Recently I’ve been watching a spate of social media themed documentaries, movies, and TV series. And it has really gotten me thinking about my current (nano) “influencer” status (discussed more at the bottom). Anyway I recommend watching some of these shows:

The Social Dilemma (on Netflix): I’ve brought this up in the past but I think it’s a great documentary explaining the insidious marketing nature of social media. These platforms truly are out there to become ingrained in your daily life and then try to sell you things/make you change your behavior or thinking.

Fake Famous (on HBO max): This is the most recent documentary I’ve watched where they take three young people with relatively low follower counts and then try to make them “famous” on Instagram. Tl;dr: it’s about buying a lot of bots (and not just follower bots but “like” bots and “comment” bots). At the end of the show one of the participants that makes it as a major influencer (around 30k followers) gets a ton of free stuff and free trips, and no longer needs bots. But it takes a lot of bot purchases over a prolonged period of time. It’s a peek into the sometimes very fake side of social media. (Also if this is what it takes to be Insta-famous, no thank you). Of course not everyone does this (actually I hope most people don’t). But it’s a little demoralizing to think you can buy your way into it and some people do.

Ingrid Goes West (on Hulu): This is an older movie (2017) centered around a social media obsessed LA transplant, played by Aubrey Plaza (of Parks and Rec fame). This again highlights the fakeness the surrounds social media and some of the dark places it can lead some people. It was highly entertaining though I’m not sure how realistic.

Followers (on Netflix): It isn’t that great of a series and I mostly watched it for the Tokyo fashions and practicing my Japanese listening skills, but it was an interesting peek into the effects of social media in another culture (spoiler: it’s pretty much the same).

Having watched all these different shows about social media, it made me realize I definitely don’t want to be an “influencer” as a job (plus I don’t think I could hack it either). I like writing my blog so I’ll keep doing that for me, but I definitely won’t sell out to fakeness just to “make it.” I think in a couple of years (once Emi is in school) I’ll probably headed back to the public health/clinical research sphere and just write the blog on the side as my creative outlet (instead of trying to make it something that would support my family and myself). After having written this blog for over 5 years, I’m starting to feel a little listless I guess (though my love of writing about stuff has continued unabated lol). But do I really want to be a blogger as a career? These days the answer to that is a “no.”

P.S. And related to all this, I enjoyed reading Leah’s post here about how she monetizes her blog (and she also references Liv’s take on monetizing as well). I found both perspectives really interesting. But the big takeaway for me was that I need to stop doing free work. It normalizes the expectation that content creators do their work for free or for gifted items. I have a gifted item review coming up next on Tuesday and as much as I really do love their underwear, I realised as I was typing it all out (at least 3-ish hours) that I’m basically doing all this work for a sum total of $26 (in gifted underwear). Even if I feel like an imposter asking for my work to be paid, I should be doing it not only for myself but for all the other content creators out there trying to earn something off of their hard work. This mindset somehow makes it easier for me to start asking to get paid.