Abdullah bin Khalid

You might have seen such a post: A student stands beside a workshop banner or a conference backdrop, dressed a little more formally than the occasion required, captioned “grateful for this opportunity” or something close to it. The caption rarely says what was learned. It does not need to. The photograph has already done its work.

I have posted versions of that photograph myself, which is partly why I no longer trust it. Something has shifted in how people relate to their own accomplishments, not because anyone started performing for an audience (people always have) but because the performance has begun to replace the thing it was meant to represent. A certificate, a seminar attended, a “delighted to share” post: these now function less as records of something that happened and more as achievements in their own right, judged by how well they read rather than by what they describe.

Ordinary social media rewards are visible. LinkedIn rewards being seen by people qualified to judge you, and that distinction matters more than it looks. Research on the platform describes it as central to how professionals construct and manage their identity, less a record of a career than an ongoing case for one’s employability, which is revised continuously. The résumé logic that used to apply only at hiring season now runs all year. Attending a talk, joining a committee, even volunteering, gets narrated in advance for its future value, written for an audience that will glance at it for a few seconds before scrolling on.

The interesting question is not whether people are vain, since vanity is old and mostly forgivable. It is what happens to the meaning of an achievement once a platform presents the visibility part of that achievement as a value. Once a system starts rewarding the performance of competence or civic concern, it no longer needs to demand the underlying thing, because the performance alone already pays out. People still do real things. They just increasingly have an additional reason to do them. The doing can be documented, and the documentation can circulate.

This is not an abstract claim for me. During a stretch spent volunteering with a local NGO working on interfaith harmony, I asked a few participants why they had joined. Many landed on some version of “it looks good on a CV.” This was not cynicism so much as an accurate read of the incentives in front of them. Do the work without a camera around and it barely registers anywhere. Put it on film, caption it, and it becomes proof of character sitting on somebody’s résumé. I do not take this as evidence about all volunteers, or all students, or all LinkedIn users. It is one observation, made among a small group of people responding rationally to a structure that rewards visibility over outcomes.

That structure is a media problem before it is a moral one. Neil Postman’s argument is that a medium does not simply deliver content. It installs its own definition of what counts as serious or worth attending to. Television, he thought, retrained audiences to expect that anything meriting attention should also be entertaining, which made plain seriousness look faintly suspect. Social media inherits that logic and pushes it further. It does not just reward visibility over substance. It resets the standard of substance that is judged by itself. A well-composed image of participation can feel more credible than the participation itself.

Herbert Marcuse had a name for the kind of person this produces decades before anyone had a LinkedIn profile: the “one-dimensional man,” someone who adapts to his environment so completely that he loses the capacity to imagine an alternative to it. Marcuse was writing about consumer comfort dissolving political opposition. Something similar happens here except that what dissolves here is the distinction between being something and appearing to be something. The platform is not really asking anyone to lie about their virtues. It is asking them to package the virtues, and if you do that often enough, the packaging stops being distinguishable from what it was meant to hold.

None of this is unique to apps. Randall Collins made a version of this argument about education decades before social platforms existed: institutions reward the credential rather than the learning it is meant to certify, because the credential is what can be checked and compared. Employers favour a confident interview over years of unglamorous competence behind it. Movements prefer a viral gesture of solidarity to the slower, less photogenic work of building consensus. Platforms did not invent the preference for visible virtue over quiet competence. They gave it a seamless architecture to run on, and that architecture bites hardest where competition is already fierce. In Pakistan, where roughly a third of university graduates were unemployed as of a 2022 study, a certificate that photographs well is not vanity so much as a rational response to a labour market that has made visible signalling one of the few tools available.

None of this requires anyone to be dishonest, either. A recent study analysing LinkedIn posts through Erving Goffman’s framework of front-stage performance found professionals continuously balancing authenticity against strategic positioning, not faking one in place of the other so much as producing both at once. That is closer to how this actually works. Someone can believe every word of their own “delighted to share” post and still be performing, because sincerity was never the thing the platform was measuring.

What changes, in the end, is not human nature but the price of appearing virtuous relative to the price of being so. An institution, whether a platform, a university, or a labour market, does not strictly need citizens who are good. It needs citizens who can be seen being good, and it will produce exactly as many of those as it is willing to pay for. The harder question, worth sitting with, is what becomes of an achievement once being seen amounts to much more than what is being achieved?

(The author is a graduate student of Political Sciences at University of Peshawar with interest in political theory, and technology’s impact on public discourse. He can be accessed via Abdullah1khan2002@gmail.com).