Home For Fiction – Blog

Today’s post “The Problematic Allure of Social Media Aesthetics” is authored by Binati Sheth. She’s a writer, a gardener, and an amateur artist. Check out her blogs and essays. You can find her living her writerly life on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

When do you want to live? The past? The future? The present? If I were to give you a choice right now, what would you choose? Ideally, we want everyone to say the present. “I want to live in the present” should be the healthy choice. Sadly though, many people on social media are choosing not to. Enter, social media aesthetics.

Aesthetics is classified as a branch of philosophy (of beautiful things). These things could be natural, artificial, or hybrid. We all love beautiful things, and we all have unique definitions of beauty. Social media aesthetics are no different. A social media user creates or takes photos with a particular aesthetic framework in mind, to establish a brand identity, tone, and personality. It all sounds like harmless fun.

But, as they often do, humans end up ruining things.

During the pandemic, cottagecore, dark academia, and Y2K aesthetics trended globally. It began as a love for warm colors, rustic life, and a fondness for knowledge and nostalgia. I personally dabbled in dark academia while turning a blind eye to some of its problematic aspects. I wrote Victorian era letters to my pen pals while spinning a pirouette around all the oppression, instead focusing only on the opulence. As I was not alone in doing this, I noticed the problematic allure of chasing aesthetics. There’s an incredibly literal problem with aesthetics – it is not about impact; it is about beauty.

Social Media Aesthetics Push Materialism and Consumerism

I cannot do dark academia with my normal wardrobe, I have to buy clothes that fit into the starter kit that is readily available to download everywhere. Similarly, I cannot do dark academia with my normal books, I have to buy vintage books. And I cannot do dark academia using natural lighting, I have to invest in mood lighting that colors everything in a sepia hue.

You just keep buying things to fit into the aesthetic. If it is something I really live by, it wouldn’t be a problem. However, most practitioners of dark academia chase the trend. But trends come and go, and so do the requirements of the trend. You become someone who consumes fast fashion (because it is affordable and search-optimized). You become materialistic on a much deeper level. Instead of focusing on the academia bit, you focus on how your background looks and how you present yourself.

Moreover, maintaining an aesthetic is expensive. Trending or not, if you have to buy things again and again, you need resources. Social media aesthetics aren’t employable. They can become employable by means of AdSense revenue, creator funds, and/or advertising if and only if the focus is on the aesthetic and not the knowledge. You need camera gear, relevant fashion, an eye-catching background, an editor, idealistic diatribes about the world, and a social media specialist who can monetize the whole thing. All of this requires money, time, and a standard of wealth. There is no space for meritocracy. Rather, it creates an elitist framework.

Social Media Aesthetics Are Limiting

A trend begins when somebody goes viral for showcasing something specific. Whatever the original has, that sets a standard for what is beautiful from that point onwards. As you enthusiastically participate in an aesthetic trend, you force yourself to conform to this beauty standard unconsciously set by someone else.

Yet this way, you unwittingly compromise your self-identity. The focus becomes beauty, a particularly synthetic type of beauty that could be defined by easily searchable keywords. It is the ultimate form of escapism: You see the images, videos, and posts, and then you go back to living your own life while dreaming about this particular type of life.

The truth is, most online communities rely on social validation. Anything we do has to be validated by the members of the community, and consequently, while chasing an aesthetic, we unknowingly give power to people who don’t know us.

In chasing acceptance and validation from the perceived cool and the GOATs (greatest of all time) of an aesthetic, we force ourselves into boxes. Instead of self-expression, the aesthetic becomes about the expression of the original creator. Imaginary gatekeepers prop up everywhere and everything you do is scrutinized by how well you interpreted something, rather than how well you expressed an idea.

Of course, each identity has an aesthetic. As an Indian, I have my cultural aesthetic that involves use of colors, jewelry, fabrics, traditional makeup, and sounds. If I made my culture and my nationality my identity, I would become an incessant gatekeeper who couldn’t and wouldn’t differentiate between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation.

Aesthetics and imaginary gatekeeping

Unfortunately, on social media, the loudest (most popular) voices often don’t speak for the majority of the community. When aesthetics trend, what also trends is gatekeeping. Instead of self-expression, the aesthetic turns into a who-did-what-wrong whine fest with tags and labels flung as insults to one’s identity. Many creators are excluded as a result.

And so, when some people have too much time on their hands, they go on specific hashtags, and leave comments like, “This is not dark academia”. An incredibly toxic community develops around certain suspiciously specific pointers. As most of these individuals acquire the aesthetic rather than believe in it, it often morphs into a social identity.

In the absence of the aesthetical context, these acquired beliefs of fashion, color palettes, eras, and ideologies become the social identity. Together, this horde of individuals suppress or applaud artistic expression in their wake. It takes a turn to just the aesthetic. The prettier and more conventionally attractive a post is, the more standards it sets for the rest. Expression flies the coop. It turns into this frantic pursuit of clickable perfection.

Aesthetics propagate stereotypes and dilute meaning

What is cute or aesthetically pleasing establishes a stereotype. For instance, the Yami Kawaii aesthetic is a sensitive aesthetic, and severely depressed people and survivors of suicide (who are still suicidal) might wear it.

However, when some… paragons of goodwill took it on and started propagating a dos and don’ts list with the Yami Kawaii aesthetic, something interesting happened: A brand was launched and a stereotype was created with comments like, “Japanese people even do suicide in vogue.”

This is so predatory.

A community of survivors created an aesthetic that soothed them, and instead of supporting them, popular social media accounts jumped on the trend, hijacked it for financial gain, and created another stereotype for Japanese people and death fashion. This happens with just about every aesthetic.

When the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020 swept the world, we saw a trend of BLM support squares propping up everywhere. Instead of actually supporting black creators by sharing their work, popular accounts shared a black square and observed from a cone of silence as the activism died down. The story shares, posts, and videos were inauthentically colored into a brand’s aesthetic – colors, fonts and all instead of authentically showing support. The activism took a backseat to the aesthetic. Even with Yami Kawaii, the -cores and the -academias, most people weren’t invested in the expression. They cared about the look.

The Loss of Individuality

The dilution of meaning also extends to the dilution of individualism. Let’s face it, dark academia trended based on the beauty of European fashion and architecture, as well as the pursuit of knowledge. I loved everything about that aesthetic, and I participated in it to express my love for European literature.

However, instead of focusing on individual expression, the focus shifted to imitation. Instead of emulating, many (myself included) were imitating instead. Rather than individualism, the focus became choices – such as the choice to associate with certain groups, or to fit into certain boxes; choices pertaining to ideology, while ignoring the problematic bits; the choice to replace dark academia with grey academia.

It was vintage aesthetics but definitely no vintage values. Nothing mattered more than getting the perfect photo with the perfect caption. Not even the individual.

Being aspirational in life is great. However, when we keep focusing on a version of who we want to be versus who we really are, a trend emerges. Many MLMs, pyramid schemes, and reverse pyramid schemes have emerged from this aspirational aesthetic trend. “Imagine where you would be… Manifest your dream life… Buy this product/service/course.” This aesthetical appeal of the aspirational life has led to many problematic subcultures which could be an article of its own. Pigs fly. Elephants fly. Everything flies, including sanity.

Aesthetics are often paradoxical

Dark academia posts complaining about toxic masculinity are hilarious to me because what else did these people think happened back in the day when patriarchy was reigning supreme? Y2K posts complaining about big tech make me snort as well, because the Y2K aesthetic originally developed around tech optimism.

That said, due to the dilution of the aesthetic, captions and related posts about it are often about tech pessimism or have nothing to do with technology. With every aesthetic you take, the paradox presents itself over and over again. What’s the point then?

That’s precisely how I’ll end this article. What’s the point? Living in the past, the present or the future for the aesthetics of it all seems profoundly shallow to me. There’s beauty in authentic expression. Any expression. There’s beauty in the messiness of a human life lived well. Aesthetics are freeing. Cosplaying at an anime event where people understood what I wanted to convey without me saying anything was sublime. However, I don’t know why I don’t feel the same about social media aesthetics. Venture a theory for me in the comments?