Platformed self-presentation splits freedom imagery from actual precarity narratives

Evidence

Alyssa Vanilla, whose YouTube channel has nearly fifteen thousand subscribers, tells of similar things—how to stay warm in the winter in a car, how to stay cool in the summer in a car, how to cook food in a car, how to pee in a car, how to date in a car—along with videos that tell of her sadness, loneliness, and anxiety. … Vanilla’s #carlife looks radically different on her Instagram page than it does on YouTube. One is filled with well-lit, glamorous pictures of nature, of camping, of travel; the other is filled with videos where Vanilla talks about her feelings, the lack of a future in America, her car (meaning her home) getting totaled, her emotional and psychological struggles. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 204

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The split between Instagram glamour and YouTube confession — one body, two selling selves — is a strong seed for a work about what a person becomes when they must present two divergent truths simultaneously.