Today’s social capital spreads faster than influenza. You sneeze out a selfie, and voila! 10,000 souls have been infected with admiration, envy, and inexplicable urges to dye their hair. Fame, in the old days, required effort. Now, it requires Wi-Fi. Once upon a time, if you wished to be seen, you had to climb a mountain, fight a war, or marry into royalty. You had to do something! Now? Just wiggle your hips, switch on a ring light, and surrender yourself to Lord Algorithm to launch you into stardom.
Consider the spectacle of the 2025 MET Gala, a pageant not of nobility but of notoriety. Shah Rukh Khan, draped in Sabyasachi’s opulence, stood not merely as an actor but as an emblem of a nation’s aspirations, his arms outstretched in a pose that sought to encompass both the adulation of the crowd and the silent approval of countless online observers. His presence, while commanding, was curated—a performance for the algorithm as much as for the audience.
Diljit Dosanjh’s attire, a fusion of Punjabi heritage and haute couture, reminiscent of ancestral grandeur, was paradoxically validated not by tradition but by the metrics of social media engagement.
Priyanka Chopra Jonas, ever the ambassador of a globalised Indian identity, navigated the red carpet with a confidence born of both cultural capital and calculated branding. Her every gesture, every accessory, seemed designed to resonate across continents, a testament to the commodification of the self in the digital age.
In the influencer economy, being seen is not vanity. It’s currency. Visibility equals viability. If you’re not trending, you’re ending.
Which brings us to the darker side of this glitzy spiral. The tragic death of content creator Misha Agrawal made the headlines not for her final post, but the chilling note her sister wrote afterwards: “She built her world around Instagram and her followers. When her followers started decreasing, she became distraught and felt worthless.” In a world where ‘likes’ equal love and ‘shares’ mean self-worth, Misha’s story was more than a tragedy—it was a cautionary tale.
The line between branding and being has blurred. What once brought joy, expression, and connection, a bit of fun, has become a full-time hustle, often with mental health as the collateral damage.
Social capital has mutated from being a by-product of genuine connection to a beast we must constantly feed. A generation now refreshes pages more than they refresh their minds. We live not in the moment, but in the comment. In the ceaseless quest for connection, we risk severing the very ties that anchor us to reality. The comment replaces the conversation; the share supplants the shared experience.
In the end, perhaps the true measure of influence is not in the breadth of one’s reach but in the depth of one’s presence—a presence unmediated by screens, unquantified by metrics, and unshaken by the vanities of digital acclaim.
The world of social media is but a stage, and we are all actors playing our parts. But beyond the roles, beyond the filters, lies our true self—real, self-aware and blissful.
So, the next time you find yourself entangled in the web of likes and shares, take a deep breath, turn inward, and ask: Who am I beyond the screen?
Let us strive not just to be seen, but also to truly see ourselves.