Performativity on Social media

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  Posted by Ellyn Rolleston Keith on November 8, 2016 at 12:15 pm

  In her article “Their Lives Are So Much Better Than Ours!”, Jenna Mahay discusses how websites for customized greeting cards aid users in constructing social identity. With style emphasized over message, these cards are “powerful symbolic expressions, in crystallized form, of the sender’s self.” The greeting card websites promote the “normative idea of happiness itself” as youth, affluence, and traditional family structures, leaving little room for those not fitting the 2-kids-and-white-picket-fence model.

  Mahay limits her discussion to holiday greeting cards and says that for many, the yearly holiday card is the only communication families have with their “extended social network” and therefore the holiday card is a “primary means of performing the family’s social identity.” After reading this, I had to check and see what year Mahay’s article was published–I was surprised to see it was 2013. I expected it to have been earlier, because although Mahay’s analysis is solid, today it is by no means limited to a yearly holiday card.

  Living in the social media age has resulted in a marked change in when and how we can form our identities. Having near-constant access to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, users can create and control their image with camera filters and inspirational quotes. In contrast to the “lowercase-d discourse” referenced in Androutsopoulos, a discourse that is “language-in-use or stretches of meaning,” our identities online allow us to engage in “capital-D discourse.” Androutsopoulos describes this discourse as a “socially situated and institutionally regulated language practice with a reality constructing capacity.”

  We all consciously construct our identities online to some degree–we don’t Instagram the bad hair days or tweet about the time we screwed up a work assignment. Social media has allowed us to practice performativity at an unprecedented level, and it seems to me that only now does it have a negative association. Before we had the ability to construct our identities to such an extent, the notion of performativity was (in my opinion) a linguistic observation without such emotion attached to it. Now, it is recognized in mainstream society. The extent to which people can construct their identities online has lead to the concept of FOMO (fear of missing out). Although no one’s life is as perfect as it can seem online, the impression is still made, and the impact has been shown to cause depression and anxiety in social media users–both on the sides of people looking at social media (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-08/wellbeing-survey-finds-teens-feeling-left-out-on-social-media/6921780) and on the sides of those who work exceptionally hard to create their social media identity, as in the case of Australian teen Essena O’Neill (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-03/instagram-personality-essena-o’neill-reveals-social-media-truth/6908270.)

  There is nothing inherently wrong with identity construction on social media, as long as we are able to remember that it is a construction of identity and not the embodiment. Comedian Celeste Barber recreates celebrity Instagram photos that are a fun realization of this (https://www.instagram.com/celestebarber/). A similar example is Sociality Barbie (https://www.instagram.com/socalitybarbie/)–a quite literal construction of reality!

• Cecelia Cutler (She/her)

  Member

  November 8, 2016 at 1:01 pm

  Bearing in mind that performativity has to produce some effects on others (Butler 1990)(e.g. acceptance, valorization, fear, jealousy, etc.) it seems clear from the phenom of FOMO, and responses like depression, and anxiety, that social media representations of the self are indeed performative.

  <span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.</span>