The BBC News documentary “Inside the Weird World of YouTuber Burnout” describes a world where younger and younger people curate their lives for social media, sometimes sharing deeply personal things with millions of people worldwide. Many of them are said to experience depression and anxiety as a result of the pressure to maintain a public presence. If they take a break for the sake of their mental health they can end up disappointed when views upon their return do not match their previous numbers. More than once the narrator states or hints it is “unhealthy” to live on social media.
That message from a mainstream media outlet is an odious example of victim-blaming.
The mainstream media has paraded the trappings of fame before the masses for decades, making celebrity status something many people aspire to. From the 80s television show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” to modern so-called reality tv, the media took wealth and fame out of the realm of movie sound stages and made them seem accessible. While when I was a child one had to go through a stringent, gate-keeping process to get to that level of social visibility, social media allows anyone with internet access to become celebrities in their own right (as long as they understand and play by the rules of the platform’s algorithms). Fame, if not wealth, is more democratic than it has ever been. The flip side is some people are burning out chasing it, and their social media channels often document their burnout for the world to see. But instead of the media delving into the toxicity of celebrity culture and the ways it drives younger and younger people to use social media to the point of burnout, we are being told social media is the cause of their anxiety and depression. It’s a classic case of berating people for daring to want what they were told to want before they even knew they wanted it.
Whether they were born into fame or built a well-known public presence with the help of a well-connected support network, people we call “celebrities” are doing the same thing those YouTubers are doing: putting themselves and their message into the public eye. They aren’t being told it is unhealthy to put themselves out there, nor do they have to burn themselves out chasing algorithms or news cycles, because they hire people to chase those things for them. Social media management and publicity are full-time jobs with plenty of opportunities for overtime. The only difference between those burnt-out YouTubers and mainstream celebrities is the former do not have publicists or social media managers handling all of that for them. They (and maybe one or two friends) are producing the content, editing the content, posting the content, dealing with technical issues, and chasing the algorithms/news cycles, all that even before dealing with the public, which can be its own mess. No wonder they burn out, suffer from depression, or have anxiety.
It isn’t much of a stretch to realize a steady diet of “reality” tv and other aspects of celebrity culture are what aspired these burnt out YouTubers to use the tools at their disposal to chase fame. That is how advertising works: you market something to make people want it. It is hypocritical for the media to have advertised fame as something desirable lo these many years only to turn around and now create all manner of think pieces on how unhealthy it is for people to chase it via social media (as opposed to being born into it or having it bestowed upon you because you can sing, dance, act, or throw a ball, I suppose). Of course people want the same kind of popularity those folks have, and if whatever industry they are interested in isn’t giving them the time of day, they can bypass those traditional gatekeepers and go after it anyway, for better or for worse. “Chase your dreams!” we constantly tell young people. Then when they invest considerable time and energy chasing the fame they have dreamed of thanks to the celebrity culture we support we suddenly tell them, “But not that. It’s unhealthy.”
Instead of mainstream media outlets portraying social media as an unhealthy medium negatively affecting the minds of young people, it needs to turn a spotlight on itself and the ways it has pushed fame and popularity into the public’s face as something to aspire to. I would be happy to watch a documentary exposing the mainstream media’s complicity on this issue between videos on how to game the ever-changing Instagram algorithm and how to become a YouTube sensation. Let me know when it’s available for streaming.