The Empty Calories of Social Media
Or, How Excessive Posting May Lead to Real Jail, Not Just Facebook Jail
I’ve been working on a longer essay that I hope to share with you all this weekend, but I came across a tweet this morning that I wanted to discuss.
Jenna Ryan was arrested for her involvement in the January 6 insurrection, and last week federal prosecutors recommended prison time. Jenna became a kind of viral sensation for previously posting that she was “definitely not going to jail” and that January 6 was “one of the best days of my life.” Well, she might be going to jail, and if you’re interested in her case, you can read more about it here. Her confident assertion actually appeared in the sentencing memo.
I am less interested in Jenna1’s actions on January 6 than I am in something she told the judge in letter apologizing for her actions. I embedded the tweet below that has her quote, but it’s kind of hard to read so I also typed it out.
“I am constantly posting to social media, just like many people today. I share various posts of myself putting on make-up or eating macaroni and cheese. I love sharing my life because I love entertaining people and making them feel good. Sharing my life makes me happy. You may see a video or post that I share online and think, ‘she doesn’t seem remorseful,” however, my true feelings are not always displayed on my public social network. Much of my inner world is kept inside, behind the scenes because showing remorse for every post would be a turn off for my audience. I try to balance my life and come across as happy and well adjusted. It’s all about image management. So looking for remorse on my tweets and social media platforms is not the best route. I am marketing myself online and cannot always display remorse. If you want to know how I feel, please ask me directly. My social media is an image I project and not my real life.
So there’s a ton going on in this passage, but first, some background. From what I gather, Jenna was a real estate agent who’d built up a significant following and then leveraged that following for MAGA stuff including live-streaming herself at the Capitol. She subsequently complained to the court that she had been made a mockery of online, being labeled “insurrection Barbie,” that people said she was a “villain,” and that people made her feel like she was the “most disgusting person in the USA.” She also said she believes that the United States is in the middle of a war that is being fought not with weapons but with information, and when she discusses waging war on social media, it is this war she is referring to. She then says, apparently in an attempt to justify her social media presence, that “using military analogies such as ‘war’ and ‘fight’ are often used in political rhetoric and are protected by the Brandenburg standard for Free Speech.”2
I’ve written before about the difference between intrinsic values such as competency, relatedness, and autonomy. According to Self-Determination Theory, these values are in line with our basic psychological needs, and the more we experience feelings of competence, relatedness, and autonomy, the better off we are. Contrast these with extrinsic values such as wealth, status, and beauty, which are like empty calories. The more we get, the more we want. They don’t satiate us. This is partly why depression doesn’t decrease with affluence, and why so many rich people are bitter and mad even though, ostensibly, they have every material advantage in existence.
In a nutshell, people are predisposed to want to accomplish things and master skills (competency), contribute to and be acknowledged as a valuable member of a group (relatedness), and they want to act in a way that is authentic and self-determined (autonomy).
These are generally not values that are promoted in Western society. We value wealth, beauty, and status. This is an indisputable fact. Maybe you don’t. Maybe your friends don’t. But collectively, society does.
Which brings me back to Jenna Ryan. By her own admission, she projected a fake life onto social media. She said that sharing her life with people made her feel happy. She said everything was about “image management.”
This is like a blaring red siren of badness. Jenna wants to be accepted—this is what sharing your life on social media is, it’s an attempt at connecting with people. This feels like relatedness, but the fact that she can’t be her authentic self means that she is actually seeking a kind of status and shaping her behavior to fit into a specific kind of group. She even says that she can’t show remorse or other negative emotions because “that would be a turnoff” for her audience. It seems to me that Jenna isn’t even necessarily acting fully autonomously. Yes, she is technically free to either post on social media or not, but is she really? Does it not seem that she feels compelled to act this way by some internal force? I mean, she thinks she is participating in a war.
As I stated above, Jenna had been an active influencer of sorts for many years—the sentencing memo says for more than a decade. This is a thriving industry for many, many people. It’s a complicated subject because I think the degree to which influencers can thrive is dependent on the degree to which their online presence supports, rather than thwarts, their basic psychological needs. Jenna more or less says off the top that social media thwarts her basic psychological needs; she literally isn’t being herself. And to be crystal clear: Being “successful” as influencer and living a happy life as an influencer are not the same, at least in the common vernacular that defines success as generating wealth.
Another point. Jenna says that her online media presence is not really her. She also says there is a misinformation war. It’s unclear to me how Jenna would identify who is acting as themselves online. She clearly seems to take a lot of what’s going on seriously—she showed up to the January 6 insurrection, after all. But what if literally everyone online is faking it? Trump, Biden, me, you, everyone, just projecting an image that helps us in some narrowly defined, self-interested way.
There are literally millions of people like Jenna. There aren’t millions of people storming the Capitol, but there are millions, maybe hundreds of millions, of people who chase the empty calories of wealth, status, and beauty when what they really seek is competence, relatedness, and autonomy. Often times, the lines are blurred. In my opinion, part of the allure of Trump, part of the allure of #resistance, part of the allure of ranting about really anything online is that when you get those likes and shares and comments, you DO feel like you are part of something and you DO feel like you’re accomplishing something and you DO feel like you’re autonomous. But, usually, you’re just posting to a bunch of people who don’t really have any genuine connection to you, and the tweets aren’t actually accomplishing anything, and you’re only experiencing the illusion of autonomy, which is why the serotonin drip eventually ends and you do it again and again and again and again and again.
In a few minutes, I’ll hit publish on this post, and I’ll anxiously watch to see how many people open it, if anyone shares it, or if anyone reaches out to me. But I don’t write for those reactions. I write because I feel I have something to say, and the payoff of getting my thoughts into a cohesive form makes me feel good. I feel good intrinsically, and that lasts. I hope that hope that however you spend your time, it’s in the pursuit of intrinsic values that make you feel fulfilled.
I refer to Jenna Ryan as Jenna throughout so as not to confuse you, dear reader, with Ryan Reilly, whose tweet I embedded.
I’m not a constitutional scholar, but the Brandenburg standard is whether or not speech incites “imminent lawless action,” so the most charitable interpretation of Ryan’s claim is that she doesn’t understand the Brandenburg standard.