Despite what #wanderlust boards on Pinterest may want you to believe, it does not feel glamorous to arrive in a foreign country, in the dead of night, bedraggled from a long flight and in need of a cab. Ellen Wright, 29, found herself in such a situation last summer while traveling with a group of friends.
“We’re trekking through Milan, it’s 1 in the morning, we can’t get a taxi, and we don’t speak Italian,” she said. “And while we’re trying to do this — one of my friends, she’s just filming it all, trying to make it seem all fun, and like a joke, when really we were all very irritated, and nervous.” What they were not, however, was surprised: Ms. Wright’s friend is a travel blogger and often broadcasts her every move in an effort to inspire — and instruct — others in following in her footsteps.
When Ms. Wright and her friends eventually got to their Airbnb, locating the lockbox hidden on the darkened street was just another expected trial, the result of doing Europe “supercheap.” But for her blogging friend, it was just more fodder for the feed.
“She even filmed us taking the key out of the lockbox, because that’s her whole thing, showing every detail to her audience,” Ms. Wright said. “But me: I’m traveling for fun. I don’t care about your followers.”
Ms. Wright, however, managed to endure the behavior for the rest of the weekslong trip. “On the flip side, we have really nice photos of that vacation,” she said. “Some of it was really fun.”
Nora Ephron once said: “Everything is copy.” But in 2020, the more apt phrasing may be: “Everything is content.”
With the rise of nano-influencers, more and more everyday people are turning their personal lives into full-time careers. And that raises important questions regarding the people who populate those personal lives: What expectations of privacy do friends and partners have a right to when hanging out with someone whose job or hobby it is to share everything about their day-to-day? Where do we draw the line between self-expression and unwarranted exposure?
If their friends are sharing every single day of their lives, can they reasonably expect to be asked for consent every single day?
“These are the questions I grapple with on a daily basis,” said Caroline Calloway, 28, the Instagrammer whose viral shenanigans have garnered her 722,000 followers and plenty of headlines. Ms. Calloway often posts deeply personal ruminations on the most intimate parts of her life, sometimes multiple times in one day. “That’s really how I built my brand,” she said. “By sharing those kinds of stories.”
Yet this fall, when she began dating a model, she started to rethink her strategy. “I’ve learned firsthand how much it can complicate a relationship,” she said. So, not wanting to miss out on the exciting #content of a budding romance, she opted for a compromise of sorts.
While she continued to share personal conversations and details of their sex life, she also went to great lengths to keep his identity hidden, disguising his face by placing a bright blue butterfly emoji over it in the posts (this has since become a meme).
“We’re living in this strange age where normal people have fans now,” said Ann Friedman, 38, who noted that when “Call Your Girlfriend,” the podcast she hosts with her best friend Aminatou Sow, started “getting big, more strangers started following us. We had, and continue to have, very different responses to that.”
Ms. Friedman’s Instagram account is now private, while Ms. Sow’s remains public. “It’s something we’ve had to talk about, our evolving individual feelings about strangers knowing who we are and being interested in our friendship.”
In fact, the two devote an entire chapter to it in their forthcoming book, “Big Friendship,” a memoir of their 10-year relationship.
The trials of friendships — secret keeping, respecting limits, deciding who to invite to your super-small birthday party or learning to tolerate your friend’s awful significant other — are all but age old. But today, social media has added a new obstacle course for would-be pals to navigate, and posting — or not posting — about a friend’s life can be one of its biggest challenges.
Christena Nippert-Eng, a sociologist and professor of informatics at Indiana University of Bloomington and the author of “Islands of Privacy,” said that as groups of friends develop, over time so do informal rules about what is and is not O.K. to post.
“In some cases, like in the fraternities and sororities we are doing studies with, they will have actual written rules,” she said. “There will be a person whose job it is to monitor everybody’s social media accounts, and fine you if you post something with, say, a Solo cup in it.”
In less formalized situations, friends have other ways of getting the message of their displeasure across. “You might sanction the person by unfollowing them for a week or two, or you might text about it or have a conversation about it off the platform, or talk to a mutual friend about it,” Dr. Nippert-Eng said. “There is often a whole system of negotiating what is appropriate that goes on behind the scenes.”
A few years ago, Ximena Blanco, 23, was hanging out at a friend’s pool with a group of people, some of whom she was close to and others she was just getting to know. “It was a good day,” she said. “People were taking pictures, but I wasn’t really thinking about it.” Until one of them ended up on a new friend’s feed.
“I was going through some cancer treatment at the time, and I had a huge bandage around my neck, where I’d recently had surgery,” she said. Though close friends knew about what she was going through, Ms. Blanco hadn’t — to borrow another phrase from celebrity P.R. speak — gone public about it yet.
“I hadn’t finished processing what was happening and what had happened to me,” she said. “I didn’t want people to see me, and to be defined as just that one thing: the girl who had cancer.”
“I knew people were going to ask what the bandage was in the photo, and I knew I didn’t want to say,” she said. Luckily, the situation was resolved with a quick text to the new friend, who promptly removed the post before too many people saw it. Still, Ms. Blanco said, that moment changed the way she thinks about interacting with people online and off.
“It made me more aware of and sensitive to what other people might not want to share,” she said.
In “Discipline and Punish,” the French philosopher Michel Foucault theorized that the mere suggestion of surveillance is enough to alter our behavior, as we internalize expectations and monitor ourselves in an effort to conform to them. This was, to Foucault, ultimately more threatening to an individual’s personal freedom than actually being locked up behind bars.
So what does the threat of being photographed midbite at a friend’s birthday party, or cutting loose on the dance floor after one too many, do to the texture and quality of those moments, particularly when the image may end up being seen by several thousand followers?
I’ll go out on a limb here: Foucault probably wouldn’t have been a fan of social media.
“People are absolutely modifying their behavior in what I consider to be the most frightening ways. They are, first of all, mentally surveilling themselves, mentally keeping an eye on what they’re doing,” Dr. Nippert-Eng said. “We need to start thinking about the social costs of losing our privacy. In a democracy you always want people to feel empowered to say and do things that are unpopular but important. Today, many people feel like they’re being constantly judged.”
And what about when it’s for someone’s business? “When I did a makeup trial for my wedding, I went to one artist who posted an unflattering before-and-after picture of me on her Instagram without my permission,” Avery Carpenter Forrey, 31, said.
Ms. Carpenter eventually decided to shrug it off. But experience like that touch on questions such as: Does using a service equal consent to be used as marketing material for that service? Did agreeing to have her photo taken mean it could be used — filtered and edited — in any way the poster wished?
However, the insertion of commerce does not always sit well with others. “As I get more followers, I tend toward not wanting to be on Instagram as much,” Ms. Friedman said. “At the end of the day, it’s a company that is essentially trying to monetize your relationships to people that are close to you.”
“There is always a power differential between the person who is observed and the person doing the observing and the reporting,” Dr. Nippert-Eng said, pointing to Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky’s infamous friendship. “We think of friends as being an egalitarian relationship, but it turns out there’s this power move available to anyone who wants to post about the other. It’s a huge leap of trust now when you’re with someone.”
Ultimately, the best way to navigate these new algorithmically optimized waters is with a very analog approach: talking it out or asking on a case-by-case basis.
“Until you have a conversation with someone about it, you really don’t know how they’re going to feel about what you post,” Ms. Friedman said. She said that she always tries to ask for permission to post a certain image, and is particularly sensitive in certain situations: “depending on what their job is, if they have kids, or if they aren’t personally on the internet or post much.”
Social media’s ability to turn every private space into a public one has also made drawing up a guest list an even more fraught experiment. Not everyone can be invited to your four-person pot roast, but, thanks to Instagram, everyone can know when they weren’t invited.
How, then, do you keep a private event out of your guests’ feeds, where it might hurt the feelings of those who weren’t invited?
“It is absolutely reasonable — and I dare say encouraged — to ask guests ahead of time and in the moment not to post,” said Priya Parker, the author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters.” “Your gathering, your rules. They can do differently at their gathering. You’re not just protecting yourself, but also other guests.
Ms. Parker recommends letting guests know earlier rather than later that it will be a social-media-free event. “An invitation is the opening salvo of a social contract,” she said. “‘This is what this thing is this time around. These are the terms. Are you in?’ It’s much easier than policing the room.”
And if your table-scape is simply too much of a masterpiece to keep from the ’Gram, Ms. Parker advises explaining the gathering’s specific purpose in your caption. “If it was an arbitrary get-together, it can feel more hurtful to not be invited, whereas when the purpose is explained — ‘Have been longing for my summer camp days, so invited my bunk mates over for a reunion’ or ‘Gotta love the neighbors who respond to a last-minute leftover birthday cake text’ — people can understand why they were excluded.”
If you aren’t hosting but still don’t want your picture taken, being direct is still best. “Absolutely I think you should also articulate your own preferences to your friend, that should be part of the conversation,” Ms. Friedman said.
If that friend, however, happens to be a famous influencer, you may have to make allowances, if only to show support. Maybe, like Ms. Wright, you’ll get a few good photos out of it.
