THE WEIRD IRL PRESSURES OF HAVING A LARGE SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWING
Is there any way to start this without sounding like a dick…?
I have millions of social media followers!
No? Didn’t think so. But breezing past the awkward introduction, let’s chat a couple of weird real-life things that happen when your online friend-club gets a bit large.
First of all, you learn to be a lot more conscious of what you say. In many ways, this can be really irritating, when people read into things way more than they should or think everything is some secret hint. Heads up – I do not have the headspace, time or inclination to weave a tangled web of mysterious clues across the internet… and to be honest have nothing that exciting to leave clues about.
On the flip side, in a way I’m really grateful for how on it people are, because the fear about saying something accidentally offensive or wrong has actually pushed me to teach myself a lot more things about different people’s lives and experiences.
Inevitably along the way I’ve said things that were unintentionally not that cool, but I like to think I’m becoming more educated in a variety of issues. Of course, I don’t know if this would have happened anyway over the course of the past several years – who doesn’t learn a lot in their 20s – but I definitely think that social media and the variety that comes with a bigger audience has given me a massive shove in the right direction.
Aside from how it affects me, I sometimes have to think about how the madness of the online world affects my friends. Sometimes I’ll start following someone as I become friends with them and then get a confused message asking why they’ve had follow requests from sixteen different fake profiles of me, or why random people have started commenting on their pictures. Can be a bit awkward, because what do you say? I guess the instinct is to apologise, but then why would you apologise for following someone?
One of the weirdest things for me was feeling like I had to ask my boyfriend before I first posted a picture of us together. It’s uncomfortable to have to ask and then explain why I’m asking… but then it’s also quite hard to judge how someone is going to react to a bunch of other people reacting to them. Basically, there are a load of people reacting to things and you don’t know what will happen - but you know it’ll be something. It was more of a ‘do you think this is going well and we’ll be together for a while then?’ which is way more pressure than an Instagram photo is supposed to generate.
There are also some really great things about it too, of course. Sometimes people send me cool stuff or I get to go to parties with free booze, always a winner – but also having a lot of people listening to what you say comes in extra handy when you want to talk about things that are more important, like charity campaigns or spreading a bit more positivity around. Personally, I’m trying to become more comfortable with myself – this conscious self-love is never more strongly tested than when you’re on holiday, which I luckily have been for the past two weeks, and spend your days in a bikini with no make-up on. Not a recipe for confidence (or at least not for me… and my butt). In my head though, I’m thinking that I need to challenge myself to be more like the body-positive people that I myself follow online – being more honest about what features and flaws we all have is a good thing for everyone, and I think knowing that a lot of young girls are following me means I feel more responsibility to be a good role model in terms of practising the self-acceptance that I would encourage in others.