I love this new piece by Jenna Wortham so much. (Hat tip Erik for showing it to me.)

"It’s success theater, and we’ve mastered it. We’ve gotten better at it because it matters more. You never know who is looking or how it might affect your relationships and career down the road, and as a result, we have become more cautious about the version of ourselves that we present to each other and the world. Even Twitter, a service steeped in real-time and right-nowness, has added filters to its photo uploads, letting its users add a washed-out effect to their posts. It makes me miss the raw and unfiltered glimpses those services used to provide of the lives of my friends and the people I follow."

What say you?

We've come a long way...

A little over a 100 years ago how you appeared to audiences was a relatively specialized skill. I'm always struck by how many early filmmakers were magicians, one of the few professions at the time which required an acute awareness how one was seen by not just a single person, but an audience. Over the next 100 years, as cameras grew in number and ownership, this presentation skill spread to us all. Today even children learn quickly how to pose, not merely smile, but hold themselves differently.

With apps like Instagram we moved from presentation to composition; not just actors but directors. Apps like Poke and Snapchat give us the skills of publishers, equipped with our own DRM. What skill might we take on next?

Jenna is completely right. Also, the exact opposite argument is right.

I say we've been conditioned to do too little bragging. If you get a great compliment from your boss, you probably won't share it with your friends out of fear that they'll think: Ugh, there she goes dancing for success theater again. But that might have been the biggest part of your day, and it's a shame I'm not hearing when it happens to my friends. It's why I ask on FB every week: "What was the best thing that happened to you this week? I encourage you to brag."

A refusal to brag withholds just as much as exclusively bragging. So the drum beat shouldn't be "fewer positive things," it should be "more real things." Or we accept it's not a full avatar of our lives.

If you can convince people that you're successful when you're actually not, you're on your way to becoming successful. This has been the case for a while but it takes on new forms when we get new ways to project status.

And I very much agree with Jenna's take. It's tedious. It's easy to get upset when you see friends being too self promoty or falsely modest but all the more frustrating when you realize you could easily be seen as doing the same.

The platforms get the credit and blame for this behavior but they're just a link in a much longer chain. I think a friend said it well, in a tweet, this summer:

"Instagram is what happens when the majority of images a generation has seen in its lifetime are advertisements."

Mistakes are honest. Go through my comments on Branch and I'm sure to offend Strunk and White numerous times.

Revoking access to edit published content will become a trend as more people want to shed the demands imposed by success theater. I am grateful that once I click "send" on Branch, I lose the ability to edit.

My question: what other platforms, networks, forums actively encourage people to give up on tinkering towards perfection in favor of submitting a first draft?

Noah: I'm sure you're onto one of the root causes of Polaroid romanticism.

IMHO, you guys are focusing on the wrong part of Jenna's piece. I think her most profound observation was this: "the real real-time social Web is coming, in one form or another."

Not this: "These applications are the opposite of groomed; they practically require imperfection, a sloppiness and a grittiness that conveys a sense of realness,"

Snapchat is fascinating not because it lacks "bragging," "audience," or "filters." It's fascinating because it shows us trending towards the desire to be constantly connected.

People use Snapchat when they have nothing particularly interesting to say, and when there's nothing beautiful in front of them. The desire to stay connected is more significant than the "grittiness" of the performance, I think.

I don't think you can separate those two ideas: the grittiness creates an environment where unpolished, casual connections can occur with less pressure to put on a good face. That they're unpolished and temporally bound is laying the conversational foundation for a real-time social web.

Agree with @Drew! Two sides of the same coin.

Lowering expectations about your participation makes the platform more viscous — you can sort of "pour" SnapChat into the cracks between blog posts, tweets, branch posts, Instagrams, etc. And those moments (Mostly because they're the only ones left!) are inherently gritty, unpolished, unbeautiful, etc. They don't meet the standards of any other platform, but SnapChat condones that.

I think making the Snaps (?) disappear after x seconds was a particularly good way to lower expectations, but it's not the only way. Personally, I don't think I'd use SnapChat any differently if they took that away (but still kept photos private).

I will admit, though... even on SnapChat, I don't let myself stop performing completely.

Outside my 1-2 closest friends I have always sent nearly anything to, I still find myself performing with everyone else. EVEN THOUGH the photos will disappear, EVEN THOUGH they can only see them for 5 seconds, they will still see them and still judge me on them. That's just human nature, I think.

Anyone else feel the same? Or am I just particularly neurotic :)

Absolutely. I often don't respond to snaps until I have a funny/witty response (not often). Or decide to send snaps simply because I see/think of something that'll cause a laugh. Again, the types of stuff I'm sharing (for the purpose of staying connected) is new. There's still performance.

Everyone, please post your snapchat handle.

I'm codyboom.

HA! Wait. That's super interesting. For all this hemming and hawing about avoiding "success theater," ARE WE ALL STILL PERFORMING?

(I'm my firstlast but I got a random snap from a random dude the other day so now I'm boring and only friends can send me snaps. Add me!)

Yeah, I think there might be a performance false dichotomy here. Maybe it's just me, but I'm always performing. At family events, social outings, meetings. There's no "me" there outside of the collection of multi-variate performance schemes for different situations.

Getting snapchat now, so I can make some duck lips.

We're always performing! I'm fascinated that we're putting it into genres: success theater, humblebrag, white whine...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ERIK!

Oh man, I had this witty response but I messed up. I messed up big time. Thanks, though for the wishes! Snap at me and I'll try to find a party hat ya'll.

It's official. I have snapchat and im a firstylasty.

Joey Roth's poster is relevant here: joeyroth.com

And yes, everyone is always performing. The trick, as it has been throughout all history, is getting people to think you're not performing. It's called being "cool".

Erving Goffman wrote about social performance in his seminal 1959 book _The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life_.

I agree that everyone is always performing, but I think the performances become more challenging and exhausting when we're performing for audiences that are larger and/or hidden from us.