• Social media facilitates more relatable content, but it is increasingly as staged as TV
Image: PEXELS
Technology is a marvellous thing. It has opened up opportunities in places that were unimaginable.
For years, a stay-at-home parent, specifically a stay-at-home mother, would solely rely on the husband’s income. What we have seen recently is a significant rise in influencers or content creators who are stay-at-home-mothers.
Apps like Tik Tok, YouTube and Instagram have provided a community for these like-minded women who used to stay home and do ordinary things with little to no appreciation. However, with these apps, stay-at-home mothers (often abbreviated as SAHM) have found a platform to share their experiences, thoughts, creativity and engage other mums in discussion.
With the rise of social media as user-generated content platforms, a new opportunity emerged: monetising your personal platforms. This opened new doors for women who for many years sought ways to make money while taking care of their families.
Enter the mummy-bloggers. Ten years ago, mummy bloggers took over YouTube with their daily activities vlog. Most of these family vloggers started out as couples who documented their journey through pregnancies, birth, raising children and so on. Eventually, most of these families quit their jobs and went into full-time content creation.
Thus began the competition for the market. These platforms would only pay creators who had large viewerships as they were suitable for placement ads. Side note: I got a little sidetracked while writing this article and searched for all the family vloggers I used to watch seven years ago. I realised that I could not get past three minutes of watching a video without an advertisement popping up. Imagine that, with every three minutes of consumption is an advertisement you cannot skip.
No wonder most of us veered off YouTube. Luckily, with the advancement of technology, we received apps like Tik Tok that enable us to consume similar content but in bite-sized pieces. Tik Tok has become a SAHM content creator heaven. Those with degrees and experiences would curate creating content with their professional background when they were out of work. So you would have mummy bloggers who are nurses, sleep trainers or nutritionists, and so on.
Tik Tok has become a widely used app all over the globe, empowering millions of people who cannot work to make money through their content. Tik Tok has become so popular that it is almost snowballing out of control. In America, a bill proposing the ban of Tik Tok has been passed by the House of Representatives, but faces opposition in the White House.
As a first-time mother, I relied on tips and experiences from mum content creators. However, I am a millennial middle-aged woman with a background in marketing and production. I can spot fake and curated content from the first second the video plays. Not so many people can. Young people are especially vulnerable to deception and being influenced without being able to distinguish what is right or what is wrong for themselves.
There are content creators who spend days just showing themselves jetting off from one place to the next. There are some who take us along with them as they search for expensive luxury homes to buy. And then there are the ‘trad wives’.
Trad wives are what we call the traditional wives content creators on the vlogospheres. These women appear fully made up from head to toe as if they are about to head out to the Opera, only to make bread from scratch in front of the camera. Some of them curate a chaotic scene with their children in the background as they hand-make cheese and butter.
The trad wives agenda is to glorify the life of a SAHM, but it doesn't take an expert to know that these videos are fake and do not represent an inch of reality in that person’s life. How do we know this? Because most of us live this life. It’s almost impossible to get a full shower as a stay at home mother of two, let alone a full face make-up and fancy hairdos.
We can say the content we consume on social media is replacing traditional media. There’s a relatability to watching your average Joes and Janes on the screen more than watching the A-list celebrities.
However, just as we deduced that most of reality television is scripted, we need to understand that social media content creators are no longer depicting reality. The sooner we accept this, the less we will spend our time arguing on these platforms.