This new Dolly Parton challenge has me all aflutter. Because unlike Dolly Parton, who appears perfectly coiffured in all four quadrants of the aforementioned meme, I find it a chore to keep body, soul, and hair in place. I am far from the “woman who can do it all.” But I still love the meme.
For those not in the know, the Dolly Parton challenge involves posting profile pictures from four social media platforms — Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tinder — in one collage. I find this hilarious in many ways.
For once, we have been freed to laugh at the absurdity of our curated lives and reminded that our “hypocrisies” are available for the world to see. (Some of us have, of course, used this as an opportunity to multiply our ridiculousness, posing perfectly for each handle, but that’s a column for another day). That all the hours we spent choosing photographs, considering consequences, counting views, must reckon with the laughter that is the only counter to narcissism.
Such contradiction in the hashtag universe, however, merely provides fodder for hating (double/ quadruple standards!) or loving (so good at this game!). Each of these calls — for seamlessness on the one hand, and savviness on the other — betrays something of the ways in which we consume others. And ourselves.
We like types. We want to pin down people. In order to figure out how to orient ourselves towards them. The social theorists call this structuralism — every element in a system is held in place vis-à-vis its tensions with and differences from another. The important thing to understand here is that neither is any element stable by itself nor does either possess intrinsic meaning.
Hall of mirrors
This is also how identity functions, as an endless hall of mirrors. We curate ourselves for each of our social media platforms based on how we would like our imagined audience to see us, and as a result we only perceive ourselves in relation to the ways that we think we are apprehended. See what I did there? Stay with me; it’ll make sense soon enough.
This is where the Dolly Parton challenge delights me. For, by presenting to us the continued hollowness of our identity choices, it tells us that there may be other ways to live outside these echo chambers.
Long years ago, my friends and I, on the job market after a marketing and communications degree, were willing participants in a cultural phenomenon called the Myers-Briggs test. Over many sets of questions seeking to understand what sort of people we were, the algorithm went on to classify us into combinations of Introverted Vs. Extraverted (sic), Sensing Vs. Intuitive, Thinking Vs. Feeling, and Judging Vs. Perceiving. We soon realised that we could be any combination of the above on any given day. We performed our chosen personality by answering questions accordingly, exposing to some of us the superficiality and limitedness of types, and the boring nature of the bureaucratic world that needs workers and not humans.
Seductive tests
The appetite for knowing the self through these boxes does not seem to have quelled, however. I continue to take great pleasure in taking tests of various kinds telling me exactly who I am. You’d think that by now, I would know better, or at the least have some idea of self as accumulated test knowledge.
Typology — what kind of a sun-sign/ waffle/ volcano/ rockstar/ colour are you? — is a seductive proposition. For it tells you that somewhere in the universe, someone has clocked you. You are counted and you account for something, even if only as a type of potato. That in an adult life, beset by invisibility, endless work, and the contradictions of a world too complex to be quelled, it’s nice to know that someone (not god), knows you. Even if the knower is only an algorithm. And by the fact of being known, life can now have meaning.
The danger, of course, is that in the thrall of such longing to be acknowledged, we forget to offer the same courtesy back. A hall of mirrors, therefore, with nobody on the other side.
Here then is a radical set of propositions and antidotes. Be many things and no one thing. Laugh long and loud at yourself. One day a week, ask someone else who they are that day, and really listen. Turn off social media. Meet a friend. Oh. And take the Dolly Parton challenge.
The writer teaches anthropology for a living, and is otherwise invested in names, places, animals, and things.