experiment to behold as a consumer. Not only the parasocial dynamics between creator and audience, but the gradually forming ethics of what’s okay to post and what’s not, what’s too personal and what’s not, what can be taken authentically and what can’t be because money is involved, etc.
This excerpt of Brittany’s podcast stuck out:
“We live in the digital age where […] we have to post everything. I know that. That’s my job. That’s my lived reality. […] That’s my lived truth. That’s all of our lived truths. We no longer are posting to share memories, we’re posting to prove who we are. We’re posting to prove to each other and to ourselves: ‘This is the kind of person I think I am.’”
Humanity has never had to deal with the phenomena of technology and social media before.
How wild would it be to go back 30, 40, 50 years and describe the faux reality we consume through the screens of our phones on a daily basis—the dopamine-feeding schedule of our (no pun intended) repetitively refreshing social feeds?
Comedian and filmmaker Bo Burnham (another unicorn who can make you laugh and cry in a simultaneous moment) has been talking about this concept for years, worried over what social media is doing to not only our brains as adults but most terrifyingly, the developing brains of our children and society as a whole.
In Bo’s comedy special, Make Happy, he describes social media as…
“the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform. So the market said, ‘Here, perform everything to each other, all the time, for no reason.’ […] What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member?”
To be alive during an era where technology and social media is fundamentally shifting the way we see each other and ourselves is a bamboozling thought. We’re tripping over our own feet, forgetting who we are as Brittany put it, “When you turn who you are—this complex, ever-changing, ever-growing ball of energy and emotion—when you turn that into a commodifiable aesthetic, that is fucking weird, and that’s what we’re doing, and it’s strange to see.”
This might be the first time in history that our ability to adapt and develop the moral code to handle something new in our world can’t keep up with the speed of its evolution.
We’ve never been so empowered and simultaneously controlled by something in our pocket.