Talking in specific terms of Instagram and being on, it is one of the easier apps to be on and “on” because it is mostly visual content, rather than word-heavy, link-based posts that require brain power. It is a seemingly mindless form of social media where you can scroll through your personal feed for hours, move on to your search feed and scroll on that for even more hours, and by that time you can come back to your personal feed again to look at the new content that has been posted in all those hours, and then once again go back to the search feed to look at even more content; the cycle is endless depending on your level of do nothingness or dedication to become Instagram cultured at 2 am in your bed whilst eating a pint of ice cream and watching Netflix simultaneously.
However, being “on” doesn’t always mean you are connected with those who are also “on”. I find myself being both on and “on”, but I don’t necessarily find myself feeling connected or “connected” with those who are always on and “on”; not even with my friends who are actually my friends, I’m just there to be supportive in the form of a like or comment. This may be due to the fact that my social media skills are extremely sub par and sporadic, and I am not a huge fan of the way that Instagram is formatted now; which is more of a Facebook relevancy format that usually suggests accounts that have no correlation to what I am actually interested in.
I am longer able to find interesting, organic, and unique accounts of people, businesses and brands that I actually have a true interest in. Instead, I am stuck with Harley Quinn makeup tutorials, pictures of Selena Gomez from fan accounts and way too many pictures of dogs doing weird things. I don’t want to look at any of those things, except maybe the dogs, but even that kind of content needs to be in small doses. There is a misfiring in both the connections and the assumptions that Instagram makes because the content is just not meeting my expectations in what is should be to be entertaining and worth connecting with. However, this desire to be “on” continues to be prevalent in my everyday life, for that is where so much of life actually happens; even if that means watching the lives of other people through a tiny screen.
Looking to people who are professionals at being “always on” we look to the celebrities. The most infamous and stereotypical that comes to my mind first is, you guessed it, Kim Kardashian. When will the world move on from this fanatic fandom phase with Kim? I have no idea. Maybe when her butt gets smaller. But until then I guess my blog post will just have to include her and her form of being “always on". What makes Kim’s posts interesting is that they have this iconic feel to them, no matter how simple or mundane they may be. This is possibly due to her iconic figure, the brand she has created for herself as a person, her duck lipped selfies, the recent fetish for sheer clothing, twerking videos, or her on point editing skills that make each post look professional, and given her level of fame and wealth, it is safe to assume that they probably are. She has 82.4 million followers so something must be working.
Kim doesn’t post as much as one might think she would as a celebrity of her character and status. She shows a certain level of restraint in the content itself and the amount of content she actually posts to keep her audience intrigued, but not enough to frustrate and be unfollowed; though it would take a lot of unfollowing for her to actually be affected. There is also a well rounded mix of “artsy” posts and “look at my body and give me attention” posts. This is a skillful “on” that shows that she knows her direct audience and what works for them as opposed to another celebrity and their audience. There is no way that she could, or anyone or that matter, could be always on, all the time. This seems to be connected to Dana Boyd’s idea of privacy and publicness in “The Social Media Reader” by Mandiberg. “Ionically, the publicness of social media also provides privacy in new ways. Many of those who embrace the public aspects of social media find that the more public they are, the more they can carve off privacy,” (Boyd). There is a good chance that Kim is able to fall under this category of private and public balance.
With that, celebrities and ourselves have to start being selective and strategic when it comes to being “on”. As Boyd makes clear “There’s no formula for embracing always-on practices, and we must each develop our own personal strategies for navigating a world with ever-increasing information,” (Boyd. This same theory applies to the lives of celebrities as well. This is something that I think Kim does extremely well and I’m not even a Kim Kardashian fan. Even when she isn’t on she is still “on" because she is constantly doing something, even if its nothing from our perspective of life, and creating new content from those experiences to potentially share out on multiple social media feeds; Instagram being only one of them. Kim has over 3,600 posts on Instagram which is incredibly low for a celebrity of her fame, especially paired with her level of sensuality that she does not mind sharing with the public.
Compare this to the number of posts that a celebrity like Snoop Dogg has, which is over 25k, and you can see the huge difference in level of “on-ness”. His amount of followers is significantly lower than Kim's, at around 12 million, but his content output is much higher than hers. But, here is where Kim pulls forward to the lead in the level of being on. Snoop Dogg may post more, more frequently, but Kim posts more discussion-worthy, attention grabbing photos that blow Snoop Dogg’s posts out of the water.
Granted the audiences for both celebrities may be different, but probably not as much as one may think. Sure, the argument can be made that Snoop is funny and just plain cool, due to his high posting of random videos that have no purpose, memes that are just there for entertainment and half-hearted relatable laughs, or awkward selfies that just don’t match up to the infamous selfies that Kim unashamedly rolls out constantly, but Kim is sexuality in human form and in an Instagram account and at the end of the day that is what sells, no matter if that is what you are personally into or not and she sells it well; just enough to keep us interested and wondering what is next.
She is posting for our entertainment, for herself and her ego, potentially to connect with her fans, and because she knows that we are always on and “on”. We follow her for these very same reasons, unless you’re like me and are not a fan and are just following her because your professor said to. But nevertheless, I am still on. You have to have a level of skill to be able to be a properly on social media guru, or at least a decent participant, and I believe that those who are followed by significant numbers of people on social media understand this.
There has to be a correlation between the audience’s “on” and the “on” of the person who is posting. Whether we want to be on or not, we are always “on”, even if that simply means mindlessly scrolling through videos of Snoop Dogg getting high with his A-list friends, or analyzing the size of Kim Kardashian’s butt at different angles on her Instagram page. In this era of “being on”, that still counts for something and that something is important to us in some way, no matter how small. Being on is no longer a choice, it seems to simply be a way of life. .
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