Inside me there are two wolves. The first is super embarrassed to admit that I paid lots of money to an influencer to teach me how to make TikToks this summer. The only thing less cool than putting effort into your social media presence is paying someone to teach you how to put effort into your social media presence. The second wolf is the one who writes this column, who is curious about the way the attention economy has led many of us to commodify our identities online, the way that commodification can translate directly to money, and how requisite it's all starting to feel.
Parasocial appeal is the core of what constitutes success on the internet right now. Are you able to convey your personality in such a condensed way that strangers feel like they know you, and even like you? Can you quickly tell the story of who you are through videos and images? It’s harder than it looks. If you don’t believe me, open up your front-facing camera right now and try recording yourself telling a funny story. Now, hit post. It’s miserable.
I was curious about whether parasocial appeal could be taught. My general assumption has been that you either have it or you don’t, but with parasocial appeal having become so central to this type of commercial success, I started to wonder whether my assumption was correct. You don’t necessarily need a strong social media presence to succeed in business, but if you’re starting a restaurant or a boutique or even if you’re a blogger, it certainly doesn’t hurt.
There are also the more personal reasons I took the course. In short, I felt old. TikTok was the first time the dominant social media platform was one I didn’t feel completely native in. I came of age in the early 2000s, and I refined my sense of self at the same time that I learned to refine my MySpace profile. For us teenagers, who you said you were online—and your ability to really sell that—was who you were. I was cripplingly shy, so I spent school days observing my classmates in silence, too scared to talk. After school, I rushed home, booted up my Dell laptop, and re-entered my real life, online. I felt cooler on the internet, and safer from paralyzing social anxiety because I had time to come up with witty responses. Changing up my profile page with HTML and CSS was way easier and cheaper than changing up how I looked in real life. I felt like I finally had control over how I was perceived by my peers.
I grew up to be a journalist and worked in social media for the first few years of my career. I taught political correspondents and art critics how to use Snapchat, and got into passionate arguments about the virtues of social media for news organizations. As I moved away from doing social media for work, the landscape changed underneath me. Facebook faded and Twitter entered its flop era; as TikTok rose in its place, I found that a lot of the skills I’d used on social media didn’t quite translate to the new vernacular, which relied on an interplay between on-screen text, videos, images, sounds, and direct-to-camera narration. As the rhetorical vocabulary evolved, so grew the professional and financial opportunity cost of sitting this one out. I could hear echoes of 22-year-old me clicking her tongue in pity. Lost another one to complacency and a lack of curiosity. What a shame.
I found this 90-day course taught by an influencer who seemed to really believe that everyone could unlock a confident, authentic voice that would connect with audiences. They just needed the tools, which would cost a little more than a thousand U.S. dollars to access.
Initially I balked at the fee, but then I decided that this was research, and that I’d write it off as a business expense at the end of the year. Plus, it was kind of a funny bit, right? I clicked enroll and charged the course to my credit card.
The course comprised a series of pre-recorded videos and worksheets, and a weekly call with the instructor and other students. I also kept a journal of my experience. The day I got access to my materials, I wrote “I'm resolving to give it my all, even though it feels ridiculous. Today I got access to my coursework on this online platform and watched the first couple videos. There's a workbook I have to work through and I'm going to try to take this as seriously as I can.”
The first lesson was about getting out of your own way. Our assignment was to first make a list of all the reasons we aren’t posting on TikTok, and then go through each of those reasons and figure out solutions to those problems, one by one. Embarrassed to film videos in front of your partner? Figure out when they won’t be home. That is now your dedicated filming time. Don’t know what to talk about? Congratulations, here is an ongoing system for keeping track of every possible nugget of an idea, and a schedule for turning those ideas into videos. Worried people you went to high school with will see the videos? Well, tough cookies there. No one ever did anything cool without being a little cringe first.
The influencer admitted students on a rolling basis, so we were all in different parts of the course. My first weekly call lined up with the other students’ last day. After I introduced myself, I sat and listened to what the other students had to say, curious to learn what it was like on the other side of 90 days.
They talked about the series they were working on, and their increased feeling of confidence speaking directly to camera. One of the students shared that they were feeling a little demoralized because no one was watching their videos. My stomach sank a little bit. The instructor encouraged the student not to let it get them down, and to remember that this was a numbers game. The more you post, the more chances you have to break through. That is definitely true, but it’s also an easy way to allay the anxieties of a person whose work clearly isn’t connecting with the audience they hope to find. I wondered how many people had paid to come through this course, only to feel this way at the end of it.
As the weeks went on, I began to feel like I was watching people being swindled. I was doing the course for research purposes, but other classmates were entrepreneurs or entertainment industry hopefuls who had invested their money into this as professional development. I was aware that this represented the majority of their marketing efforts, and that if this didn’t work, it would be a real problem for their businesses, which need social media to find customers and survive. My classmates were enthusiastic, but still struggling to find their voices, which makes sense. Most of them didn't pursue careers where they learned to hone their storytelling skills, and now they were trying to figure out how to fit a three-act structure into a 60-second video.
I’d had a decade of experience in online media and storytelling, and my own videos weren’t taking off; most of them were stuck in TikTok’s 300-view jail, the lowest rung of its algorithmic distribution. Even though we weren't doing journalism, I also felt uncomfortable about a lot of the takeaways from a journalistic perspective. Many of the course's lessons aligned with best practices I’d learned over the years about headlines, social media copy, and storytelling. We talked about ledes and curiosity gaps, keeping your videos short and quick, and keeping things moving by changing or adding elements every three seconds at least.
Some of these tips came into conflict with journalistic ethics, though. We watched videos of people reading “Am I The Asshole” posts on Reddit in the first person, as if they were telling their own stories, for example. A video starting with “I refused to lend my sister money for her wedding after she didn’t invite me to be a bridesmaid” has great odds of viewer engagement and retention; does it matter if the story actually comes from a subreddit?
Even though I wasn't creating journalism here, I couldn't suspend my awareness of how information travels on the internet, or the rules I had learned to wield that power responsibly. My uneasiness reflects the discomfort that I feel in response to the larger flattening of news and “content” on social media. They all exist in the same feeds now, and they must use similar tactics to compete for viewers’ limited attention. This, of course, is one of the reasons it’s so hard to distinguish real news from junk online. I’m not so rigid in my journalistic ethics as to turn my nose up at online engagement strategies, but I couldn’t help but feel like so many of these techniques were gross gimmicks made to game the algorithm. These techniques weren’t one or the other—news or junk—but both.
It would be easy for me to write off the course’s instructor as an exploitative evil person cashing in on a very real need for people to teach internet, but as I watched each webinar, I felt pretty distinctly that the instructor really believed in what they were doing, and that they genuinely wanted to help people learn to use social media for their advantage. I felt more uncomfortable with the fact that so many entrepreneurs had decided they needed to do this course to get attention for their businesses, and even more uncomfortable with the fact that they were right to think that.
In order to get that attention, they had to learn to play a complex game to satisfy a constantly changing algorithm that is theoretically built on human psychology, but in its evolution morphs further and further away from facilitating genuine connection. Once you know the tricks, it's hard to scroll through TikTok and not see the attempts to grab your attention and play nice with the algorithm. Rather than talking to each other, users trying to win the TikTok game are talking to reflections of each other, miming human connection so lines of code will reward them with more attention.
I don’t have to tell you that posting on the internet is a weird thing to do. Why does a person feel the need to record every beautiful or interesting or surprising thing on their phone? Do we really not trust our own memories to hold them? When personal social media collides with the commercial potential of a personal brand—or an actual brand—the stakes of keeping the audience's attention go way up. It's no longer about portraying yourself in a fun or appealing way for your peers to judge; it could be a matter of survival or failure for your business.
I'm not interested in participating in any moral panic about the devolution of our intellectual life at the hands of social media, but after taking this course, I did feel depressed about the fact that so many hopeful people were credulously turning to programs like this to make their dreams come true. If my average daily screen time for TikTok usage is any indicator, though, it wasn't enough to turn me off completely.
