The Digitalized Personality
After scrolling through TikTok for just five minutes, I’m sure this is what you see: advice influencers with no credentials giving therapy-like pep talks, micro-celebrities detailing their breakups for views, and creators doing fit checks with a link below to TikTok Shop. Personality has become a performance or even a job in today’s digital landscape. There’s no longer a distinction between being yourself and performing yourself; they’ve merged together.
We live in a time where the self is branded for the attention economy. Social media has turned personality into a product, packaging authenticity, visibility, and relatability into marketable commodities, constructing personality in new ways. A culture that once honored talent or lived experience is now honoring the rise of performance, something you can build, alter, and sell.
This didn’t come out of nowhere. The cultural historian Warren Susman discussed this in 1984 in the chapter "Personality and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture" from Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. Susman wrote that 20th-century America shifted from valuing character to valuing personality. While “character” is about acting being “good” (guided by morals when no one is watching), “personality” is about being good because everyone is watching. The difference lies in visibility. What Susman saw in early Hollywood, the rise of the close-up and the movie star in film, is now incorporated in our digital culture. Social media allows everyone to reach mass audiences and participate in personality culture and the performance of self.
The influencer actualizes this shift. To disappear from social media algorithms is to lose relevance. That’s why Victoria Paris posted four times a day in her early TikTok career, and why someone like Trisha Paytas can cry over a chicken nugget on camera and gain followers. Consistent exposure through posts or public appearances is necessary in today’s attention economy, and oversharing has become its own genre. It is a way of proving you’re worth watching and showing up on people's screens. But the irony is that “being real” is now something that is curated.
Authenticity has become a marketing strategy. Influencers post “day in the life” videos that are often built around product placement, affiliate partnerships, or maintaining a curated image. The self-help aesthetic of going to Equinox, manifesting, and drinking Erewhon smoothies is less about actual wellness than about selling a version of self-care that comes off as “aesthetic.” Media scholar P. David Marshall explains this in “The Commodified Celebrity-Self: Industrialized Agency and the Contemporary Attention Economy," stating that we’ve reached “a new comfortability with the commodification of the self.” Furthermore, people don’t just market products; they market their personalities as products. This raises questions about whether these influencers' personalities truly align with the products they sell. An example of this is Kim Kardashian, who shared a post to Instagram promoting Diclegis, a drug used for morning sickness, without stating the side effects and having no evidence of actually using the product. Another example is influencer Ellie Thuman, who promoted Crocs for Coachella, while not actually being seen wearing them at the festival. How far will influencers go to promote products that don’t align with their personalities?
And in today’s digital culture, personality isn’t even limited to humans. Susman argues that personality is about the “externalization” of the self. Digital culture is increasingly advancing the externalization of the self with Artificial Intelligence. Machine learning models are trained on human data and can change their personalities according to what they are prompted to do by the user, creating their own personality. This challenges the idea of authenticity. Because AI can be used to mimic and create synthetic personalities through the use of deepfakes and AI-generated influencers, AI is truly externalizing the self into something that did not exist in the 20th century—the conception of human relatability without an actual human behind it. These AI-generated actors and influencers, such as Tilly Norwood, are designed to be consumable and likable amongst mass audiences. Concurrently, deepfakes can rewrite someone's behavior, thus shifting audiences' perception of their personality and damaging their reputation. AI takes what Susman referred to as “the culture of personality” to even identity with no human behind it.
There’s something both empowering and exhausting about living in a digital world where people are expected to constantly perform. The internet has democratized fame, but it’s also standardized it. And although we are actively aware of the consequences that digital culture places on personality and authenticity, we continue to participate in it.
What used to make someone stand out now makes them blend in—the feed rewards repetition. Being yourself was once a moral idea. Now it’s an algorithmic one.
