Social Media, Power & Inauthenticity

In her YouTube confessional, Essena O’Neill reveals the reality behind social media.  She discusses how her aspirations to feel important through likes, views and followers only made her miserable at the end of the day.  She claims that she did everything in her power to prove to the world that she was important and beautiful, yet even when she achieved what the culture of social media has constructed as the “dream life”, with hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, a YouTube account with 100,000 plus views, a modeling contract and all of the wealth, fame and power that went along with it, she felt no real value.  Essena allowed the culture of social media to define her in a way that was far from real as everything she did was edited and tweaked in a way that would gain more value, likes and views, and in the end, she lost her true self to a false construction of reality.

Jose Van Dijck’s argument that the the organization of social exchange in a culture of connectivity is staked on “neoliberal economic principles” is supportive of Essena O’Neill’s decision to cut all ties with her existing social media accounts, as her testimonial presents the idea that the culture of connectivity stems from an ongoing pressure to achieve power through developing and gaining “strategic alliances” using various technological platforms.  Essena discusses this in her YouTube confessional when she reflects back to her 12-year-old self, who grew up in a society that taught her to believe that value, happiness, popularity and self-worth is derived from likes, views and followers.  Her 12-year-old self that grew up in a culture of connectivity where popularity and importance came from gaining “strategic alliances” through various social media platforms, felt that the only way to achieve power was to do whatever it took to make her presence known online, even if that meant misrepresenting her real self.


I believe that Essena’s decision to testify to “the inauthenticity of social media stardom” and terminate all of her existing social media accounts was a bold and courageous statement, as she chose to leave what many in a culture of connectivity believe to be the “dream life”, for pure, authentic and real happiness, while also revealing the truth about social media stardom and addressing the need to create more awareness around an issue that is continuing to define how we value self-worth.