The art of staging our lives on social networks.

I started using social networks more than ten years ago.
Like many people, I started with Facebook, then Twitter, and finally Instagram.
In the beginning, I was really over-sharing my life.
In other words, I posted a lot of uninteresting things.
Over the years, I realised that these things should be kept “private”.
And I started using social networks only for my work and the causes I fight for.

But in the last few years I have started to observe things that have fascinated and saddened me at the same time.
In fact, I have come to realise that we spend our time performing on social networks (by using the word “we”, I mean some people including myself, not everyone).
Staging ourselves and, above all, making and posting a selection of what happens to us. We select the best events, the best places to be, the best looks, etc and we obviously present them in the best possible way.
Indeed, if you take the time to scroll through social networks for even 3 minutes, you’ll see that most of your contacts only post about the positive things that are happening in their lives. You’ll see posts like “My baby is walking!”, “I’m getting married!”, “I’m having a great night out with my friends at a cool bar”, “I’ve just bought a house”, “I was chosen for this job!”, “My work has been selected for this exhibition”… It’s a world where everything is fine and good. A wonderful Sims world where only death reaches us.
It’s a fake world.
You log in, the curtains open, so get ready to smile!
I’m talking about staging and art because, for me, from the moment we compose, we become performers. We think our relationship with social networks in this way: showing the best, wearing a mask then going backstage to become ourselves again.
Coming back to our real life, once the computer is turned off.

Is it wrong to say on social networks that we’re not ok, that we’re going through difficult times? I guess it is.
Otherwise, why don’t we do it?
Because we’re looking for approval, attention and recognition. We seek to please others and, more importantly, we want others to envy us.
We want people to believe that we live a perfect life.
And who is going to like it if we tell our contacts that we are not feeling well, that we’re going through a difficult time like a breakup, a failure at work, a depression?
Even when we have our close friends in our contact list, we still pretend that everything is fine. We have to show positive content even though in reality we feel like crying every day.
It’s a lie.
It‘s like people who don’t like to watch sad films because it reminds them too much of reality. They prefer films in which everything is fine.
You have to make people believe that everything is fine in the best of all possible worlds.

I say it again: I don’t judge because I belong to that category of people who stage themselves, who select the best of their life for social networks.
For example, I often take far too many selfies before I consider one “good enough to be posted”. And it always makes me laugh because I tell myself that I don’t really look like that in reality.
Yep, it’s true: I don’t live 24 hours a day with my mouth slightly open, a nice outfit, make-up, a hand in my hair and I don’t live in a Vscocam world either.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite: you’re more likely to see me with dark circles under my eyes, wearing no make-up, my hair barely combed, and an outfit more comfortable than pretty.
In a more singular context, when I publish posts announcing my selection in exhibitions, do you think that I talk about my failures, the rejections I receive, all my false hopes? Of course not.
However, I have many more failures than successes.
Besides, when I am congratulated, in my head I often say to myself
“if only you knew…”.
Yes, it’s true: I only show the positive side of my jobs.
I don’t show how hard it is to keep up, how I sometimes can’t sleep because I think of all the difficulties that my jobs generate.
I don’t want to talk about it because I don’t feel like I can complain: I chose to be a visual artist and a freelance photographer, it wasn’t forced on me. I think that I’ve really been influenced by this culture where you’re not supposed to talk publicly about your weaknesses.

It’s quite strange because you would think that with a screen separating you from others, it would be easier to open up.
But it’s the opposite. We prefer people to see and love us through a composite image rather than to see what we really are, including our weaknesses and problems. But, and I think you‘ll agree with me, it’s foolish to seek people’s approval on selected and fake images.

Moreover, I think that showing our failures means recognizing our humanities. It’s accepting that we’re not perfect.
And it can also do good because it can also resonate with other people.
Last month, I published an article on the assault I lived 7 years ago.
It wasn’t easy to write, and my heart was pounding when I clicked the “share” button. I felt like I was leaving a page of my diary on the internet. Even though I knew that this article wasn’t going to be read by hundreds of people, I had this feeling of giving myself away.
And I quickly received messages that have been really helpful.
They made me realise that I wasn’t alone. People told me about my courage, some congratulated me. I didn’t expect these messages and it really helped me.
It wasn’t the first time I talked about something difficult on social networks. I remember the day a cat I had been looking after died and the guilt I felt. I was so upset that I spoke about it immediately and many of my contacts comforted me.

I’m not saying that we should say everything on social networks.
We must never forget the limit between public and private life.
But I think we need to step back and learn to look at them from a different perspective.
They can be very harmful: imagine a person who sees most of their contacts pretending to have a great life, won’t they feel sad, depressed if they see that nothing good is happening to them?
This can be bad for these people, but also for us, the people who stage our lives, because it can end up becoming a real obsession.
We’ll constantly tell ourselves that we have to show the best and we’ll never dare to show when we’re not doing well.
It’s even possible to see that in order to embody the perfect life on social networks, some people (un)consciously build their real life around this purpose. Like going to a place to take a picture of yourself there and being able to say “I was there” on social networks, even if you didn’t really want to be there. Isn’t that sad?
As if social networks have come to influence, control and dictate the lives of many users.

But in my experience and what I’ve also seen for some of my contacts, it’s also through these networks that you can get help.
So why not be more honest and less artificial?
No matter how hard I look, I don’t understand this culture of selection.
I didn’t read articles about this subject because I didn’t want to be influenced. I only wanted to share my opinion. And deep down, I think that this staging is linked to standards. Indeed, for the last ten years or so, I think we have created through social networks norms that many of us submit to.
And just like in real life, if we don’t submit to them, we risk being looked down upon. Maybe if we had refused the idea of creating an avatar in the first place, things would have been different.

Everyone has their own use of social networks and I’m certainly not the right person to say how people should use them.
But I think that in this world, and especially in a time of limited interaction, we should all take a moment to think about how we use these networks, how we may be perceived and how we perceive what we see on social networks.