Are we sharing too much of ourselves online?
How creators and average users are navigating the pressures to commodify daily life
I hope you all had a wonderful break. I’m feeling reinvigorated in the New Year with lots of interesting topics on the docket to write about, so let’s dive in.
But first — if you like Taylor Swift (or football), here’s a piece in Marketing Brew that I was recently quoted in about how brands are capitalizing on her new relationship with Travis Kelce. Personally I feel that the branded pile-on has gotten way oversaturated, but let me know your thoughts.
As I was scrolling through my FYP this holiday season, navigating the inundation of “what I got for christmas” videos and 2023 recaps, I couldn’t help but wonder — have we over-commodified our everyday lives? These types of videos began as a hallmark of professional content creators, but like many things on social media have trickled down to average everyday users. This new year in particular, they’ve taken on a life of their own — “allowing users an outlet to reflect while also generating anxiety and pressure among young people to commodify their lives into viral content,” writes Taylor Lorenz for the Washington Post. This rise in these recap videos can largely be attributed to “the TikTokification of life,” says
ofThis concept has become apparent outside of the holiday season as well. More and more people are mining their cringey childhood memories for social media clout — whether it be through embarrassing diary entries, or letters to crushes. Riley Collins (@ryelejean) regularly posts screenshot evidence of ways she tried to impress her childhood crushes for her nearly 200K followers. She said she never expected to build such a large platform off touting her cringiest memories, but they just kept going viral. Collins is one of many creators capitalizing on their childhood cringe — building camaraderie with followers who went through similar experiences in their adolescent years. These types of videos are always fun and relatable to watch, but indicate a larger cultural pressure to make a spectacle out of daily life.
This pressure translates to big life events in particular — proposals, weddings, pregnancy announcements, etc. If you didn’t make a TikTok about it, did you even really get engaged? Many family creators have been accused of having children for the sole purpose of making content and garnering views. “I'm convinced a lot of y’all had kids just for content” said TikTok creator @Whomamagonecheckme2.
During my own wedding planning process, I at times felt like what should have been an intimate experience had become hijacked by commercialization. Brand-sponsored weddings have become increasingly commonplace, as well as hiring a wedding content creator to capture your day on social media. There are many brides who have become content creators themselves by documenting their own wedding planning process. It begs the question — when the wedding is over and the honeymoon is done, what do you have left to post about?
At the same time, many creators have started rolling back what they share — particularly when it comes to children. Creators with millions of followers like Maia Knight, Laura Fritz, and Bobbi Altoff have all stopped showing their children online (Altoff affectionately refers to her children as “Richard” and “Concrete” to keep their identities hidden) . While some have been applauded by their followers, many have been met with vitriol, backlash and a severe drop off in follower count. As parasocial relationships have intensified online in recent years, many followers are left feeling “owed” unfettered access to the lives of the creators they follow.
The creator economy has long been sold as an escape from the 9-5 grind, a way to bypass traditional capitalist constraints, and a true pursuit of self-fulfillment. But with the rise in creator burnout, many have started speaking more openly about the mental health costs of nonstop creation and the tyranny of social media algorithms. The pressure to commodify even the most basic everyday moments raises the question of if this new "always on" model of work — and by extension, life — is more detrimental than the corporate constraints we once sought to escape. And it seems the mounting pressures of the creator economy are drawing everyday users in as well. For both creators and “average” people, if we mine our most intimate selves for public consumption — whether it's leveraging cringey childhood moments for clout, or hosting a brand sponsored wedding — what's left for us?
There’s something to be said about showcasing the beauty of banality, of simply just existing. We’ve seen it with the proliferation of TikTok trends like humancore. But when it becomes capitalized, corporatized, commoditized — it can become diluted. There’s a need for more balance between privacy and publicity. But that’s easier said than done.
put it perfectly in her end of year post for — “there aren’t a lot of middle spaces on the Internet that manage to gracefully straddle that balance between private and public.”What do people hope to gain by oversharing — besides likes and followers? Perhaps the more human desire is rooted in being part of something bigger — whether that’s a collective cultural conversation, or something simple like participating in holiday gift hauls. But with today’s “extremely online” culture, it’s crucially important to be deliberate in which conversations we want to be a part of. It’s all about being more balanced and intentional with our energy online — both creators, and “average” internet users. A good New Year’s resolution.