There’s a huge cry for transparency and truth in advertising these days in the world of social media. I’ve seen numerous bloggers address the idea of “getting real” with their blogs this year in a protest against the worlds we create for ourselves online that, while not the blatant lies that Jason’s pizza geek creates in this music video {which are pretty blatant, but then again, so is Brad Paisley’s styling himself into GQ}, are still sanitized and idealized versions of reality. We all do it. We’re all trying to manage and cultivate our online brand, and no one wants their personal or professional brand associated with a pile of dishes in the sink, a bunch of paperwork strewn all over the desk, or the yoga pants and ancient college t-shirt we’re writing our blog posts in. Not me, but just sayin…yeah. Okay. I like my yoga pants. Don’t judge me.
Still, it’s like looking at an image that’s been through Photoshop. There’s a certain degree of alteration that can be done where you say, okay, light adjustments, level adjustments, a blemish air-brush here and there…and then there’s total reconstruction, where it crosses the line from being a photo into being art. More and more, we’re looking at our online lives and transparency that way. No one wants to see your dirty laundry, but no one also wants to hear that you don’t have any dirty laundry either, that after you wear them, all your clothes are magically sanitized and smell like daisies without ever having gone into a hamper, even a Pinterest-worthy hand-woven rattan hamper.
We want to present our best selves online, or at least a self that best represents whatever our professional or personal brand might be. We edit our content, Instagram-filter or Lightroom-filter our photos, turn our noses up at pictures that aren’t Pin-worthy, and basically expect the very best content from ourselves and blogs we follow…but when do we hit that point where it’s too much, where our online lives have become too far removed from our real lives to be honest?
But let’s just suppose we take that out of the equation and consider honesty. Will the cry for honesty make us stop being snooty over non-DSLR non-color-adjusted photos or standard layouts and the displayed perfection that we look for online? Can we truly be “honest” online?
What if we come across the blogging equivalent of Jason Alexander’s pizza geek? What would we think of his honesty? There’s a pretty good reason that he’s hiding behind the “so much cooler” online persona, and it’s the same reason that we hide all the dirty dishes and non-Pinterest-worthy kitchens and other little pieces of our lives that we don’t want the online world to see. We judge. The song encourages us to mock the pizza geek who’s avoiding judgment {which brought up issues of bullying when it was first released}. Even if we don’t outright do that to things we deem Pinterest-unworthy, what’s our real reaction to “honesty?”
Weigh in here, folks – I’d love to hear what you think! How “real” should we get, and how much editing can we do to our lives before we become fake versions of ourselves?