Performing personhood has perhaps never been as panoptical, and top of mind, as it is today. Social-media platforms prioritize the fastidious maintenance and monitoring of online personas, creating spaces where identity construction is central to the user experience. But how is one to authentically represent themselves online? Unlike offline reality, where spontaneous and unrehearsed human expression is not only possible but inevitable, a life online is always reminded of its own artifice. To post is to calculate, deliberate, manipulate—performance is built into the experience, whether the poster is aware of this dynamic or not. This explains why unflinchingly earnest content rarely flies on social media; does the poster not see that simply by posting, they are revealing themselves to be image-conscious and vain? A chief reason that “virtue signalling” became so hotly contested in the mid-twenty-tens was not just because it was in bad taste to express passive, entirely gestural solidarity with a political issue but because the broader mores of social-media use had begun to shift dramatically. It was no longer normative to post a photo of your breakfast, or to write an Instagram caption about how much you loved your mom on International Women’s Day. Suddenly, any type of unironic persona-forward material entered the hall of mirrors of performativity criticism. These days, users can avoid being labelled as performative by imbuing content with the metatextual awareness that they are, in some way, aware of the performance. But it is still impossible to fully ignore the spectre of performativity on social media, despite the apps’ assertion that they are organic breeding grounds for genuine human expression. (Instagram’s mission statement claims its purpose is to bring “you closer to the people and the things you love”; TikTok says that its platform allows users to “unleash their creativity and share authentic stories.”)
Conceptions of authenticity and sincerity have dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment, a period in which Immanuel Kant argued that individuals should be free to pursue knowledge as a means to better understand the human condition, and thus their authentic selves. (“The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude!,” Kant wrote. “Have courage to use your own understanding.”) Kant’s belief that “a constant critique of the world around us and of ourselves,” per the scholar Anita Seppä, afforded individuals the ability to “reach a more mature stage of existence and individual autonomy.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau was more sensitive to the mystical nature of existence, contending that genuine selfhood emerged from within and was not entirely relational; the true self was a natural, fixed thing that could in turn be malleably expressed out into the world. Few philosophies speak as saliently to our current culture of self-absorption as this post-Enlightenment obsession with authenticity; the guiding promise of the American project is to free individual humans from undue constraint and control, allowing them to discover their true selves and do anything that they put their mind to, regardless of their religion, race, gender, or class background. This promise, despite centuries of unequal fulfillment, still fuels the sputtering engine of American mythology.
Such an absolutist vision of individualism, however, undermines the systemic conditions that inform our relationship with the world, and ourselves. If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.
In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner.
