curation fixation

a culture's obsession with being perceived

The first screen name you ever have is your first time getting dressed for the world. The amount of numbers you add after Soccergirl, and the use of an underscore when typing in Angel_Baby, are all meant to evoke something. Growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s, these screen names of mine progressed alongside the explosion of social media as a concept. My AIM username was Olliesangel555, named for my cat. When I got to middle school, it felt babyish, so I upgraded to xo_glam0rous_ox. By the time I was in high school, I had an Instagram account and a Tumblr, both of which were named something as nebulous and provocative as I wanted people to think I was.

When I asked for my 6th-grade boyfriend’s screen name, I was puzzled to hear him reply ‘handsquid’. Screen names were usually something simple like a pet’s name or an after-school activity, and it painted a completely different picture than what I was signing up for when I agreed to go to the fall dance together. It didn’t put me off completely, and I came to crave when this name appeared online. In person, we were shy and awkward, but online, our brief relationship bloomed under our alter egos.

handsquid: i’m sorry I didnt dance with you tonight.

handsquid: i wanted to say you looked beautiful.

xo_glam0rous_ox: <3

Whether you like it or not, your choices online say a lot about you. It’s the cerulean monologue from The Devil Wears Prada on steroids. We live in a culture where we are asked to pitch ourselves on a daily basis, to make an account for every purchase we make, and to add a profile picture to anything involving ad revenue. Even the laid-back, private IG account of a man who never posts has a tiny visible profile picture with which he announces himself to the world.

We’ve been given the freedom to speak our minds online, but with that comes the burden of speaking it often. Everything you put online is meant for public consumption, and you must have enough for the masses, or you’ll be cut from the algorithm. People are understandably tired of it. Even Substack, where we come to escape this fatigue, is susceptible to the powers of the curation fixation. Substack is a platform that nourishes the creative above the creator, but we still churn out similar article after similar article on girlhood (you can read mine here, by the way) to feed the machine. Is the need to eat up whatever content we can eating us alive?

A small level of curation still existed back when Facebook was king, but it’s nothing like what we see today. I never considered how something would look in a Facebook album like I do now organizing my Instagram carousels. Even the wave of casual posting cannot free itself from performance. Cautiously sandwiching a blurry selfie between a picture of a garbage can and a shaky photo of your breakfast is just as intentional as applying valencia to your vacation pics.

The original Facebook status prompt was ‘Jane Doe is: ____,’ and it was updated in 2007 to a simple ‘What’s on your mind?’. Thought-provoking, to be sure, perhaps a radical gift of authority and individualism given to the Facebook user, but lest we forget, the entire thing was built as a hot or not platform by a chronically online nerd. There is no ethical curation under Zuckerberg.

Your online identity becomes your entire identity when everything exists online. I saw this when I became distant from my real life, opting for Tumblr as a teenager and then again when COVID canceled my plans as an adult. I fell in love with creating content then, but it was also a mirrored box in which I was trapped. When I am at my most depressed, I can safely retreat to the corners of the internet to lick my wounds and be seen exactly the way I choose to be seen. My Instagram, my proxy. My Tumblr myself.

Millennials and Gen-Z have always found comfort in curation, especially when creating community. However dizzying the speed, the reason we jump from Vanilla Girl Aesthetic to Indie Sleaze is because we are searching for the golden ticket. The one thing that is pre-packaged, easily defined, and fits us like a glove, so we can put it on and tell the world, ‘When you see me, I want you to see this.’ The older generations have mocked this obsession with labeling, but to me, it’s a social strategy.

“It’s a form of SEO marketing,” I told my parents once. We need as many labels as we can get, so we have something to search and find others like us.

Is it equal parts tool and crutch when the thing that brings you closer to others also keeps you from forming individual taste? Is our obsession with being perceived, even when making memes about wishing not to be perceived, ultimately our downfall? I got an email from Hinge recently stating they would no longer show your Instagram feed in your Hinge profile, and my blood went cold. How else will potential matches know I’m exactly the right balance of witty artist and good-time girl? I re-curate my already curated Hinge profile to compensate for this depletion.

The Sephora kid of it all, the constant phrenological exams, TikTok is rife with the pressure to curate. It’s a funhouse mirror of my childhood on Tumblr. All my energy went into finding the perfect Soft Grunge images to reblog. Typically, this would be a bruised knee and a schoolgirl skirt or cigarette smoke clouding a pink-haired head. It was also collar bones and thigh gaps and an assurance that if I post enough pale, gaunt faces, I will become one too.

I’m thankful I wasn’t a teenager when your online presence was measured with virality. Most of the time, it didn’t even have to include your face. The most outward-facing parts of the internet were places like Twitter, where you’d go viral for quippy lines or interesting stories. Of course, image mattered in some areas, but Facebook and Instagram were primarily for classmates and family members. There wasn’t the same cycle of record self, post self, read comments about self from thousands of strangers. Still, as a teenager, I would have prayed for something like this to exist. I was obsessed with how I looked and what others thought about it.

When I was 15, I found my way to a subreddit I thought held the answers to all my questions. This subreddit promised to inform whoever posted their face, once and for all if they were ugly or not. To get this kind of answer from an anonymous audience of strangers seemed like the perfect way to know for sure. Poking around the page now, which has half a million members, it’s still a place people go to answer this burning question. You also see this on TikTok when people ask for brutally honest glow-up advice. We can’t help but ask our cruelest critics what we should think about ourselves.

My memory of the subreddit was like finding a back door to the internet. I posted my selfie and was embarrassed when all the comments came back mean. Not because they were insulting my looks, but because they were insulting my decision to post there. Apparently, I was not ugly enough to ask this sect of the internet, but even though that should’ve been the validation I needed, it left me feeling wanting. I wanted to see myself in someone’s description, not to be dismissed entirely. I was desperate to be defined outside of my bubble. I wish I could say that this subreddit is on the decline, but it seems even more popular today. A quick scroll showed me more young women like I was, smiling earnestly into the camera and asking what they’re doing wrong.

Curation can make you sick, but it can also be relaxing. Instead of making selects on a stack of nearly identical selfies, I try to spend my time on inspiration platforms like Pinterest. There, I can activate the hunter-gatherer part of my brain. I search for a particular aesthetic and hope to God that I recognize a piece of myself in the results.

I click on my perfect pin and add it to my board. Now it is mine. It has come home with me. It hangs with the rest of my online presence in a closet I can try on occasionally. It looks just like me and it will answer the door for me when I’m not home. I keep it until the shine wears off, and I can’t see my reflection in it anymore.