Terra Incognita

EF typing thread on Dr. Ramani. There are also a couple of her videos on this thread.

I was born in 1992, so I remember a time before the Internet. It wasn't until maybe 3rd or 4th grade that I started using a computer in school. In middle school, we were given laptops for both personal use and for schoolwork, but social media wasn't really a thing yet. Back then, I spent my time looking up obscure music, films, reading bad Vampire Chronicles fan-fiction, and filling my laptop with all kinds of viruses because I used Limewire to download everything. But even then, I was developing body image issues due to TV and films and I can imagine if I were a pre-teen or teenager now, my body image issues would be even worse.

In high school, MySpace was a huge thing, but that quickly died out as everyone migrated to Facebook. I never made a MySpace and I didn't get a Facebook until I was 25, but when I was 18, I had a Tumblr, and that was the first time I ever created a social media profile, and I was addicted to it. I could easily post blog about my interests and write about anything that came to mind. I remember the dopamine high I got from each like, comment, reblog, and follow on my blog. I went as far as to post risque photos of myself (without showing my face though) and garnering the attention of both men and women from a wide range of ages. I was always self-absorbed and this medium rewarded my self-absorption. But the uptick in narcissism came with more self-consciousness and self-objectification.

I think one of the most damning thing for me was comparing myself to other women who were close to my age. In the past, it was one thing to compare yourself to celebrities because everyone knew they were airbushed, photoshopped, and have the resources to look good. But in the late 2000s and early 2010s, you were starting to see the emergence of the social media influencer and you were beginning to see certain people and certain types of people being circulated within these spaces. They were purported to be "regular people" but they always looked amazing and did amazing things, and while I didn't follow the trends, I followed other women on tumblr, just regular women, and they always looked gorgeous on top of being genuinely cool people. The proximity between our ordinariness, in terms of us not being celebrities and models, and the perceived perfection (of course they were photoshopped as well) of these women made me more self-conscious, image-conscious, and hyper-competitive.

Overtime, I do find myself to be so viscerally turned off by the image economy of social media, but at the same time, I'm not unteethered to it. It's hard not to view myself within the framework of the image economy. To tie it back to Peeping Tom, I have experienced the almost libidinal force of being the voyuer, satisfying my pleasure of viewing other people, and it's not just about enjoyment; there's also morbid curiosity, masochistic flagellation, and viewing that incurs my wrath but God forbid I stop. I've also experienced the high the exhibitionist gets from being looked at and that didn't end in my tumblr days.

-Sarah- wrote: ↑Wed Oct 13, 2021 10:49 am
But in the late 2000s and early 2010s, you were starting to see the emergence of the social media influencer and you were beginning to see certain people and certain types of people being circulated within these spaces. They were purported to be "regular people" but they always looked amazing and did amazing things, and while I didn't follow the trends, I followed other women on tumblr, just regular women, and they always looked gorgeous on top of being genuinely cool people. The proximity between our ordinariness, in terms of us not being celebrities and models, and the perceived perfection (of course they were photoshopped as well) of these women made me more self-conscious, image-conscious, and hyper-competitive.

Well, this is one of the reasons I told Anthony I don't think it's the spectacle element that captured the public with Gabby Petito. Not surprisingly for anyone who knows me well, I've found the public's reaction to this play-by-play true crime case more interesting and significant than the case itself and I've read a good few long comment threads about it.

The public is genuinely concerned and appalled at the discrepancy between the image Gabby and Brian manufactured and the reality behind it and want it to live on as a cautionary tale. So there is a paradox of influencers and their followers cautioning against, essentially, the toxicity of themselves. If you really want to stretch an analogy, it's like the end of Peeping Tom when Mark watches himself. Except of course it's not the end. It's going to take a lot of ends before we start to get out of this mess.

tbcd

#Gabby Petito