Selfie Psychology: The Inner Workings of the Social Media Celebrity

An article from Psychology Today addresses the science behind why people would rather interact with computers than people in our homes, and how escaping into the digital world is experienced as a form of relaxation in contrast to the relative stress of live person-to-person interactions.

Is there a relationship between this scientific reality and photo-based or video-based social media celebrities? What if, instead of hiding behind a computer screen through text message interactions, people interacted by sharing/oversharing their lives through visual images of themselves. Would that provide greater false intimacy with users and celebrities? Would we feel like we’re truly those internet celebrities’ friends?

Selena Gomez from Wikimedia Commons

An article titled “You’re Not Really Friends with that Internet Celebrity” challenges the concept of digital friendship (like in cases of Selena Gomez with over a hundred-million followers). It basically explains that relationships are affected by four factors: emotional intensity, reciprocal actions (e.g. scratch my back for yours), time, and sharing personal information. In a social media relationship, celebrities can perform reciprocal actions by retweeting, hash tagging, or just posting something that feels like it relates to their follower. Also, celebrities are forced to create a public image of themselves that makes it feel like being “let in” on a secret. It’s a private life being brought into the limelight. And that kind of relationship can feel just as real as one you actually have. For example, when Kylie Jenner announced her firstborn, fans congratulated her with all the heartfelt effort of congratulating a loved one on the news.

Stormi, daughter of Kylie Jenner and Travis Scott from Wikimedia Commons

But Instagram, though a platform for social media celebrities to garner brand deals and sponsorships for digital modeling careers, is also the most toxic for young adults according to this Time magazine article. YouTube has the highest rating for happiness, while Instagram leads to teens feeling anxious, depressed, and having a fear of missing out on things/not being invited to events that their peers are going to. Positives like: self-expression, self-identity, and community-building are overshadowed by cries of narcissism and cyberbullying.

We’ve touched on the psychology of the average social media follower, but what of the social media celebrity? How do they factor into this entire digital conundrum? They are, after all, the content creators everyone’s watching.

Well, the answer might lie in our emotion economy.

Grindstaff and Murray say in “Reality Celebrity: Branded Affect and the Emotion Economy”  that “(the emotion economy) is geared toward cultivating, shaping, and displaying certain expressions of ordinariness (those coded as “real,” “authentic,” and “true”), the emotion economy is what feeds the thickening layer of ordinary celebrity in the contemporary media landscape.”

Basically, Grindstaff states that we live in an emotion economy where celebrities have to present themselves as “realer than real”. To do so, they have to amp up everything. They have to wear the flashiest clothes. When they cry, their emotions aren’t real unless they’re sobbing horribly. Their private life has to be worn on their sleeves, or else we’ll stop watching like it’s a messed-up, real-life version of the Truman Show.

Amanda Bynes 2009, from Wikimedia Commons

An article in The Guardian examines this emotion economy and commodification of digital human flesh by looking specifically at reality TV royalty: Kim Kardashian. It examines the case of the celebrity cult: celebrating people just for how famous they are, loving them only for their well-knowness. It villainizes the celebrity as being a narcissistic wretch who posts photos of themselves just to make money and revel in their own glory. But that’s not the way to go either. Villainizing a human being without wondering the psychological effects the social media platform also has on them is like judging someone without even striking up a conversation with them. It’s just unjust.

An article on Ethics in the News suggests that having social media for celebrities, and creating that branded image, just inflames prior mental illness/struggling addictions that the celebrities already had. Social media, in essence, just makes mental illness worse for celebrities trying to find their authentic selves. Think of how many articles say child stars have “gone bad” like too-ripe fruit instead of trying to write about child stars who have succeeded. The article takes the example of Amanda Bynes, a former child star, and suggests that when people respond negatively to her on social media, it is like cyberbullying from faceless masses. Just like Instagram, social media can still let celebrities be cyber-bullied just as much as teens are.

In conclusion, in a world where celebrities seem to be known for their fame, and where we adore people for revealing every single detail of their personal life to us, we acknowledge that we exist in multiple realities. The digital world, though existing in cyberspace, has a very real impact on our mental health, our relationships, and our psychology. Only by knowing this can we get insight into the emotion economy, and learn for the better.