The era of social media and selfie culture can easily be summarized in some of the lyrics in Lexie Liu’s 2021 song ALGTR in which she says, “Addiction to perfection stabbing me in the eyeball, I cannot change my preset identity,” and “Trapping us inside monitors, you macho man.”
If anything, the popularization of Snapchat in the years 2014–2016 started the spike in the need to take pretty pictures to present oneself to the world: given for the first time ever an avenue to tell one’s story through pictures, free from the reins and structure of Instagram and the freedom to share said pictures among a specific group of friends, with some sort of a transient feeling hinged onto it with the time limit on the “snap stories”, as they were called. Even the most “candid” photos were taken meticulously, dog filter upon dog filter as teenagers aimed to present themselves in living the best life possible. The ideal life, as it was within my small high school population, was ladened with late-night Snapchat stories from nightclubs and houses drinking the night away as they flashed their Asian glow underneath the flashing lights with, of course, a dog filter.
This was the unspoken culture I grew up with in high school. Taking pictures became some sort of a sport: choosing the perfect angle, the perfect filter––you can see your acne from one side, do you know how to use FaceTune––curating a somewhat separate online persona in order to perform an illusion that one is living a life different from the one being lived. Paired with the growing insecurity of a teenager going through puberty, how one presents oneself on social media becomes more and more important as time passes on. However, this is not an accurate representation of the self. In more ways than one, it’s merely a performance. We become multiple actors when taking into consideration the degree at which we aim to present ourselves as vainly as possible: Instagram calls for a perfect, calculated picture; Twitter is mainly an avenue for a more realistic self-portrayal; Snapchat is a mixture of both. In a way, we become three different people online.
Though pictures tell a thousand words, a highly calculated selfie with a nice filter hardly ever says anything beyond what’s shown: look at my face, look at how nice I’m having it right now. As something purely physical, the obsession with perfection becomes more and more prevalent as we strive to show ourselves in the best light at all times, the presentation of oneself on social media in the form of selfies becomes intertwined with the obsession to present oneself close to perfection in real life as well.
But such is the reality of social media, perfect selfies or not. There is always a hint of falsifying, if not hiding away, parts of our identities in order to present ourselves online in a way that’s most appealing to us. Therefore, as Lexie Liu puts it, “So what if I’m fictional?”