Captured by the Audience

How do we define ourselves, asks Gurwinder Bhogal? Sure, we have internal drivers and ideas, but we also temper that with feedback from others. Are we overdoing it? Is it acceptable? Are we fitting in or becoming outcasts? This approach made sense since time immemorial when the feedback we got was from a small set of people with whom we interacted regularly.

 

But in the age of the Internet and social media, that approach is not working, argues Bhogal. We now get feedback from people we barely know. Even the famous people we listen to online, well, what they say online may not be “indicative of who they are”.

 

Who doesn’t like to be popular? But popularity online carries a new risk:

“They often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.”

Very quickly, they find they need to stick to that caricature – any deviations lose them followers, and lead to accusations that they sold out. At this point, Bhogle says, the individual has been “captured by the audience”.

 

He cites a few extreme examples to help understand the direction in which things head, not to say everyone goes to these extremes. Nikocado Avocado “eats online”, i.e., he posts videos of himself eating various things. For whatever reason, it caught on, and soon he was being pushed by his audience’s comments – eat as much as you physically can. Now he is grossly overweight, eating the most unhealthy stuff imaginable – surely not what he intended to be. Or take Louis Mensch who posted articles on Russia possibly having had a hand in Trump’s election (this was before that theory went mainstream). She became very popular online, but it also created an expectation – she was now expected to report mindblowing accusations all the time. Inevitably, her theories got whackier. But even those whacky theories had followers, who then gave her ideas on yet more crazy theories to pursue. A vicious loop had been set off.

 

This then, says Bhogle, is the ultimate risk with online fame:

“This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be.”