Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

Author:Kyle Chayka [Chayka, Kyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2024-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE RISE OF INFLUENCERS

One streaming television show epitomized the flattening of culture in the algorithmic platform era. It debuted on Netflix in October of 2020, during a pandemic that still had most people the world over stuck in their homes with no other choice but to watch TV. Still, it was surprising how quickly the show came to dominate conversation (online, at least, where all nondomestic discussion was happening). Emily in Paris was the creation of Darren Star, the director and producer best known for the Sex and the City series, an intermittently glossy and gritty portrayal of Manhattan life in the late 1990s. Emily in Paris was originally meant for cable television but eventually landed at the streaming service, where the entire first season was available immediately to binge-watch.

A show both of and about social media, the titular Emily Cooper—played saccharine in the extreme by Lily Collins—is a woman in her early twenties from Chicago. She might be called “basic” for her job at a marketing firm, her long ponytail, and her habit of jogging around cities in athleisure. Emily heads to Paris to bring her American expertise to Savoir, a fictional agency that specializes in marketing luxury fashion brands. Specifically, it is Emily’s job to train the staff on creating content for the Internet. Like a well-meaning missionary, she disrupts the relative peace of French tradition—long lunches, print magazine ads, runway shows—and tries to convert the locals to Instagram posts instead.

In Star’s Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw was a newspaper columnist who wrote about her dating exploits, shopping habits, and deep friendships—articles that were only hinted at in maudlin draft lines that appeared as she sat at her laptop. Bradshaw’s role as a writer made her a productive part of culture: she was constructing a particular personal philosophy of life and love. Emily, by contrast, is simply a professional consumer. Her version of Carrie’s writing is taking photos with her phone, which is a constant presence in the show.

In the first episode, she pulls it out and takes a selfie with the view from her chambre de bonne. Then a symbolic representation of her phone screen pops up within the camera’s real-life frame. Emily posts the photo to an unnamed Instagram equivalent (to avoid copyright infringement), and her number of followers on the generic platform appears on screen. She changes her username from @emilycooper to @emilyinparis. Later in the same episode, she takes another Parisian selfie—her follower count has quadrupled, and then it jumps up again when she posts the image. She reacts to the number with bemused satisfaction. In the second episode, her followers have gone up by a factor of ten as she posts snapshots of a market. The number of likes and comments on her images spin upward like the wheels on a slot machine: she has hit the social media jackpot, acquiring strangers as intimate fans of her personal life.

This visual gimmick persists throughout the show as Emily takes yet more selfies, documents parties, and shows off outfits.

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