Mobility is the main feature of these days: we are always connected; thanks to social media, we can see what our friends, our colleagues or our schoolmates are doing - whenever and wherever.
Obviously, we share only our best moments on Facebook &co; the result: a daily hype of optimism and enthusiasm, which has a deep impact on the perception of ourselves and our lives. Have you ever thought: my life sucks, while scrolling someone’s Instagram?
That’s exactly the FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, the anxiety to be social, to get likes and to show the best side of you.
That’s exactly the FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, the anxiety to be social, to get likes and to show the best side of you.
Even Barbie - yes, the famous doll - has more followers than you! No joke: look for Socality Barbie and you will find the profile of a perfect hipster Instagramer, sharing pictures of her breakfast, her amazing holidays or her intellectual reading with poetic quotes and a massive use of hashtags; if you want to be social, take notes! It is the idea of a photographer who wanted to make fun of users’ homologation: brilliant!
Of course this idyllic image is completely fake, and it could happen that when you get tired of being fake, you decide to quit social media: it is the case of Essena O’Neill - the Australian model who broke free of her addiction to likes and comments by her followers.
(For the record, her action were too dramatic and she kept her Instagram up with edited captions, yes, but still: she’s accumulating followers. Was the “social media rehab” fake too? Draw your own conclusion).
(For the record, her action were too dramatic and she kept her Instagram up with edited captions, yes, but still: she’s accumulating followers. Was the “social media rehab” fake too? Draw your own conclusion).
When it comes to models and fashion industry, the pair being social and money is directly proportional. Casting directors will ask for models or influencer with a huge amount of followers to reach their audience, whether actual or not. And to get the best, you have to pay a lot: the three most highly ranked supers on social - Cara Delevingne, Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid - are currently valued between $125,000 and $300,000 for a single post across their portfolio: they earn more per post than their normal day rate!
Posting pictures of their every day lives, they monetize their images and create a personal digital brand: the more followers a model has, the more they can be appealing to the fashion industry, which can use their social profiles as advertising channels. For this new breed of models, the fact of being social is sufficient to be considered talented: imagine what Kendall Jenner - with a followership of about 65 million - is capable of!