The Slippery Slope Of Branding Yourself On Instagram
By Carolyn Shields
There’s no denying that smartphones have rapidly changed our lives. Sherry Turkle, MIT professor and clinical psychologist, goes so far as to admit that the age of the cyborg has actually arrived — we literally struggle to get around, to communicate, to make friends, and to pass time without our cellphones. They might as well be attached to our limbs. But that’s old news, right?
Marc Barnes, the blogger behind Bad Catholic, mused in his essay, Christians Shouldn’t Use Smartphones: “Technologies tend to change the world along with them, and this nullifies their once-marvelous effects...the world is currently being made in the image of the smartphone; that, already, whatever godlike capacities the things once gave us have already become dreary necessities.”
A similar comparison can be drawn to social media, specifically Instagram. Our conversations have quickly advanced from the addictive qualities of Instagram and the highlight reel it has become. We’ve started addressing the phenomenon of adolescence happening twice - online and off - and the struggle to reconcile the two; the result often being a "finsta," or a fake Instagram. Not to mention the conversations around the mental health concerns and the bullying issues that can accompany Web 2.0.
But thank God we had those conversations! Thank God we still continue to have those conversations because it means that issues are being addressed. Sometimes Instagram even responds with initiatives such as its new anti-bullying feature launched in December 2019. In a post-Christian, techno-centric world, we need to keep this discourse at the forefront of our advance into the new millennium.
And so, we have moved into Chapter Two of Instagram, and as we tackle the first hits of living second lives in a third-party platform, new issues inevitably evolve.
The first one?
WE CREATED A WHIPLASH
The whiplash was a response that came swiftly following the conversations around the danger of how Instagram is solely a highlight reel of one’s life. It looked like this: In response, people began sharing intimate moments previously confided in a journal, to a friend, or to a therapist. Now they are broadcast to the world, often with tears and raw, emotionally charged testimonials.
To put it simply, we solved one problem (tackling high-light reels) by creating another (live-streaming our “low-light” reels).
Christ told St. Faustina that there are some things so intimate that they are only meant to be shared between the two of them; not even the angels need to know about it. It calls to mind a buzzword of the 2010s - authenticity - and it begs the question: How far should we go in our efforts to be authentic? And is this quality...overrated?
In efforts to be real, to build empathy, to tackle taboos, we exchanged one extreme (high lights) for another (low lights), and in doing so we created a whiplash effect.
But the good news is the Catholic Church isn’t afraid of the polar spectrum. We’ll explain this in the next section.
YOUR LIFE BECOMES A BRAND
“Hey guys,” people have been singing, “I’m working on my content for next month and want to hear about what you want to see more of from me. Drop your suggestions below!”
Branding isn’t just about the content you share, or just the stylistic choices (how much white space will be on your grid, which filters you use, your tone). “Those are way less important things about branding and are not as close to the core when you think about why you exist, how you operate, what’s your culture and those kinds of things,” shares Jason Jensen, the CEO of Glass Canvas, an award winning full-service agency that specializes in helping faith-based organizations unlock their potential.
Instead, as Glass Canvas shares, branding starts with “why,” and that “why” will determine everything else. Wesley Bancrofft, Brand Strategist & Product Thinker, shared that knowing our “why” halts purposeless action and gives us radical direction.
But if businesses struggle to understand this, why should you?
It’s important to avoid marketing terminology when it comes to expressing ourselves on Instagram. Using jargon like “brand” and “content” might sound cool, but it reinforces the widespread belief that our lives can be quantified, that we are a product to be bought and sold, that we exist to be accessed. And clearly there’s major issues with this, from viewing others as objects to devaluing life when it cannot contribute (at its extreme: abortion).
To be blunt, we become disposable. We are reduced to a number, to an account, to a bot.
We need to stop marketing our lives because it’s already been paid for, yet so many of us are trying to fit our entire lives into a nice little box in efforts of obsessive control. It’s limiting our freedom of expression (bad) while also narrowing our focus (good).
The issue is easy to see here, but not easy to solve.
For starters, didn’t the saints kind of do this when they denied everything and picked up their cross? Their brand was denying everything for the ultimate Good.
They also had to make choices on how they would share their lives, but the key difference here is they weren’t trying to define it themselves. They pursued the great Why, and everything else fell into place. They didn’t allow others to shape their expression, nor did they rely solely on themselves.
A lie our culture constantly falls for is that we are self-made and that we can determine who we are. We try our hardest to do this online, but the sole fact that you are someone's daughter debunks this myth. Your identity is molded by others and not because you ask their input on what content to share.
The saints didn’t agonize over how they were being perceived. They didn’t care so much about striking the right balance. They cared about how God saw them.
So should we.
We shouldn't worry about striking the right balance of every facet of life — both IRL and URL — about posting a photo of your Budweiser after a photo of your rosary, of being equal parts happy, embracing sadness and being real about it, showcasing beauty but also the ordinary.
Living your life isn’t about balance. If it was, we would all go crazy trying to strike the right balance.
Bishop Baron touches on this when he cites G.K. Chesterton’s love of bipolar extremism in To Light A Fire:
“Chesterton didn’t like this rather than that, nor did he like a compromise between the two. He always said the Church likes red and it likes white, but it has a healthy hatred of pink. Further, it doesn’t want red alone and it doesn’t want white alone; it wants them both at full intensity. His ground for that was the incarnation: Jesus is not a little bit human and a little bit divine; he’s fully human and fully divine. He believed that this peculiar logic imbues all of Catholicism, and he was dead right.”
Don’t let statistics tell you what people want from you, which side of the scale to tip more toward. Trying to compartmentalize your life on an account and off the grid is most likely going against a holistic approach that we are called to own.
The title "Influencer" in and of itself is reason to draw concern. Where there’s power, there’s a spiritual battle. These new celebrities share their opinions to their hundreds of thousands of followers, and the results can be dangerous; such as when a misinformed Kim Kardashian publicly endorsed a morning sickness pill without mentioning the side effects. As the lines blur between marketing and personal accounts, it's hard to determine if the influencer truly supports the product or is simply doing it to earn money.
Think of Judas. (And, no, we're not comparing all influencers to Judas). Because Judas was one of Jesus’ closest friends, it is easy to imagine he held a certain amount of influence over others; however, he sold that influence for thirty pieces of silver.
Our attention and our time is the most valuable thing in today’s economy. There’s a battle out there for it. Don’t sell it to the person who shouts the loudest or who has the strongest algorithm.
Sometimes the greatest influences out there are the ones that barely speak a word, such as the Blessed Mother.
At the World Youth Day Rally in 2019, Pope Francis asked: "Are you willing to be an 'influencer' like Mary, who dared to say, 'Let it be done?’ Only love makes us more human and fulfilled; everything else is a pleasant but useless placebo."
CONCLUSION
The purpose of Chapter Two is not to present tidy solutions to new issues that arise as conversations advance (whether they be about Instagram, abortion, or a plethora of other topics that need to move on from old arguments). It’s about identifying how the revolutions are changing, introducing the new characters, and bringing it all to the table so that we continue discussing it.
The conversations around Instagram are quickly evolving, but if we are to thrive in this new Digital Era, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve.
