Karl Marx, social media and class

Are you over-using social media because you are poor?

Social media. Classism. These are topics I can swim in, to be honest. And yet, I was not ready for a deep dive. I could not even tip my toe in this for around a month until now.

I have been procrastinating on this, and if thousands of pop-psychology social media posts have taught me something, it means I was trying to escape from an uncomfortable emotion. Sure, I have been drowning in deadlines at work, but that’s not it. I was just grappling with an old friend of mine called “shame.” Shame is an old acquaintance by now, and I am befriending a new self-image. I am in limbo, at the moment.

What do I mean by shame? I have spent an insane amount of time on social media since its start. It is uncool to admit that my life was mostly lived online. I was on Lookbook months before people in Europe noticed its existence. I remember meeting Chiara Ferragni at Orio Al Serio Bergamo Airport with my friend G., who wanted to ask her for a picture. All our high school peers did not even know who she was and why we would ask her for a picture. We started saving up money for a pair of Jeffrey Campbell. Now, I’d rather die than be seen in these, but at that time, these shoes were peak edge. But we were both so proud of ourselves for always finding out the latest trend before everyone did in our town.

We were admittedly two teenagers who hated the city we lived in, felt it was provincial for us and could not wait to escape to bigger things. Namely New York or London. Both spent an insane amount of time in front of a screen because our parents were too busy with something else. Mine killing themselves with work, hers killing themselves in the pursuit of self-knowledge. Each social class has a way of killing themselves and ignoring their kids. The result is pretty much the same. As I said, we spent ungodly hours on the internet. There was a sense of injustice, of not being understood, and the internet gave us a venue to display how we were really, to ourselves, at least.

I had curated albums of pics on Facebook that had gone lost when I decided to kill my online persona of that time and delete the account. I regret it now. Mainly because I recall having some gems there. Especially a picture of me training at a park with old Chinese grandmas in Beijing. A picture that is fixed in my memory, but I cannot redeem it any longer. It is lost forever. Those were times of innocent candidness. Not nearly as staged as our posts are now. I recall some pictures of me at my friend Sabrina’s 16th birthday, I had worn a foundation that was too strong and made me look like Trump and a pair of flesh-coloured stockings that would make me now puke.

In sum, the internet became a tool to form our self-image and shape who we wanted to be. It informed our taste. I just paid 70 euros for my new therapist to tell me the reason why I am stuck is because my self-image does not match the changes I want to bring. That’s how important it is for our psyche the way we see ourselves. I have heard somewhere that who a person wants to be is more important than who they actually are right now. That idea of themselves needs either to be materialised or it will haunt them forever. Social media, for some, has become a tool to express who they want to be and how they want to be seen. It is a way to build.

Now, this message I got from my friend Y. has kept my synapses busy for a while. She is an online friend of mine who got to Canada with a scholarship in Computer Science; she is an outstanding student; she built her life there with multiple jobs on the side, a constant threat of not getting her residence permit renewed and the emotional baggage of someone who at some point had to leave her house in Kosovo because the war enemy burnt her house down.

I wish I had a clear-cut “yes” or “no” to the self-imposed question that is haunting me: “Are you over-using social media because you are poor?” In all honesty, I am tempted to say “yes” but also to add “so what?”. Y. is only one of a countless list of friends that I made online, most of them turned into physical friends. I am consciously avoiding using “real friends”. Because sometimes people you see every day are not acting more “friendly” than those you have perhaps never seen but communicate and exchange with often. I have a friend who will recognise himself in this article, who now I see around the world when we are both on work trips. We have met on Instagram, because of the silly things I every so often post. We share a drink or a meal and go straight to the point about our lives. Why would he be less important to me than someone who is there in physical presence? You won’t make me fall for the quantity when I am about quality.

I made love to an actor because of social media;