The Sweet Joy of Being a “Nobody”
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Or how the idea of being considered “someone” by the standards of nowadays media machine, is one of the things that would least excite me in life.
In a virtual universe like that of Twitter, where, like fur on a kitten, there are so many accounts that have amounts greater than 100,000 followers , you would think that an account like mine, with a bit over 75,000 followers, would be considered as something “average”, considered it belongs to me, a proud homely-looking millennial Latina, who has spent a good part of her life doing nothing but activities related to writing, and thus would be uninteresting to those “talent hunters”, who dance through life, hoping to find the next “sexy girl ”from the internet. And yet the improbable happened. Over time, I have received messages telling me that maybe, showing a little more skin, and putting aside the written content that I upload to my social media profiles to turn into R-rated ventures, could help me become an “internet star” in just a few months. It was even suggested that I should make use of plastic surgery (obviously, sponsored by them, my wanna-be patrons) to become more “attractive” to potential followers…. The above, by itself, is questionable, but it is even stranger, when thinking that they were addressing a person like me, who is not distinguished by even posting thousands of selfies daily. But a quick visit to the profiles of the people who sent me these types of messages, made me realize that they were related to some aspiring local influencers, many of them, under 25, posting content specifically aimed at male audiences. For whom is this technique of approaching aspiring influencers or starlets a big business?
When rejecting the offers of these guys, I received some messages from fake accounts with insults that said things such as “A puritan like you, has no place on social media” “You are nobody, and you will never stop being one.” Obviously, I blocked and reported the accounts and messages. But then, I thought about how many other aspiring influencers will fall into the hands of people like this. How many young people end up giving in to manipulation, hoping for a little “fame”? I know what happened to me could have been nothing but a sick joke, the product of idle and twisted minds, but it tells you a lot about the machismo that swarms to this day in social networks.
