Welcome to social media narcissism
When it comes to secretly recording and broadcasting about strangers in your midst, just don’t
Blair and her boyfriend are depicted not as privacy invading creeps, but quirky chroniclers of a budding romance.
I was once at a popular dim sum restaurant when I noticed a young diner remove several untouched dishes of steamed dumplings from her table and bend down to place them on the floor.
She then stood up, reached for her smartphone and proceeded to photograph her food from a bird’s-eye view, because apparently this is the angle from which dumplings look most impressive on Instagram.
The wait staff asked her politely to put her breakfast back on the table so that they wouldn’t accidentally step on it, but she refused — at least until she had the perfect aerial shot of her probably cold Shumai.
I always thought that this was the saddest thing I had ever witnessed a human being do in the service of social media validation. Until this month — until the viral explosion of “Plane Bae.”
That’s the name given to a viral social media post about two strangers, a man and woman, who appeared to hit it off on a plane — and whose inflight encounter was photographed and chronicled online without their consent. Here’s how it happened.
Last week, American actress Rosey Blair and her boyfriend boarded a flight to Dallas, when they noticed that the two attractive strangers seated ahead of them appeared to be flirting. What did Blair and her beau do? Rather than simply eavesdrop like normal people or get over it and watch a movie, they decided to use the strangers’ chemistry — and the plane’s Wi-Fi — to their advantage.
They documented their fellow passengers’ interaction on social media, taking photos of the backs of their heads and close up shots of their grazing elbows. Blair did most of the work, writing to a rapt and growing digital audience of hundreds of thousands of people updates such as, “They (the couple) have been talking non stop since we took off. They’re both personal trainers. They have touched arms a few times. They are both vegetarians … they are sharing a cheese board!” And then this: “Breaking: they just left for the bathroom at the same TIME.”
Blair obscured the strangers’ faces, but she photographed them from behind after everyone exited the plane, luggage in hand, walking side by side in the airport. It was only a matter of time before their identities surfaced online.
The mystery man was revealed as Euan Holden, a retired soccer player who is relishing the attention of the incident and has since appeared on “Good Morning America.” However, I won’t reveal the name of the woman believed to be Holden’s seatmate, because she is reportedly less ecstatic about the attention. In fact, she is reported to have deleted her social media accounts in the aftermath, allegedly due to harassment from online trolls calling her a “skank.”
Meanwhile Blair and her boyfriend are the subjects of media stories around the world and guests on national TV in which they are depicted not as the privacy invading creeps that they are, but as quirky chroniclers of a budding romance.
This is a new low in the already base age of social media-fuelled narcissism.
Take pictures of your dumplings on the floor of a restaurant and you exploit nothing but your food and embarrass no one but yourself. But take pictures of other people without their knowledge and publicize detailed accounts of their intimate moments without their consent, and you cross a line into darker territory.
Of course, Blair wasn’t the first person to document an encounter like this on social media. In 2015 Toronto writer Anne Thériault live tweeted a play-by-play account of a disastrously bad date unfolding next to her in a café. Last year, diversity advocate Ashe Dryden live-tweeted a public breakup (neither revealed the identities of their subjects).
What’s interesting is that the tweeters in the viral incidents mentioned here are otherwise social justice oriented people — i.e. people who presumably value the principle of consent. Yet they appeared willing to compromise that principle in order to grow their social media audience.
Unsurprisingly, various news outlets published pieces this past week expounding on the meaning of privacy in the internet age. Business Insider, for example, concluded that in regards to the Blair affair, “There are no easy answers.”
But there are. If you must, regale social media with details about your own inflight romance. Live-tweet your own blind date and your own breakup. But when it comes to the moments — big and small — of the strangers in your midst: mind your own damn business.