THE GRAVEYARD OF UNREAD MESSAGES AND DRAFT POSTS

 By Khushi Parikh, TYBAMCJ

I will ask you to do something….Check your Instagram, RIGHT NOW. 

When you open it, it’s a flood of stories from your friends, reels from your favourite creators and a FYP (for you page)  full of memes and relatable content. But in that sea of infinite curated stories, stylized reels and carefully designed posts, lies a hidden place. A place that is buried deep in everyone’s accounts: a graveyard. A graveyard full of draft posts you never posted, edits you made but don’t want to share.But we will come back to that.

 

Because to reach the graveyard, we first need to talk about the phenomena that spawned it. 

Let's talk about the vibrancy that is the homepage of every social media platform. 

On Instagram, it's a flood.It's Instagram where trends and aesthetics thrive..and die. Be it memes that market your beloved brands, or reels with the latest trending dance challenge, Instagram is where people build,share with each other mini-worlds of aesthetics. These aesthetic themes albeit are defined by their targeted appeal to it's audience and also their shortened nature. An example is the festive season. Every festive season, cyclical trends emerge. Fashion brands bring out their Diwali sales a month early, reels are flooded with GRWM videos of people wearing chania cholis and stories are packed with pandal hoppers. 

An instance we all must have observed was how much Lalbhagcha Raja not only ruled the streets of Mumbai, but also our social media feeds. On Twitter (now,X), it's an explosion. 

X has always been the playground of ideas, life hacks and actionable advice and now it's one of the primary launchpads of founders who are “building in public” : Sharing their personal story, insights on building their business/project consequently to them actually scaling their work.  

Companies, especially Tech startups are leveraging the power of X as if it's fuel to their market exposure rocket! Cluely, the viral “cheat on everything” startup has used X as it's launchpad, with their first launch post (as reported by startupspells.com) amassed 7M+ views, 3.4K+ retweets, 20K+ likes, 10K+ bookmarks : enough traffic to risk bringing the site down. 

On YouTube, it's a cascade.One short after the other, you see snippets of the most trending K-dramas and movies, with some people feeling they know the entire plot, without EVER seeing the film! Video is the new nation, and Podcasting is its primary currency :  with just one controversial podcast of Raj Shamani featuring India's most renowned runaway billionaire reported to amass a whopping 20M within 4 days of its release in June 2025.  

On Facebook…I wouldn't know. Because not only has it become a dead zone for Gen-Z, its main attraction is now to be “inward-facing” with more and more people finding solace in FaceBook communities. 

Cultural Capital in a Digital World - its a Creator's Economy. To apply Bourdieu's cultural capital to social media, the collection of social assets is expanded to include digital assets such as tweets, posts, reels etc; along with the person's overall online competencies - how they dress, talk, act in front of the camera (Bourdieu, 1986). Bourdieu dictates that the accumulation of cultural capital is done to enable social mobility - that is to advance from your existing social class to a higher one.

Here, social mobility is possible, perhaps more than ever before. Through social media, you can create a leverage beyond what you've studied, beyond what surname you have. You can be truly influential and impact lives, not just of your audience but also the “lives” of the brands who are willing to pay for your time and efforts. This is through  embodied cultural capital, in this context : “ your vibe”. It boils down to how one presents themselves online, and how people perceive them. This develops through constant digital social interaction, developing insights on how to truly talk to one's audience.Social media has transformed from being a digital community to a creator economy, where people who create content, and the people who control how content is shaped, perceived and distributed gain the highest form of leverage.As a content creator, they gain this leverage when they finally win in the race to the 50K, 100K, 1M. Here, they can be said to get institutionalized cultural capital- gaining Prestige of being well-renowned, and in some cases, even well-celebrated for it. Eg: YouTube Creator Fest, where every YouTuber with the highest following is heavily featured and promoted by YouTube. 

Now comes objectified cultural capital. And as a content distributor or maker - in this case every brand that has a pulse over digital platforms - they leverage their content to gain objectified cultural capital, making their product or service the next BEST thing to buy, purchase or consume.Here, we can reference trends from “Netflix and chill” to the recent POPMART collector's item craze for Labubu's on TikTok, who have traveled the world more than you and I, getting featured in a Wimbledon match on Urvashi Rautela's purse to having starred on Kapil Sharma's show as a part of Sunil Grover's Gen-Z Girl Character. And creators? They are the distributors, the promoters of this next BEST thing, and more often than not, they become personal brands themselves, gaining objectified cultural capital in terms of accumulating these next BEST things, giving an image of luxury, prestige and authority. This is Avni Barman leveraging her knowledge of The Silicon Valley to build GenShe while gaining her own cultural capital through being a speaker (or attendee) of the most exclusive tech fests out there, to  Cluely's Daniel Min who's not just creating cracked content features on Cluely Execs but also developing his own authority as a creative professional stuck in Tech Bro SF by hosting his own Creator Meet at the Cluely office. 

The rise and fall of Fake Authenticity. It's observed how rapidly  consumption trends are evolving, showing that we as a species are now shifting to “information snacking” : leaning towards bite sized content in short form format. Attention span is at it's all time low, as we are now not even at par with a goldfish memory power.And with everyone battling to gain cultural capital by monetizing your attention towards them - through quantifying your admiration in forms of likes, views, shares, follows and comments - it's an intense battlefield. Thus, none now prefers “fake” content. The one post that clearly just wants you to buy their product, or use their service for $20 for a month. With purchasing power on the rise, viewers now look for quality, they look for stories that convince them to give : be it their money to get the latest Indu Ice-cream flavour, or their attention by getting hooked on to Sorted Girl's latest series on AI. 

How's this quality measured? It's through the power of telling great stories, tapping into people's sensory perception and getting them to truly feel, truly resonate with the creator or the creative brand. When content stops feeling authentic, your viewers stop scrolling. But when it's addictive, created to have them stay and watch till the end just to feel fake dopamine, then well, welcome to stage 1 of being a Doomscroller. 

Now where does this Fake Authenticity generate from?

Answer: Symbolic Interactionism Theory.

This theory explores how we interact with social assets and give them certain meanings and interpretations that help build our social reality (Mead, 1934). In short, we create our social reality through shared meanings and interpretation of our interactions. George Herbert Mead describes the self as “ a social product” that is divided into two : the “I”, our personal sense of self, and the “me” that develops from social interaction, from external factors. He explains this through how a child develops themselves, their sense of “me” through imitating what they observe in their social environment and as they grow,learns to interpret and adapt better to more complicated reality with complicated cues. In short, our social identity is developed through social interaction, and built on how we interpret those social symbols. In the digital sense, our digital reality is dependent on how we perceive online behavior, on how we interpret the content we consume, and the format and persona we consume it from.This “imagery”: how one presents themselves, talks, acts and behaves online is perceived by an audience who interprets this as “relatable “ or “authentic” if they perceive that the interpretation resonates with their own personal ideologies and opinions. 

(NOTE: below is my interpretation of Zohran) 

An example here can be Zohran Mamdani, who is “relatable” to Gen-Z worldwide despite being, and talking about being, the future mayor of New York City. This is by design, as his manner, medium and message all cater to a Gen-Z audience worldwide who are collectively  navigating similar economic and political uncertainty as those in NYC.Here, Zohran is creating his image of “self” on being a socialist leader that stands for the working class, and the Gen-Z who admire him interpret his campaigns as symbols to perceive him as that leader, and as someone who speaks to their “self” : one created from the collective beliefs of generation that stands for human rights, cultural sensitivity and a disdain for those who abuse their authoritative power.

The subsets of the theory better interpret how we perform our identities, and how we even develop our notion of self in the first place in an online space. In social media now, the key to success is the knack of building an admirable yet enviable image that people can't stop resisting to admire, and compare themselves to. The content creator uses certain cues, like Hooks, style or format, that is interpreted by their audience in a way that labels them as “XYZ” and their audience as the people who aspire to be that XYZ. For eg, food blogger Shivangi Pithisaria's content establishes her as a food content creator who makes the most comforting and soulful yet easy to make recipes. A viewer of her content ‘s looking glass self would be based on how they look at their food making skills in comparison to hers (Cooley, 1902/1992). Ergo, how to develop an enviable “self” that makes others want to adjust their behaviors to match. Here, the looking glass theory by Charles Horton Cooley plays a role. One's self image arises from interpersonal interactions and other's perception. As content creators build an admirable social self, that brands reward them for, a viewer's self concept would be influenced, as they percieve their social worth through the same metrics of likes, shares and follows for their content, even if that isn't their original motive.This helps explain how manufactured authenticity is addictive, and why it works.

  

Let's look at where it doesn't work, through another subset theory. Goffman's dramaturgy theory involves how our identity is formed “frontstage” and “backstage”, and better explains my argument on how an average social media user perceives themselves online(Goffman, 1959).. Our online self becomes theatrical, as if a performer on the digital platform. Our "frontstage" behavior is how we want to be perceived online, whether it is to be as controversial as the Rebel Kid, or everyman like Mr.Beast. We want to look a certain way on the internet, and that is how our interaction online is influenced. How we comment, like, share and what we even post is constantly affected by how we want to be seen on this “frontstage”. Our backstage behavior is less performance, more real, we aren't compelled to perform here or at least not as much. This theory backs how “Finsta” , which is an Instagram account just for your close friends, was born.  “Finsta” itself is a phenomenon that explains how the looking-glass self, the adjoined performance pressure to be perceived similarly to your favorite creators, or even just your other more aesthetically posting friends, led people to crave authenticity and relatability. But this relatability itself came at the cost of backstage. Because when you want the comfort of your living room replicated in your hotel room, the lines of reel and real blur. What's your integral self, your innate self and what's performance, your social self now meshes together and loses clear distinction. Bringing with it again, the pressure to be “real” and “authentic” in a total manufactured sense rather than actively embracing the nitty gritty of real human emotion. Your backstage, your place of comfort is now also generated through carefully formulated content pieces that serve to hijack your emotions.Eg: Kendall Jenner was upheld as the face of Authenticity as she emotionally shed a tear onscreen, only for people to find out that this “backstage” glimpse into the real Kendall was just a performance for an ad campaign. 

In a world laced with opinions and judgements, in a Digital space that encourages you to perform, perform, perform… scroll, scroll, scroll, the manufactured content, and evidence of it being manufactured becomes more and more prevalent. And when lines between frontstage and backstage behavior blur, the internet no longer becomes your comfort zone but a commercial platform that sells,be it a product, a service or a personal brand, that serves to give fake dopamine to the user. And alas, comes the Graveyard effect. Performance fatigue stems from the Graveyard.Because when social media is just a source of pressure and performance, even DM’ a friend becomes a task, that again leads you into being sucked into the vicious cycle of performance, and unwarranted consumption of performance. This graveyard effect is not limited to a niche section, but to almost the entirety of Gen-Z who are now facing fatigue from the overload of information, and this need for performance of a certain sense of social self. This fatigue has different forms, from physiological (eye strain, headaches, sleep troubles due to excess screen usage) from psychological (heightened emotions, dissonance, lack of focus, fatigue to a crippling sense of FOMO, and at times, confusion on your own identity).  Despite all these forms, its root cause stands to be the same: that social media, and the internet as we know it, is rapidly changing form and direction. Our sense of self is not celebrated, but leveraged, incentivized. 

The values we had admired as bright-eyed young users - the ideals of friendship, love and sharing stories across the globe - have tarnished. We saw social media existed simply as a means to share,to connect even when we couldn't see each other face-to-face.It was the secret door to finding your own clan, a group that listened to the same underrated/overrated music, a group who would collectively scream when they saw the latest movies. This Internet of our childhood, the social media that used to be a thrill to operate with our 13+ accounts (even though we were well below the age) has been overflowed with an influx of optimized content. It's our online “backstage” , a place where we could simply be. With consumption on its highest ever rise, content has become a commodity. It's purchased, it's consumed and it's marketed like an actual product. Profits and recognition have become key metrics to judge success on social media, rather than plain contentment of sharing your own story or viewing someone else's joy.

Referred to a lot of people as the “Dead Internet Theory” - a conspiracy theory that social media content is now more bot generated than organic human content (Renzella & Rozova, 2024) -  The phenomenon is testament to the drastic change of the internet  we have grown up with, has slowly bloated into an algorithm-powered commercial platform packed with more bots than humans. It  is creating cracks not in existing digital networking infrastructure, but also having an effect on the psyche of the viewer.

Now more than ever, we are too tired, too exhausted to view our own influx of messages, as both private and commercial content play a game of mix and match in our social media feeds. The formulaic nature of “authentic” (read: tailor made to be algo-friendly) content has blurred the lines between a person's performance identity with their real one. Our sense of social self and the duty of performing it has become too much, for too little. Because with the influx of AI, the question arises, who are we trying to perform for? An audience who truly appreciates us, or a commercial platform that rewards commercial behavior? Or a dead platform where bots are trained to reason a certain way? Authenticity has died. And the cost of performing is too heavy for a layman not chasing cultural capital of likes, followers or brand deals. When the weight of this heavy load of maintaining social self, and chasing for cultural capital  becomes too much, that's when the graveyard of undead DMs arises.

References-

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood Press.

Cooley, C. H. (1992). Human nature and the social order. Transaction Publishers. (Original work published 1902)

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.

Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. University of Chicago Press.

Muzumdar, P., Cheemalapati, S., RamiReddy, S. R., Singh, K., Kurian, G., & Muley, A. (2025). The Dead Internet Theory: A survey on artificial interactions and the future of social media [Preprint]. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5085878

Nickerson, C. (2025, March 3). Symbolic interactionism theory & examples. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/symbolic-interaction-theory.html

Renzella, J., & Rozova, V. (2024, May 21). The “dead internet theory” makes eerie claims about an AI-run web. The truth is more sinister. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-dead-internet-theory-makes-eerie-claims-about-an-ai-run-web-the-truth-is-more-sinister-229609

Startup Spells. (2025, April 22). Cluely’s outrage marketing ad genius: The AI cheating tool that went viral and triggered millions. Startup Spells. https://startupspells.com/p/cluely-outrage-marketing-ad-genius-ai-cheating-tool-viral

The theory of cultural capital in higher education and its influence on equity. (n.d.). Every Learner Everywhere. https://www.everylearnereverywhere.org/blog/the-theory-of-cultural-capital-in-higher-education-and-its-influence-on-equity/

‘My true factual story’: Vijay Mallya reacts to Raj Shamani podcast getting 20 million views. (2025, June 10). Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/my-true-factual-story-is-being-heard-vijay-mallya-on-podcast-with-raj-shamani-getting-over-20-million-views-101749521986724.html