In Back to the Future, Marty McFly travels back in time to 1955 with his 1985 camcorder. The 1955 version of his scientist friend, Doc Brown, marvels at the technology of the video camera, dubbing it a “portable television studio”. Having recently learned that Ronald Reagan is to be the future president of the United States, Doc remarks: “No wonder your president has to be an actor. He’s gotta look good on television.” While Doc pretty accurately identifies the growing importance of television in 1980s society, he was still a little bit off when it came to the idea of everyone carrying a “portable television studio” around with them. Jump forward 41 years from the film’s release to today, however, and you have a pretty good analogy for mobile phones and social media. Modern life revolves around our portable television studios, with every action and interaction easily recorded, shared, and watched at all times.
It is only natural that we, the generation who have grown up alongside the rapid development and integration of this technology, would eventually be defined by it. We have grown up with an intrinsic awareness of how we represent ourselves visually. The image of how something appears has always been more important than reality, but now more than ever, this illusion is becoming increasingly perceived as reality itself. The means through which we identify ourselves, through which we define our personalities and our interests, becomes more and more about the appearance of these personalities and interests. The image of what we like and dislike, the things we do, becomes more important than the things themselves. Susan Sontag writes in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, that “Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs”. Now, in 2026, all of life could be defined as a strategy for accumulating photographs (albeit quite cynically).
A 2024 New Yorker article by Kyle Chayka titled “The Desperation of the Instagram Photo Dump” highlights the increasingly curated nature of how we present ourselves online. Chayka cites the rise in the Instagram “photo dump” as proof of just how stylised even the most minute representations of our lives have become. Chayka defines the photo dump as “faux-messy but actually carefully selected compendia”, a testament to the effort that goes into creating depictions of life. What is crucial about discussions of how Gen Z behaves online is the idea that, with near-constant access to the internet and social media through mobile phones, there is no meaningful distinction to be made between an online and offline life. Behaviours that proliferate online, such as the careful collating and collaging of our lives, bleed through to the “offline” world and become visible in daily interactions. Chayka charts the movement from a casual, personal internet where people mainly interacted with their friends to something more akin to a “broadcast system, reaching strangers as well as friends”, making people “more self-aware, and thus more surgical” about what they post online.
We are both self-aware and equally self-conscious about broadcasting our lives. We are taking part in a constant performance, but we know it’s a performance. We know everyone else is performing too. We feel the need to call attention to the performance, to highlight the artifice of it all, to make fun of ourselves before somebody else can. This idea is best represented in the offline “performative male contests” which took place on college campuses across the world, including at an event hosted by the Hist in September. The performative male was created as an online character whose existence slowly bled into and influenced offline behaviour. The hallmarks of a performative male are broad and wide-ranging: anything from dressing a certain way, reading books by female writers, drinking iced coffee, or even carrying a tote bag can denote someone as a performative male. The performative male character mocks men who pretend to engage with feminism, but it also incidentally mocks men’s earnest engagement with feminism, and highlights a broader issue wherein performance surpasses reality. Gen Z’s earnest engagement with anything will necessarily denote something about their personality, and in a world where personality is broadcast to the extreme, posted online to be magnified and amplified, earnest engagement becomes a frightening concept.
The rise of consumerism and marketing through online advertisements and product placement has led to every item and object becoming so imbued with meaning and significance that everything we engage with seems to signify something about our identity. Everything we eat, wear, watch, read, and buy has been presented to us through a marketing campaign that tells a story about the people who buy these items. Everything today abounds with built-in significance that is impossible to escape from. A prime example of this is Sally Rooney’s literature. In an article written for Vox in 2019 titled “The cult of Sally Rooney”, Constance Grady underlines the “status symbol” that Rooney has become. She says: “It is now aspirational to be the kind of person who has read Sally Rooney. She is a signifier of a certain kind of literary chic: If you read Sally Rooney, the thinking seems to go, you’re smart, but you’re also fun — and you’re also cool enough to be suspicious of both “smart” and “fun” as general concepts.” By the time Intermezzo was released in 2024, a shift in what Rooney represented could be seen. The novel’s artwork was emblazoned on tote bags and bookmarks so much so that the hype around the book seemed to eclipse the content of the novel itself. The release of Intermezzo transformed Rooney’s work from an implicit indication of someone’s personality to an explicit accessory. It is possible to track the progression from aspiring to be the kind of person who has read Sally Rooney to aspiring to be the kind of person who appears to have read Sally Rooney.
It is pointless and untrue to say that appearances are not important. But as we become defined more by what we own and consume, and less by what we do, say, or believe, it is long past the time to detach ourselves from the meanings assigned to us by billion-dollar marketing campaigns.
