Why Must I Be the Hottest Girl Studying in Bird Library?
Image via @Unsplash
Picture this: you’re hot-girl walking down the promenade, airpods in, determined to find an ideal study spot in Schine, when all of a sudden there’s a tap on your shoulder and a tiny microphone being shoved in front of your face. You try to pick up speed, but it’s no use; you are now on the receiving end of a man-on-the-street interview and your interviewer has just asked you what song you’re listening to. It is here where you must confront the true horror of the situation. You are now forced to publicly admit to willingly listening to “Somebody That I Used To Know” Glee Cast Version.
If this scenario makes you nauseous (or at least makes you less inclined to crank up your guilty pleasure playlist), you’re not alone. In fact, it seems as if social media apps like BeReal and man-on-the-street style interviews like the previously mentioned are making the idea of perception more and more inescapable. We’re seeing each other in our most vulnerable, authentic moments, and experiencing pressure to make them palatable, if not inspirational, for public consumption.
BeReal may be intended to trade the commonplace façades of social media in favor of spontaneity, but we've all been guilty of praying the BeReal notification goes off during the most interesting, productive, or aesthetically pleasing time of our day. Every possibility of someone asking what song you’re listening to serves as motivation to plug some super underground indie band that will prompt commenters to write “omg taste!!!” and “someone find yellow t-shirt girl” when the video is inevitably posted to a corner of the internet where the Glee cast album would be considerably less well received.
Even when we’re alone, we’re thinking about how we’re perceived by others, polishing even our most personal moments, ensuring that even our private goings on are suitable for public perception, consumption, and hopefully admiration.
The Instagram account @lookoutsyracuse, which posted its first collection of “fits around campus” on October fifth, serves as the newest addition to SU’s social media panopticon. It’s reinforcing the “please look at me and think I’m cool but assume everything about this is candid” ideology. SU Freshman Haley admits that being featured on the account was “a bit jarring,” since she was not aware that she was photographed and did not have a say in “whether or not [she] was posted.” We have no choice in whether or not we are perceived, but, new, increasingly invasive avenues for perception are providing us with more and more ways to stress over how we can control the narrative.
This exhausting, ever-present audience forces you to ask the real questions, like if the amorphous face of The Internet™ were to see me right now, looking super mysterious whilst sipping an iced chai in the basement of Bird Library…would they think I was hot? Would they want to know what super obscure song I’m listening to??? And most importantly, would they beg for a fit check????