Leaving the auditorium of the Royal Opera House last week after The Sleeping Beauty, I passed a woman taking selfie after selfie in the mirror of the hall. She had snuck out during the curtain call to have the red banquettes to herself. When she should have been applauding Yasmine Naghdi and Francesca Hayward — goddesses, Olympians, immortals — this complete nincompoop was basking in her own glory. All so that someone will post beneath her picture: ‘Hot lady alert.’ If I’d had a bouquet I’d have thrown it at her.
We hear a lot about abuse, the coarsening of discourse, the howls of ‘fascist’, ‘nationalist’, ‘snowflake’ and ‘boomer’, the constituents who torment MPs with nightly threats. I don’t wish to deny or diminish this side of social media. I quit Twitter on the principle that I would not willingly sit in the stocks next to a basket of rotten eggs and an invitation: ‘Test your arm! Penny a pelt!’ But the other online extreme, the hurrahs and hosannas, the garlands of hearts and stars, is insidious in its own way.
Post a picture, whether a barefaced humble-brag or a full Kardashian paint job, and the comments come. ‘Couldn’t. Love. This. More’, ‘Cutest human’, ‘Gorgeous girl’, ‘What a babe’, ‘UNREAL’, ‘Pure flame’, ‘Oh hello…’, ‘Wow wow and, I mean, wow.’ Whose head wouldn’t turn? ‘Smoking!’ chorus our followers. And for a moment we think: ‘Damn right I’m smoking. I am a goddess of fire and light.’ Only for a moment. The hit wears off. You post another photo. Beauty. Another. Stunner. Another. Perfection. You post, they applaud. On and on in an escalating cycle of attention-seeking and adulation until you start to believe your own artfully styled, sepia-filtered Insta-legend.
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