To Be Known Is to Be Seen

A self-exploration of the role of social media in facilitating mutual surveillance and the construction of identity for the self and others.

Watch. Follow. Refresh. 

A human’s average daily screen-time is seven hours and three minutes. That’s seven hours of our days watching, scrolling, remembering, and forgetting the people in which we connect with through parasocial relationships. 

Substack writer, Sherry Ning (@sherryning) likens social media as the twenty-first century long lost sister to George Orwell’s 1984. But Ning makes a distinction.

“Our screens do not exist to monitor us, but for us to monitor others,” she writes. “There is no totalitarian state behind our screens enforcing social order; instead, the screens turn us into the supervisors of each others’ behaviours.”

Take cancel culture for instance. A misstep, a resurfaced tweet, an old video clip out of sync with the social climate of the present moment. The verdict is ours to cast: redemption or exile. The accused waits in digital limbo while the crowd deliberates, scrolling, commenting, deciding. Who remains at center stage? Who is reduced to a walk-on role, to Tree #3 in the background of someone else’s narrative?

We log on, we watch, we decide.

I'm only twenty-two.

That said, I’ve grown up in a transitional phase that bridges the gap between life before and life after a technological takeover. 

Technology did not arrive in our worlds for many of us—instead, it simply was. It dangled from our backpacks in the form of a Tamagotchi, blinking and making noise for hunger and need. It lived in the pixelated fur of my Nintendogs, in the Pokédex catalog of creatures, each nearly identical but for some small defining trait. The lesson was there from the start: tend to them, collect them, keep them alive and they will perform to your requirements of entertainment. 

Now, the collection looks a bit different. A ‘For You’ page tailored so precisely it might as well have been stitched from the nerves that compose our bodies. A following list curated with the same diligence once reserved for a childhood menagerie. The lesson holds. Ignore them too long, and they will disappear.

Pinterest shapes the lives we wish we had. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube—these are not just platforms, but windows, keyholes, two-way mirrors. We watch, we study, we take notes. The difference between observer and observed dissolves. We are at once the collector and the collected.

On my twelfth birthday, my parents let me ditch my slide BlackBerry—good for little more than calling them in emergencies—for an iPod Touch. With it came apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr. The world, or at least some filtered version of it, glowed in the palm of my hands.

Before, celebrity existed in the glossy pages of Teen Vogue and J-14, a world relayed in interviews, staged photoshoots, and quizzes that decided for me if I was more of Sharpay or Gabriella (Sharpay of course). 

Then came the influencer. No longer untouchable, no longer shrouded by the mystery of print media. Now, their lives played out in real-time, a blueprint for how we might construct our own. The curated, the candid, the perfectly unplanned.

We became archivists of each other’s days, documenting in minute detail the who, what, when, where, and how. Our following lists were not just lists, but carefully arranged constellations of desire. We studied, we imitated, we broadcasted. And in doing so, we placed the strings in our own hands, curating our own defragmentation of fetishized voyeurism, and the ability to become a puppeteer of our own destiny. 

Curiosity and Comparison 

Humans are naturally inclined toward curiosity—we collect, dissect, curate. We map the edges of our own identities by tracing the outlines of others, biting off the parts that resonate, hoping that in the process, we might fashion something new. Something that belongs to us. Something others might, in turn, want to bite from.

Naturally, this leads to comparison.

We post a story, then refresh. Once. Twice. Again. We wait for the digital nod of recognition, the quiet acknowledgment that we exist in someone else's periphery. We catalog the way we wore the dress against someone we’ve never met, someone who most likely doesn’t know we exist. We measure the distance between admiration and imitation, wondering if we've pulled it off.

Magda Murawska, in The Dangers of Comparison, writes about this need to shape ourselves in the reflection of others. We compare our objects, our desires, our metrics of success. We edit, erase, reconstruct. Until the version of ourselves we present is polished, seamless, an accumulation of borrowed edges.

“The immediacy thrilled us,” Murawska writes. “The ability to be seen, to be known, to be watched. And yet, the more we performed, the less of ourselves remained.”

Through this process, we disappear in the repetition. The ‘I’ becomes a collection of things observed, a scrapbook of borrowed personas. Until, eventually, we forget what we looked like in the first place.

Intimacy and the Parasocial Relationship

“A parasocial relationship is a one-sided, often imagined, emotional connection or bond a person develops with a media figure, such as a celebrity, fictional character, or social media influencer, whom they don’t know personally.”

…Or so Google says. 

It is no longer just the celebrities, the verified, the anointed. It is the girl who sat two rows behind you in your second-year philosophy class. The barista who remembers your order and makes it to perfection. The friend of a friend of a friend you met at a party once six years ago, whose presence lingers like a song you can’t quite place. Any and everyone you’ve connected with digitally has now evolved into a new form of parasocial relationship.

We connect with them in the same way we connect with the famous. We study their choices, take notes on their style, watch their movements with the same quiet nature we afford those with real influence. We post a photo from a trending restaurant, hoping it lands on their feed, that it triggers something, that it places us somewhere in their mental map of online characters.

But parasocial relationships are not a one-way street.

Not only do we, the watchers, form attachments to the watched, but the watched, in turn, shape themselves in response. They sense the expectation, the weight of it, the silent contract formed the moment someone hits “follow.” They adjust, refine, and cater. 

“The proliferation of devices surrounding us at all times may help us ‘get in touch’ with other people, sure,” writes Substack user @catherineshannon, “but they impede our ability to get in touch with ourselves.”

So we curate and construct. We create the person we need our audience to believe we are.

And yet we know that everything online is not to be taken at face value. We say it out loud, roll our eyes at the obviousness of it, giggle with our friends about the obscurities of lies we’ve witnessed and still, we fall for it every day.

Have you ever met someone in person whom you had engaged with online, only to find them unrecognizable? Their voice is different, their energy off, their presence nothing like what you had come to expect. This is not their fault. Not entirely. More often than not, you’ve placed them as a version of themselves that you believed to be true.

Blame should not be placed on only the creator, but on the creation.

FOMO

Fear of missing out, a self diagnosis at best, but a disease we all share that correlates directly to our presence online. 

But one thing we all forget is that one day we will be forgotten. To not be online is to be forgotten by nature. 

“Without social media, I became an enigma, but I also became inconvenient. People forgot to invite me to things because the invite was sent via Instagram group chat, an app I no longer had. Friends stopped reaching out because I was no longer passively present in their feeds. There were no casual ‘saw your status or post, let’s catch up’ messages, because there were no posts to see. The world, I realized, is built on passive connection, on the low-effort maintenance of relationships through shared content, mutual voyeurism, and the occasional emoji reaction. Without that, you become a ghost, haunting the edges of people’s lives but never quite materializing,” describes Substack user @misstyped.

It’s a cruel irony the way we’ve placed ourselves in the epicenter of constant connection, as if social presence is some inescapable being. We didn't ask for it, but somewhere along the way, we were lured into this spectacle.

Youthquaker’s Editor, Daisy Woelfling, has written about it, too—her experiment with relinquishing her smart device, returning to the flip phone, unplugging her life in a way that felt almost rebellious. I remember the first time we met, her telling me about it, how she still had access to social media through the isolation of her computer and music was relegated to a portable CD player. She had created a life that seemed both simpler and more deliberate, and I couldn't help but feel the weight of my own dependence on the constant hum of notifications. 

I found myself jealous and in awe, as I am part of the problem too. I love my phone and the connections I hold, but what would it be like to throw that all away?

Not long after, she wrote of her return to the smartphone. It was too convenient, she explained—everything in that tiny brick box, always at hand. We are nothing if not creatures of convenience, after all.

That’s exactly it—we are nothing but a product of our own creation, wrapped in a beautiful pink satin bow, our identity neatly packaged for the public’s gaze.

I am no stranger to this, of course. This very article is built upon the framework of others—those I admire, those I borrow from, whether I know them personally or not. It’s all a collage, a collection of borrowed ideas and reflections stuffed into a tiny carry-on suitcase that wants to burst. I kick myself for not having come up with the original thoughts first, for needing to piggyback off the initial musings of writers on Substack. It can all hinge on a single word they used—one simple phrase that suddenly sets the tone for an entire perspective, one I feel compelled to respond to, reshape, and call my own.

I feel it all—the parasocial bonds to my favorite fashion influencers, the writers whose words have me thinking back to them every other day, musicians who were able to convey an emotion with instruments. Even the friends of a friend of a friend who I met six years ago at a party still plays a role.

There will forever be an ever-present pull. I fear missing out—what if I turn my phone off and, in that split second, someone tries to reach me? What if the newest, hottest bar in town slips past me and I never know? And the ceaseless comparison to others gnaws at me daily. 

But here’s the truth: it’s exhausting. This dance of curation, this fear of disconnection, this longing to be seen without ever being truly known. In the end, we are all just fragments of what we choose to show, edited and filtered. There is not a single person who doesn’t fall victim.

Photos: Cyril Torrejas. Model: Jasmine Rundassa