December 2018
December 2018
Ten from December 2018
Full Edition
On Reality vs. Appearance
In 2018, we lost musicians Avicci & Mac Miller, chef Anthony Bourdain, designer Kate Spade and HQ Trivia CEO Colin Kroll to suicide, amongst others. With each shocking notification on my phone, I was reminded – once again – of how little we know of people’s actual lives. For celebrities, external appearances are overindexed on, since that’s all we have to go on. But even for regular people, folks we know, are friends with, went to school with – realities and appearances can oft be mixed up, the convergence of the two coming, sometimes, too late.
This isn’t a post about suicide, though suicide is perhaps the most extreme example of a misalignment between reality and appearance. If you’re interested, it’s worth reading some notes on the meteoric rise of suicide rates in the US and some of the trends in ‘misery pop’ music that reflects segments of our current culture.
Suicide aside, realities and appearances have never been and will likely never be in alignment. Couples going through marital issues or families in financial troubles are as unlikely to tell everyone they know about their problems today as they were in 1900. Today, social media is the dominant mode of curating appearance, but before social media, alternative methods served the same purpose. The concept of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ comes from a comic strip created in 1913. ‘Keeping up’ as a concept necessarily implies changes to either reality or appearance that positively improve your social pecking order, the perception of you amongst your peers. Mark Twain alluded to this concept in one of his essays, Corn Pone Opinions:
The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict.
So how did we do it in the 20th century? We went to the playhouse watching what was cool in the 10’s, we were one of the firsts to buy the General Electric Motor-Top refrigerator in the 20’s, we Gordon Gekko’d over everyone with the latest mobile phone in the 80’s, we got the Rachel Haircut in the 90’s. Whether we did it to change our reality, or our appearance to peers is a blurry line – did we actually like that play? Could we actually afford that refrigerator? Were we such an accomplished businessman that we needed to haul bricks around on beaches? Did we think the Rachel haircut was cute (it was) or were we just trying to edit our image to the masses?
This brings us to an important point. Reality is an iceberg for which Appearance is the tip. Appearance belongs to Reality, is influenced by it, but contains a mere percentage of Reality. We may really like the Rachel haircut, might identify with it. That’s real. But our haircut will also be seen by others, and that’s appearance. The part of us that’s real, loves Friends, likes fun haircuts, goes to get the haircut but so does the part of us that wants to fit in, wants to be seen as cute. Reality is never lived in isolation, and therefore Appearance will always be the first exposure you’ll have to someone’s Reality. Whether or not you spend enough time to go below the surface depends on your closeness, though I question this now as I hear more and more people rely on social media for their updates on ‘friends’.
Because of their nature, Reality and Appearance will never be decoupled. We’ve seen how humans have always had means of convincing others of positive things in their lives. But we haven’t even gotten to the year 2000 yet and this is where the story gets interesting, where our means of convincing others has not multiplied, but exponentiated through social media.
If you think about revenue as a function of price and volume, appearance works in the same way as a function of intensity and volume. Intensity here defined is the magnitude of delta you can expect in appearance from some event (i.e: purchasing a Mercedes-Benz will have a higher intensity than buying a used 1995 Nissan Maxima). Volume is the number of people exposed to the event (i.e: your network of 10,000 followers see you bought a Benz vs. your 25 neighbors). Therefore, someone posting a picture of their new Benz to 10,000 followers will have a higher perceived appearance than someone driving a ’95 Maxima around their neighborhood.
Appearance = Intensity x Volume
I contend that intensity hasn’t changed much since the days of Mark Twain, but that volume has been the biggest driver in our society’s increased exposure to appearance. I say exposure here intentionally because I’m not sure that humans care more about their appearance today than they did 50 years ago, I think we’ve always been naturally self-conscious. But I do think we are more plugged in now, more exposed to appearances than we once were. In a day, we can scroll through hundreds of pictures and updates from hundreds of people.
To illustrate the point about our increasing opportunities to differentiate Appearance from Reality, take an example from a professional conference I went to. One of the keynote speakers there was some guy from Google talking to us about how to curate your brand, your image. I hate these talks, personal brand, blah, blah. He talked about how he’s like a museum curator of his own image, about how he can manufacture different brands out of himself depending on the platform. On LinkedIn, he was a professional who had his shit together, went to some big MBA program, worked at the biggest names. On Instagram, he was a daring photographer, traveler and adventurer. On Facebook, he was a doting uncle, son, brother. On Twitter, he was the witty young tech professional with political opinions. I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, what a headache to manage all of these separate appearances of you, in addition to managing the one, real you. Maybe it works for this guy and maybe you make it work too, but this obsession over curating appearance, and all the new ways modern social media lets us do it strikes me as exhausting and of questionable value-add to our lives.
This ability-to-curate-appearance on steroids is a modern day pop culture phenomenon, and as such, some of the better pop music of our day takes stabs at understanding it.
Tracks 5, 6 and 15 of this month’s Jam are such songs, all released in 2018, that dive into the way modern people construct appearance.
Track 5, Internet You by Brynn Elliott details a perfectly curated appearance.
Malibu cowboy / with the doors off the Jeep / In your mirrored Ray Bans / Casual selfie / … / You’re the life of the party / … / You were picture perfect / With ten thousand hearts
This guy appears to be the All-American babe, but Brynn soon finds out that:
It was all fake / none of it was true / Can I run away with the internet you?
Track 6, The Internet by Jon Bellion, details the same phenomenon from a first person point of view:
I don’t need the wood, just need you to think I hit it / … / I don’t need to learn, just need you to think I get it / I don’t need the sermon, just need you to think I read it
Society’s become one more concerned with appearance than reality, according to Bellion:
No one cares if you’re happy / Just as long as you claim it
In Track 15, Sad Still, Quinn XCII raps to a pounding drum beat and finishes these verses with little screams each time. When I first listened to it, it felt a bit odd, a bit out of Quinn’s normal wheelhouse. But the message of the song, the one of being overwhelmed by all of today’s exposure, of holding in talking about anxiety, of living a life for appearances but swallowing in what’s deep down – it makes sense that these verses would be delivered in blitz-style rap to a racing heartbeat. Quinn references social media a few times in the song, each time negatively:
Flood my head with vloggers
All you ever see on Instagram is low cut jeans / From girls that I can bet are probably going through some shit / But make a fake smile till their white blood cells lit
Each time my heart starts beating I look for symptoms on Reddit
Elliott’s song, Internet You, ends with a plea for that All-American guy to:
Just be who you are
Bellion’s song, The Internet, finishes with some lasting questions:
How can you stop something not even there? How can we change this?
Quinn’s song, Sad Still, finishes with a question and a suggestion:
How do you feel?
They should see what’s under our mask.
This new year, I hope someone knows your reality and not just your appearances.
– theMonthlyJamm | January 5th, 2019
Ten from December 2018
Full Edition
On Reality vs. Appearance
In 2018, we lost musicians Avicci & Mac Miller, chef Anthony Bourdain, designer Kate Spade and HQ Trivia CEO Colin Kroll to suicide, amongst others. With each shocking notification on my phone, I was reminded – once again – of how little we know of people’s actual lives. For celebrities, external appearances are overindexed on, since that’s all we have to go on. But even for regular people, folks we know, are friends with, went to school with – realities and appearances can oft be mixed up, the convergence of the two coming, sometimes, too late.
This isn’t a post about suicide, though suicide is perhaps the most extreme example of a misalignment between reality and appearance. If you’re interested, it’s worth reading some notes on the meteoric rise of suicide rates in the US and some of the trends in ‘misery pop’ music that reflects segments of our current culture.
Suicide aside, realities and appearances have never been and will likely never be in alignment. Couples going through marital issues or families in financial troubles are as unlikely to tell everyone they know about their problems today as they were in 1900. Today, social media is the dominant mode of curating appearance, but before social media, alternative methods served the same purpose. The concept of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ comes from a comic strip created in 1913. ‘Keeping up’ as a concept necessarily implies changes to either reality or appearance that positively improve your social pecking order, the perception of you amongst your peers. Mark Twain alluded to this concept in one of his essays, Corn Pone Opinions:
The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict.
So how did we do it in the 20th century? We went to the playhouse watching what was cool in the 10’s, we were one of the firsts to buy the General Electric Motor-Top refrigerator in the 20’s, we Gordon Gekko’d over everyone with the latest mobile phone in the 80’s, we got the Rachel Haircut in the 90’s. Whether we did it to change our reality, or our appearance to peers is a blurry line – did we actually like that play? Could we actually afford that refrigerator? Were we such an accomplished businessman that we needed to haul bricks around on beaches? Did we think the Rachel haircut was cute (it was) or were we just trying to edit our image to the masses?
This brings us to an important point. Reality is an iceberg for which Appearance is the tip. Appearance belongs to Reality, is influenced by it, but contains a mere percentage of Reality. We may really like the Rachel haircut, might identify with it. That’s real. But our haircut will also be seen by others, and that’s appearance. The part of us that’s real, loves Friends, likes fun haircuts, goes to get the haircut but so does the part of us that wants to fit in, wants to be seen as cute. Reality is never lived in isolation, and therefore Appearance will always be the first exposure you’ll have to someone’s Reality. Whether or not you spend enough time to go below the surface depends on your closeness, though I question this now as I hear more and more people rely on social media for their updates on ‘friends’.
Because of their nature, Reality and Appearance will never be decoupled. We’ve seen how humans have always had means of convincing others of positive things in their lives. But we haven’t even gotten to the year 2000 yet and this is where the story gets interesting, where our means of convincing others has not multiplied, but exponentiated through social media.
If you think about revenue as a function of price and volume, appearance works in the same way as a function of intensity and volume. Intensity here defined is the magnitude of delta you can expect in appearance from some event (i.e: purchasing a Mercedes-Benz will have a higher intensity than buying a used 1995 Nissan Maxima). Volume is the number of people exposed to the event (i.e: your network of 10,000 followers see you bought a Benz vs. your 25 neighbors). Therefore, someone posting a picture of their new Benz to 10,000 followers will have a higher perceived appearance than someone driving a ’95 Maxima around their neighborhood.
Appearance = Intensity x Volume
I contend that intensity hasn’t changed much since the days of Mark Twain, but that volume has been the biggest driver in our society’s increased exposure to appearance. I say exposure here intentionally because I’m not sure that humans care more about their appearance today than they did 50 years ago, I think we’ve always been naturally self-conscious. But I do think we are more plugged in now, more exposed to appearances than we once were. In a day, we can scroll through hundreds of pictures and updates from hundreds of people.
To illustrate the point about our increasing opportunities to differentiate Appearance from Reality, take an example from a professional conference I went to. One of the keynote speakers there was some guy from Google talking to us about how to curate your brand, your image. I hate these talks, personal brand, blah, blah. He talked about how he’s like a museum curator of his own image, about how he can manufacture different brands out of himself depending on the platform. On LinkedIn, he was a professional who had his shit together, went to some big MBA program, worked at the biggest names. On Instagram, he was a daring photographer, traveler and adventurer. On Facebook, he was a doting uncle, son, brother. On Twitter, he was the witty young tech professional with political opinions. I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, what a headache to manage all of these separate appearances of you, in addition to managing the one, real you. Maybe it works for this guy and maybe you make it work too, but this obsession over curating appearance, and all the new ways modern social media lets us do it strikes me as exhausting and of questionable value-add to our lives.
This ability-to-curate-appearance on steroids is a modern day pop culture phenomenon, and as such, some of the better pop music of our day takes stabs at understanding it.
Tracks 5, 6 and 15 of this month’s Jam are such songs, all released in 2018, that dive into the way modern people construct appearance.
Track 5, Internet You by Brynn Elliott details a perfectly curated appearance.
Malibu cowboy / with the doors off the Jeep / In your mirrored Ray Bans / Casual selfie / … / You’re the life of the party / … / You were picture perfect / With ten thousand hearts
This guy appears to be the All-American babe, but Brynn soon finds out that:
It was all fake / none of it was true / Can I run away with the internet you?
Track 6, The Internet by Jon Bellion, details the same phenomenon from a first person point of view:
I don’t need the wood, just need you to think I hit it / … / I don’t need to learn, just need you to think I get it / I don’t need the sermon, just need you to think I read it
Society’s become one more concerned with appearance than reality, according to Bellion:
No one cares if you’re happy / Just as long as you claim it
In Track 15, Sad Still, Quinn XCII raps to a pounding drum beat and finishes these verses with little screams each time. When I first listened to it, it felt a bit odd, a bit out of Quinn’s normal wheelhouse. But the message of the song, the one of being overwhelmed by all of today’s exposure, of holding in talking about anxiety, of living a life for appearances but swallowing in what’s deep down – it makes sense that these verses would be delivered in blitz-style rap to a racing heartbeat. Quinn references social media a few times in the song, each time negatively:
Flood my head with vloggers
All you ever see on Instagram is low cut jeans / From girls that I can bet are probably going through some shit / But make a fake smile till their white blood cells lit
Each time my heart starts beating I look for symptoms on Reddit
Elliott’s song, Internet You, ends with a plea for that All-American guy to:
Just be who you are
Bellion’s song, The Internet, finishes with some lasting questions:
How can you stop something not even there? How can we change this?
Quinn’s song, Sad Still, finishes with a question and a suggestion:
How do you feel?
They should see what’s under our mask.
This new year, I hope someone knows your reality and not just your appearances.
– theMonthlyJamm | January 5th, 2019
