{"id":1914,"date":"2019-11-13T00:34:13","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T00:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/11\/13\/is-it-real-or-is-it-instagram\/"},"modified":"2024-03-05T16:20:45","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T16:20:45","slug":"is-it-real-or-is-it-instagram","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2019\/11\/13\/is-it-real-or-is-it-instagram\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it real? Or is it Instagram?"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n T<\/span>he Internet of 2019 is rife with social-media influencers and articles about them. Much of the coverage is fawning and superficial: how to become one, how to make $3,000\u00a0 per<\/a>\u00a0Instagram post<\/a>, how to make your house look like nobody lives in it, how influencers are the <\/a>future<\/a> of media and politics and culture and celebrity and just about everything it seems.

Carina Chocano<\/a>, a respected TV-and-film critic and successful magazine freelancer who won a National Book Critics Circle Award, wanted to do a different kind of story \u2014 one that explored the influencer trend in a more layered way.

Early in 2019, Chocano found herself in a creative meeting with several other women, brainstorming on a TV show and talking about Courtney Adamo, a lifestyle blogger<\/a> with more than 250,000 Instagram<\/a> followers. Adamo and her husband had uprooted their life in London, traveled the world, and ultimately landed in Byron Bay, Australia, where they are raising five children. Along the way, she built a brand based purely on images of her beautiful family, her beautiful surfer-mama friends, and her beautiful, spotless house.

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Carina Chocano, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for her book “You Play the Girl”<\/figcaption><\/figure>

As the conversation about Adamo went on, Chocano felt herself more and more fascinated with this digital-era cult of personality. \u201cWe were just discussing the mystique of it all and how these images are so compelling but confusing,\u201d she says. \u201cThere’s something sort of attractive and repellent about it at the same time. It looks so great, but feels really wrong.\u201d

A few weeks later, her editor at Vanity Fair called out-of-the-blue to ask if Chocano would go to Australia and write about Adamo and her cadre of beautiful friends. Her story, \u201cThe Coast of Utopia,\u201d<\/a> was published this past July.

Her story hooked me from the first sentence, and held me until the very end. As a freelance journalist who writes mostly about health and science issues, I marveled at the way her article differed from the more investigative-style, research-heavy stories I am used to. I also love surfing and Australia, and I am fascinated by the ways that social media has shaped society. Interested to learn about how Chocano incorporated a strong voice and cultural analysis into a story that could be dismissed as celebrity fluff, I asked her to reflect on the choices she made while reporting and writing it.

Our conversation is edited for length and clarity, then followed by an annotation of the text.

I<\/span>t sounds like you had a lot of ideas going in to the story, but how did you approach the reporting trip?
<\/strong>I knew about Courtney Adamo because she’s famous. But my editor really has the whole world down. She was like, \u201cThese are the best friends; this is the frenemy.\u201d I remember when I got to Australia, I thought, \u201cThere is no way that this is going to break down the way that we thought.\u201d But it actually ended up pretty accurately reflecting who the core group was.

How much research did you do about the women before the trip?
<\/strong>I started reading about them and going down rabbit holes. There were so many puff pieces in lifestyle blogs, so I had a lot of details about their shopping habits and the brands they like and all these material details. I had a lot of surface stuff but nothing deeper. Especially Courtney \u2014 she had been interviewed so many times and she had a certain way of talking about her lifestyle. So, I thought, \u201cOK, we’ll have a deeper conversation. We’ll talk about other things.\u201d

What kinds of deeper things?
<\/strong>I started to think about the categories of things that interested me and seemed to run through the story: Instagram and the idea of authenticity versus presenting this perfect life; how much control parents have over the children’s image; what their duty is with regard to the children’s privacy, especially when they’re very small; friendship and the presentation of it; the appearance of simplicity that, as anyone who is steeped in this stuff understands, is extremely expensive and inaccessible to most people.

That maybe makes it sound like I had ideas going in about what I was going to write, but it was sort of the opposite. I did a lot of reading and I did a lot of thinking about it, but when I got there it all went out the window.

What did you tell Courtney when you first contacted her?
<\/strong>I told her that I was really fascinated with the whole lifestyle \u2014 and living on the beach with five kids and just picking a place to live. It was both a profile and an observational piece. And that’s really what I feel like I ended up doing. She was enthusiastic when I first wrote, but she became more reticent by the time I got there and I never understood exactly why.

How long did you spend in Australia?
<\/strong>I was there for 10 days. I love those kinds of reported stories because I find that being taken out of my world. It gives you perspective and bring things into focus. Sometimes, when I go to report on things like this, there’s that initial panicky moment of like, \u201cOh no, there’s nothing really interesting here.\u201d

It was kind of an ephemeral mission. So maybe there wasn’t a story. Maybe it was just boring and there was really nothing to say.

I thought I was the only one who had those panicky moments!
<\/strong>Courtney was very busy when I got there. It was hard to get time with her and there was someone else I was trying to reach that I couldn’t reach. So, you start to panic. But in the end, it always seems to snap together.

You definitely present a point-of-view in the story. Did you develop that perspective during the reporting, or after the trip, when you sat down to write?
<\/strong>The latter. I just went in with questions. Some people felt that I had come in with an agenda, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. What I try to do is put myself in the situation, observe it as openly as possible and really engage with it. And then I try to work out for myself: What just happened? What did I see? And I really try to investigate how I felt. What did I feel sitting in the kitchen? Why did I feel conflicted?

I find reporting, especially on the stories like this, to be an emotionally draining experience. People always think the subject is vulnerable. I think the reporter is vulnerable, too. It\u2019s like this strange exchange of vulnerability. You’re in someone’s house and someone’s life, and when you’re doing something that’s observational like this, you’re empathetic to this subject. At the same time, you want to have critical distance. I think this is my personality, but I find myself over-identifying with everything. Then, you have to pull back.

How did the introduction to the story come together?
<\/strong>I actually remember the moment and having it kind of pour out of me, which isn’t that common. But I think because I traveled there, and like I said, had an overwhelming emotional, intellectual and creative experience, those things came together to form this amazing moment of inspiration. I was trying to process all the complicated emotions and the conflicting feelings and the confusion, and work it all out. That\u2019s been the approach that I find most successful.

The story doesn\u2019t have an obvious nut graph. You never say, \u201cHey readers, if you stick with me, you’re going to get a really interesting analysis of this influencer life.\u201d Was it a deliberate decision to not flag what was coming?
<\/strong>I’m anti-nut graph. I was a critic for a million years and the kind of stories that I love to read and to write are cultural criticisms that try to make sense of these meta-narratives that we all live in. I don’t want to sum it up for you at the top. I want to take you with me through my process and see where you land. Maybe you land where I land and maybe not, but it’s not an answer. It’s just a process.

Did you have a structure in mind before you started writing?
<\/strong>I don’t outline or plan. But I kind of zoom in on a scene or moment that feels indicative of larger themes, and then I try to pull way out for context, just to sort of orient readers to where I’m going. But I’m not going to tell you where I’m going. It’s more of an associative style that works for me.

What did you decide to leave out?
<\/strong>I wanted to ask about vaccines. All their kids go to this Waldorf school, which is sort of a hotbed of anti-vaxxers. But I was worried that any hint of controversy would shut down access, and I’d find myself in Byron Bay without a subject.

The husbands are kind of absent, too.
<\/strong>Well, they’re there, but we don’t hear the voices. If you follow any of this stuff online, it’s a very feminine world. It’s this kind of a Mama’s world, a married, usually white woman’s world. if I had interviewed the husbands, I’m not sure what I would’ve gotten from that.

You made the decision to put yourself in there, too. Was that also about wanting to take your readers on a journey with you and grapple with some of these bigger questions?
<\/strong>This isn\u2019t a big investigation. It’s a reported cultural criticism. If you\u2019re reporting a financial scandal or something, you’re going to talk to everyone to try to find out what happened, and everyone is almost equally as important as anyone else because you never know what you’re going to get. But in this case, there was no truth that I was trying to uncover beyond why are we attracted to this? Why are we repelled by it? Why is this happening now? What does it mean locally? What does it mean globally?

Is there anything you would have done differently?
<\/strong>What I didn’t get enough of, because I honestly didn’t know how to go about it, was talking to local people \u2014 friends of the friends who weren’t part of the group. One of the most interesting things to me that the story sort of illustrates is the distortion effect that social media can have on a small community. We feel it in life every day, but in a community as small as that one, I had this feeling like it\u2019s a magnifying glass on an ant.

You use a lot of parentheses in the story. Why did you make that stylistic choice?
<\/strong>It was a way to telegraph the cognitive dissonance I felt while talking to someone who was telling me, \u201cI live a simple, humble, private life, and my children are allowed to look at screens.\u201d And meanwhile I’m like, \u201cBut your sofa cost $10,000 and you have 250,000 followers and your kids are basically on everyone else’s screens every day.\u201d So, it was a way to communicate that without saying it or moralizing it. Just saying, \u201cHere’s what I’m feeling when I’m in here. I’m aware of all of these things at once.\u201d

How did you develop your voice and approach to storytelling?
<\/strong>It\u2019s a style that I think I developed as a critic. There\u2019s this idea that you either come at things like an elephant or a termite \u2014 that you come at things from this place of authority from up above or you burrow in. And I’m definitely more of a termite, like I’m just chewing through it and digesting it, and all I can really see is what’s right ahead of me. But then I come out the other end, usually there’s some insight.

Th<\/strong>e annotation:<\/strong>\u00a0Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Chocano\u2019s responses in blue. To read the story without annotations, click the \u2018Hide all annotations\u2019 button, which you\u2019ll find just below the social media buttons in the top right-hand menu, or at the top of your mobile scr<\/em>een.<\/em>

The Coast of Utopia<\/a><\/h2>

From the looks of Instagram, Courtney Adamo and the surfing mamas of Byron Bay are living the dream. Can it be real?<\/h3>
BY\u00a0CARINA CHOCANO<\/a>

PHOTOGRAPHY BY\u00a0TIERNEY GEARON<\/a>

JULY 2, 2019

<\/a>The subhed is the first hint we get that you are going to dig deeper into these women\u2019s lives, though you won\u2019t come back to this \u201cCan it be real\u201d question for quite a while. Did you write the title and subhed? And did that get written before, during or after the story was done?<\/span> I didn\u2019t write them. That\u2019s always done by copyeditors or editors. Sometimes I don\u2019t like them, but usually I really enjoy seeing how someone interpreted the story and how they boiled it down. It\u2019s different for online and print, too.<\/span><\/span>

 

C<\/span>ourtney Adamo\u2019s minimalist, Shaker-style kitchen is gorgeous, but you already know that if you follow her. <\/a>Why did you use the second person to talk directly to the reader right away?<\/span> I was trying to play with the false intimacy of Instagram, how it makes you feel like you know all about someone, when in fact you may only know the false self they present. I guess I wanted to play with ideas about how \u201cobjective reality\u201d can be false, and subjectivity, or context, or experience, can be truer.<\/span><\/span> The house\u2014one of the first built in the historic town of Bangalow, New South Wales\u2014might just be the most overexposed house in Australia. With its clapboard cupboards, wooden stools, bulk dry goods in mason jars, Blanc Marble countertops (\u201cslightly more expensive than the Carrara,\u201d she explains in a blog post about her kitchen renovation, \u201cbut we are so happy with the decision\u201d), Dunlin Chelsea Pendant Lights ($669 each), SMEG refrigerator ($2,870), Lacanche oven and stove (\u201crange cooker of my dreams\u201d and, at about $10,000, a \u201csplurge\u201d), the kitchen is like a scene out of Little House on the Trust Fund Prairie. <\/em>[This phrase is so descriptive, and really sets a tone! Did it just come to you or did it require a lot of thought?] It just popped into my head! Adamo (@courtneyadamo, 250K Instagram followers) is a midtier family lifestyle micro-influencer, which, if you don\u2019t know, is a thing. [Why did you decide to start in Adamo\u2019s kitchen, as opposed to say, on the beach or in the surf?] This was my first meeting with her, so it seemed like a good place to start. It really set the tone for the story for me, as well, as right away I was confronted with the dissonance between the values of simplicity she espoused and my awareness of just how rarefied and expensive and unsustainable her lifestyle was.

Adamo set up her Instagram account in 2011 to share pictures of the kids with her family. She didn\u2019t know it was public until she got her first comment from a stranger. Now that she\u2019s hit a quarter million followers, her settings remain unchanged. [More characters come into the story later. Why start with Adamo?] She was definitely the assignment, and she was the only one that I’d heard of. She definitely has the most followers. Of all of them, she was the most well-known for turning her family life into this narrative. She still considers her feed her \u201cpersonal thing,\u201d but there\u2019s something about the stream of photos\u2014the uniform palette of beige and white, ochre and dusty rose, the coordinated clothes, the styled life, the sponsored content, the kids like modern-day von Trapps\u2014that looks like a massive ad campaign. But for what? Children? Good genes? Good taste? Good luck? <\/a>The story doesn\u2019t have an obvious nut graf, but I keep coming back to this short list of questions, which seem to hint, if subtly and briefly, that there are deeper questions to be explored ahead. Was that intentional \u2014 to drop hints without hitting readers over the head with where you are going with the story?<\/span> Yes, I wanted to drop hints and seed questions. I wanted to engage readers and prompt them to ask themselves these questions rather than to draw conclusions or hand down judgement. That wasn\u2019t the point and wouldn\u2019t have worked. My point was to engage people and encourage them to think critically about what is presented as reality.<\/span><\/span> In the comments, her fans want to know how she keeps the place so spotless with five kids in the house. (And it is<\/em> spotless.) They want to know what product she uses in her hair. (Aveda is a partner.) They want to know where she got that dress, that paint color, those shoes, that life. They want to know her secret. <\/a>Tell me about the use of parentheticals throughout the stort, What function do they serve?<\/span> They\u2019re meant to illustrate the feeling of cognitive dissonance that was so central to the experience. It was a way to show how opposite things can be true at the same time, and how a story is as much about what\u2019s left out as about what\u2019s included.<\/span><\/span>

It\u2019s a rainy morning on the last day of school before Easter break, and Adamo, who is American but has begun to sound Australian, is making tea\u2014Earl Grey for me and herbal for her two-year-old son, Wilkie. Her look\u2014deep tan, hair up, no makeup, chicly lumpy oatmeal-colored cardigan by Spanish knitwear company Baba\u00e0 (@babaa, 95K followers), no shoes\u2014is laid-back, yet she seems preoccupied. Wilkie rolls around on the counter, drinking out of a porcelain cup. Every time he puts it down, I expect it to shatter. <\/a>We have heard your voice and your assessment of the situation already, but here you more visibly come into the scene. Why did you decide to use the first person and become part of the story here?<\/span> In a way, it\u2019s like the fly-on-the-wall distancing gambit only takes you so far. After a certain point it can feel disingenuous, even coy. The fact is, at that point, I was making a judgment \u2014 I stressed about what might happen. I thought it was better to show myself feeling this way than to pretend to speak for everyone about feeling this way. It felt more honest, and allowed me to be a character in the story whom readers were also free to judge.<\/span><\/span> The cup has survived four siblings, Adamo tells me, and it will survive him, too. Because Wilkie, whose entire life, including his birth at home, has been documented online, is having an old-fashioned childhood\u2014and that means no screens and absolutely no plastic.

\u201cMore tea?\u201d asks Wilkie, holding up his cup.

\u201cNo more tea, baby. Nope. Nope, we\u2019re all going to be finished. It\u2019s all gone. Do you want me to give you some yogurt?\u201d

\u201cYeah,\u201d Wilkie says.

\u201cYes, please, Mom,\u201d she says.

\u201cYes, please,\u201d says Wilkie. \u201cI like yogurt.\u201d

\u201cYou like yogurt?\u201d she says. Then to me, \u201cWhat was your question?\u201d

<\/a>What did you tell her (and her friends) that you were writing about? Did you share any of the big ideas you were exploring with them beforehand?<\/span> I said I wanted to get a slice of life \u2014 to hang out, get to know them, paint a picture of their lives. I knew I wanted to explore certain themes\u2014privacy, image vs. reality, the commodification of private life\u2014 but I didn\u2019t really know what I\u2019d find.<\/span><\/span>

 

\u201cJust in terms of working with your family.\u201d

\u201cI don\u2019t know. I love it. I love my family. I\u2019m happy to work with my family, and they understand that. Yesterday, the kids came home from school, and I was like, \u2018You guys, we\u2019ve got Millie here. I need family photos.\u2019\u201d She means lifestyle photographer and friend Amelia Fullarton (@ameliafullarton, 50.3K followers).

\u201cMillie\u2019s here!\u201d says Wilkie.

\u201cMillie\u00a0was<\/em>\u00a0here, wasn\u2019t she?\u201d She smiles at him. \u201cYesterday.\u201d

\u201cWe needed photos for the project I\u2019m working on,\u201d she continues. \u201cAnd they just get the drill and they do it.\u201d

<\/a>This dialog really illustrates a sense of distraction on her part. Is that why you chose to launch into this scene in the intro? Were there other scenes you were considering for the lede?<\/span> There was no other contender. I honestly couldn\u2019t say why the distraction struck me, but it did. I guess it was because I got the sense that she wasn\u2019t distracted by her kid so much as by my presence, somehow. But I don\u2019t know. Again, it was a way to invite the reader in, to ask them to participate in helping me make sense of it all.<\/span><\/span>

 

B<\/span>efore Byron, Adamo lived in London for a decade. In the mid-2000s, she became something of a mommy-blogging celebrity as a cofounder of Babyccino, \u201can international lifestyle website for modern mums,\u201d where those who don\u2019t want their kids wearing generic high-street crap can find small-batch, high-end clothes and toys. Adamo joined Instagram in 2011 and grew a decent following thanks to the blog, the lifestyle coverage, and the occasional newspaper piece (Adamo has a journalism degree from Northwestern). Then, in 2014, she posted a cute picture of her then 18-month-old daughter, Marlow, lifting her shirt to contemplate her navel. Instagram removed the photo, saying it violated their standards, Adamo reposted it, and Instagram disabled the account. In a Babyccino blog post, Adamo accused Instagram of deleting \u201cfour years of my family photos and memories: all the photos of our travels, my children\u2019s birthdays\u2026All of it gone.\u201d Tremulous hashtags emerged. Adamo\u2019s story went around the world. When the dust settled, her account had been reinstated and she has amassed enough followers, as her husband, Michael, once put it, to \u201cfill Wembley Stadium twice over.\u201d <\/a>You mention the husbands here and there, but you don\u2019t go into their stories very deeply or get their input. Why?<\/span> It reflected the lives presented online, I guess. The husbands are solidly in the background. In many of the cases they bankroll the life. But they aren\u2019t the protagonists of the story, which is populated by women and children. It\u2019s a pretty patriarchal setup\u00a0 \u2014Instagram as the woman\u2019s \u201csphere.\u201d<\/span><\/span>

 

A year or so later, Courtney, Michael, and their first four kids (Easton, 14; Quin, 12; Ivy, 10; Marlow, 6) sold the house, the car, and many belongings, and embarked on a \u201cfamily gap year\u201d around the world. Adamo kicked off the voyage with a farewell piece in the Telegraph<\/em>\u00a0and the launch of her travel blog, Somewhere Slower. Then, after a highly publicized, lightly sponsored 18-month global search for the slow life (they never really considered a return to the U.S., she tells me, because Michael dislikes the consumerism), they alighted in Byron Bay, Australia. Wilkie was born there, the older kids were enrolled in school, and, after spending a year and a half working on their visa applications, Michael began a job from home as a managing director for a Melbourne animation company. Two and a half years after arriving, the Adamos are fully settled. They might start the day with a \u201csurf sesh\u201d before school. In the afternoon, they might \u201cwork together as a family.\u201d

On Adamo\u2019s Instagram feed, which consists almost entirely of photos of herself, her beautiful children, and her photogenic friends perpetually dressed in rumpled linens in dust bowl colors, life appears to be not so much a permanent vacation as a permanent travel shoot; a slightly overexposed, subtly saturated, high-contrast vision of free-spirited order and control. <\/a>I just love this sentence \u2014 and what follows. You really sum up the vibe of what these feeds look like, and then you follow immediately with what appears to be a contrasting reality. I can almost imagine that you started with the essence of this paragraph when you went into the story. Is that true or did it come later?<\/span> Hard to say. Of course I\u2019d spent a lot of time looking at the feed before going. But it wasn\u2019t until after I went that I was able to really feel \u2014 as a person having the experience \u2014 how edited and produced these images of laid-back casualness actually were, and how much they left out.<\/span><\/span>

She has a lot on her plate. She has five kids. She\u2019s still blogging (albeit less) for Babyccino. She\u2019s managing her Instagram account. And she\u2019s getting ready to launch\u2014and has since launched\u2014a new business venture in the lifestyle space. Inspiring this many people really is a lot of work.

 

T<\/span>he dream of utopia\u2014of a life lived in a sane, happy, slow-paced, sustainable, self-contained community of beautiful dreamers seeking refuge from the crass, materialistic, cruel world\u2014has been with us forever, or at least since 1516, when Sir Thomas More coined the term as the name of a fictional island where everything was perfect and everyone was like-minded.\u00a0Utopia<\/em> is a play on the Greek word for \u201cno place,\u201d which, in the English pronunciation, sounds just like the Greek word for \u201cgood place\u201d\u2014as in, a place so perfect, it could only exist in fantasy, or on Instagram. <\/a>When did you start thinking of this story as an exploration of utopia, or the illusion of it? Did the women think about their lives that way?<\/span> Courtney did talk a lot about how great it was, how idyllic their lives were. And, of course, she\u2019d embarked on a world-wide trip to find her perfect place, so it was not hard to make the connection, especially given that the Byron of their feeds is an idealized and heavily edited fragment of the whole place.<\/span><\/span>

Some people follow the dream to distant lands, secure compounds, or intentional communities. Others just follow people on social media and live vicariously through them. Byron Bay, which has long been an actual hippie-surfer-wellness alterna-lifestyle destination, has lately emerged as a kind of virtual utopia as well\u2014thanks, in part, to all the ethical, organic, sustainable, conscious fashion labels to come out of there in recent years. Also, Chris Hemsworth lives there. Also, influencers. <\/a>This is a funny and chatty way to end this section, after you\u2019ve just brought up a fairly heavy idea. Was that intentional, to lighten things up?<\/span> It\u2019s a shape-shifting tactic, I guess. A way to navigate from one posture to another. The heaviness is real. The silliness is real. It\u2019s both heavy and light, serious and dumb, at once.<\/span><\/span>

By the time Adamo arrived in Byron in 2016, she was known among some of the area micro-influencers\u2014though she had never heard of them. On her first day there, she was invited to a magazine launch party. \u201cIt was so convenient,\u201d Adamo says. \u201cI was like, perfect\u2014what a perfect opportunity to meet people.\u201d The party took place at The Farm, an actual farm that also houses a restaurant co-owned by the husband of influencer and cookbook author Magdalena Roze (@magdalena_roze, 40.2K followers). Aimee Winchester (@little.winnie, 85.1K followers) was there, and so was Claire Alexander-Johnston (@jetsetmama, 115K Instagram followers), and Fullarton, who would later go on to shoot Adamo for Spanish\u00a0Vogue<\/em>\u00a0and the clothing label D\u00f4en (@shopdoen, 180K followers), among others. \u201cWe went for a coffee the next day,\u201d Adamo says of the women she met, \u201cand then we were really good friends, and our kids connected. Within a few days of being here, we were like, this is our place. We just knew it.\u201d

Byron Bay is on the easternmost point of the Australian mainland. It was named by Captain James Cook after his fellow circumnavigator John Byron, grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, of \u201cmad, bad, and dangerous to know\u201d fame. Even if you don\u2019t know the story, you kind of know the story, because it\u2019s the same the world over. The Bundjalung people, stewards of the land for 20,000 years, were dispossessed. In March of this year, Australia\u2019s High Court handed down the largest \u201cnative title\u201d ruling in decades regarding aboriginal ownership of the land, restoring indigenous people\u2019s rights to their traditional land and water. But until 1968, they were barred from raising their own children, moving freely, having access to education, earning more than a certain amount, marrying without permission, eating in restaurants, swimming in public pools, or voting. <\/a>How did you decide which details of this history to include?<\/span> I wanted to contrast the absolute freedom of rich, mostly white and\/or upper-middle (or straight up upper) class digital nomads with natives barred from moving freely.<\/span><\/span> In the late \u201860s, longboard surfers discovered Wategos Beach. By the 1980s, beach shacks on Wategos were giving way to mansions, and the hippie-surfer vibe was well on its way to being upscaled and commodified. Lately, the town has emerged as a mecca for makers\u2014an epicenter of small clothing labels and independent brands.

On first impression, Byron looks like beautiful but crowded beaches, high-end stores and cute caf\u00e9s, quotidian spring breakers, tourist shops and Greyhound buses, linen at a startling array of price points, and nourishing grain bowls sprinkled with petals. The Byron of your digital and increasingly brand-sponsored imagination, however, is all that minus the bad stuff; a carefully curated bank of images designed to stoke your lifestyle longings. (If such are your dreams.) It\u2019s a land of large, \u201cnomadic\u201d \u201cbroods\u201d who \u201cfind their tribes\u201d on life\u2019s \u201cjourney.\u201d Never mind that Australia\u2019s policies on immigration and refugees are draconian bordering on vicious. In this young, mostly white, ahistorical, neoliberal utopia of the imagination, anyone can go anywhere. All you have to do is have a yard sale, hop in the gypsy caravan, point a finger at a map, and take up legal permanent residence anyplace that best showcases your lifestyle. <\/a>So much voice and vivid writing here. Do these sentences come flowing out of your fingers, or is there a lot of careful sentence-crafting at work?<\/span> This just spilled out of me \u2014 after a lot of time marinating in the material and trying to organize it.<\/span><\/span>

Joe Gagliese, cofounder of Viral Nation, an influencer marketing and talent agency based in Toronto, couldn\u2019t think of another place like Byron Bay: a cross-tagging, cross-promoting, mutually amplifying, audience-sharing group of friends living, loving, working, and posting aspirational lifestyle content in a highly Instagrammable paradise. \u201cI think that that place, that Byron place, is kind of like one of those unicorn locations,\u201d he says, calling it an \u201cexample of the future\u2014it\u2019s either pretty scary or pretty cool, depending on how you look at it.\u201d <\/a>This is the first outside comment of the story, which is so interesting to me, because you\u2019ve already spent a couple thousand words telling (and letting the women tell) their story. Why did you decide to interview this guy?<\/span> My editor wanted someone to comment with authority on the business of influencing, for context. And I wanted to hear what someone on the business end would make of the place. I felt like I needed a reality check, or some validation of what I was seeing.<\/span><\/span>

 

T<\/span>he lady at the Hertz counter wants to know why I\u2019ve traveled here for work. When I tell her that I\u2019m writing a story about influencers, she looks at me in disbelief. \u201cIn\u00a0Byron<\/em>?\u201d Yes, more or less. She does not appear to be delighted. \u201cAnd they pay you for that?\u201d Well, yes. She turns to her silent coworker and says, \u201cI guess there are all kinds of jobs, aren\u2019t there?\u201d Together, we create a daisy chain of bewilderment. <\/a>This paragraph cracked me up, and so did the next one. Does humor come naturally to you, and what are you trying to convey here with this aside?<\/span> Yes! I started out writing humor, but it was always social satire. I\u2019m drawn to absurdity \u2014 the best subjects, the most illustrative of life and its paradoxes, are completely absurd and therefore important to pay attention to. And humor makes people receptive, too. It\u2019s a mind-opener and a defense-disarmer.<\/span><\/span>

 

The GPS tells me to take the exit at the roundabout onto Hinterland Way, which isn\u2019t quite as remote as it sounds. I\u2019m following the Adamos\u2019 dented white Kia to Wategos Beach. The van, driven by Michael, is packed with children and surfboards. I\u2019m driving 50 mph on the wrong side of the twisty, potholed road. I\u2019d feel like Hunter S. Thompson if I weren\u2019t sober and wearing my seat belt. <\/a>Ha!<\/span><\/span> We arrive at the beach, and 30 minutes later I find a place to park. I meet up with the Adamos and their friends near the barbecue pits. It\u2019s starting to drizzle, but everyone is here to surf. The kids are free-ranging, the new baby makes a big poop. Everyone eats sandwiches, which need mustard, or something. Wilkie wanders off and gets brought back by a nice stranger. Everyone thinks it\u2019s funny that the lady thought he was a girl because his hair is in a topknot.

<\/a>Did you care how the women might react to this description of them? I saw one of them comment sarcastically on Instagram, referencing your story, about how apparently, all they do is eat mustard sandwiches and lose their kids on the beach.<\/span> I was careful in these passages to describe them as simply and accurately as possible. It\u2019s interesting \u2014 the kid did wander away and was brought back, and the friends did make fun of the woman, which I felt (but didn\u2019t say) probably came out of a combination of impulses: snobbery, self-consciousness, nervousness. I also was grappling with feelings of social awkwardness, empathy and identification, anxiety about doing a good job, and my own reactions to a toddler wandering at the beach, which I didn\u2019t include. I let the scene just be a scene. I tried to record it without inflection. I saw the comment about the mustard, too, and it made me laugh. I have no idea why anyone would be offended by that statement \u2014 to me it was pure slice of life. The kind of stuff you say while eating a sandwich at the beach. \u201cThis needs mustard.\u201d It\u2019s about as real and simple and uninflected as it gets.<\/span><\/span>

 

All the \u201cmurfers\u201d are here\u2014the portmanteau of\u00a0mum<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0surfer<\/em>\u00a0are Adamo\u2019s clique of pretty, stylish, entrepreneurial, and creative young mothers of multiple children whose laid-back, unstructured lives generate a dizzying combination of FOMO and squad goals. They live in old-fashioned houses and give their carefully unstyled children names that sound dreamed up for a Goop collaboration with Lemony Snicket. They\u2019re married to supportive, handsome, and scruffy men of purpose. They make their own hours and dinners and soap. They have their own brands. They are their own brands.

According to at least one Australian magazine, the murfers are \u201cnailing the lifestyle,\u201d which makes it sound like they\u2019re effortlessly pulling off an expert maneuver that only an elite, highly trained few could hope to attempt without risk of serious bodily harm. <\/a>Thank you for calling out the absurdity of that phrase! How much had been written about these women before? Did that coverage influence your assumptions coming in to the story?<\/span> A lot had been written \u2014 all of it puffy lifestyle coverage. This sort of coverage was, come to think of it, a big part of what I wanted to explore. Not the women themselves, most of whom I liked a lot, but the fictions about women that get shoved down our throats, and how game some women are to participate in them.<\/span><\/span>

There\u2019s Winchester, Adamo\u2019s best friend, who is small and pretty, and married to a professional bodyboarder, Dave. She has five girls (Coco, 11; Autumn, 9; Juniper, 5; Clementine, 3; and Daisy, 3 months) and a children\u2019s sleepwear label, Little Winnie, which operates almost exclusively online. She trained to be a yoga teacher but got pregnant with Coco about a minute after she completed it.

There\u2019s Amanda Callan (@church farmgeneralstore, 24.7K followers), a rangy former model with a sly sense of humor, and her two boys, Banjo and Percy. With her husband, musician Andrew Morris of the Wilson Pickers, she co-owns and operates Church Farm General Store, a brand that produces \u201chandmade & homegrown\u201d soaps and sauces.

There are the adorable and impossibly cool Taninaka sisters. Mia (@miaeatswolves, 21.3K followers), an artist, has boys Ziggy, five and a half, Taro, two and a half, and Koa, four months; and Hana (@hanataninaka, 9K followers), a linen expert, has boys Zephyr, four, and Dali, two, and twin girls on the way. Together, they cofounded and run Taninaka (@taninaka.san, 9K followers)\u2014plant-dyed, organic, ethical bed linens for babies. Mia and Hana grew up in Sydney and also lived in Bali. They are married to Jasson (@jasson.salisbury, 8.7K followers), a meditation teacher, and Jeremy (@jdleefurniture, 10.5K followers), a carpenter who is planning to study fiction. Hana helps Jeremy with the books (for the furniture business, not the writing). <\/a>How did you go about maintaining a balance of distance and camaraderie\/trust during the reporting? Did they seem self-conscious about you being there?<\/span> It\u2019s a delicate dance, and everyone is different. Some people are open and some people aren\u2019t. I always try to give everyone a chance to really represent themselves, then reproduce what they are presenting as faithfully as I can. Self-awareness and openness come off better than caginess or defensiveness.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cI didn\u2019t even know Courtney had an Instagram,\u201d says Hana, when I ask about how everybody met.

\u201cI remember when I first met you, Aimee,\u201d Mia says. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018Oh, she\u2019s rad!\u2019 And someone sent me your Instagram thing, and I was like\u201d\u2014her voice turns skeptical\u2014\u201cThat\u2019s not the same girl.<\/em>\u201d

Hana laughs.

<\/a>I\u2019m curious about your use of extended dialog, which serves to illustrate their personalities. What do you use for recording these conversations? And you must have had so much to choose from. Did you know when you heard this exchange that you would use it?<\/span> I use a digital recorder and ask before recording. And yes, I usually know when I hear something that I\u2019ll use it. People are so interesting off-the-cuff, when they aren\u2019t trying to be.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cReally?\u201d Winchester says, surprised. \u201cWhy?\u201d

\u201cI don\u2019t know!\u201d Mia says, cracking up.

Winchester had a personal account before starting her business, and then when she started it, she just changed the name, \u201cso it\u2019s always been a fusion of personal-slash-business.\u201d

\u201cAmanda\u2019s got the biggest business,\u201d Mia says. \u201cShe\u2019s the most professional. Ours is just on the side.\u201d

\u201cYeah, our main focus is just being stay-at-home mums,\u201d says Winchester.

\u201cTheir stuff\u2019s uh-mazing,\u201d Mia says, meaning Church Farm. \u201cThey sell soap, curry paste, hot sauce. It\u2019s amazing.\u201d

\u201cAmanda does it with her partner,\u201d Winchester explains. \u201cOur partners have other businesses. So, for us, it comes in waves. Amanda\u2019s is more solid.\u201d

Imogen Edwards (@imogen_imagination, 7.7K followers) pipes up. Edwards is tall, blond, beautiful. She\u2019s lived here and surfed her whole life. The base tan on her legs looks like it was laid down in the \u201880s. <\/a>Nice.<\/span><\/span> \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of brands around Byron and we all know each other,\u201d Edwards says. \u201cIt\u2019s like an epicenter of building businesses. It\u2019s a hub of slow brands.\u201d

\u201cEveryone\u2019s having a bit of a crack,\u201d Winchester says.

\u201cYeah, it\u2019s just not leaving it to the big guys,\u201d Mia says.

Edwards doesn\u2019t have a brand, but she does have three girls, and she\u2019s doing some work for the music festival Splendour in the Grass. She was born in a town called Main Arm, just inland from Byron. Her parents split up when she was young, and her mom, \u201cone of the original female surfers,\u201d who surfed competitively, rented a little house on the beach and worked at a health food store. Sometimes, they got government assistance. Edwards didn\u2019t set up her Instagram until last year, when she and her partner decided on a whim to move to the south of France. She did it to meet new people and stay in touch with friends. In Paris, it led to coffee with an amazing woman who had two kids in a Steiner school and surfed.

I wonder what made the French woman reach out.

\u201cI just think people know Byron has a general chill vibe,\u201d Edwards laughs.

\u201cWhat?\u201d Mia deadpans.

\u201cLike, what\u2019s your star sign\u2026?\u201d

\u201cLet\u2019s go meditate under a tree\u2026.\u201d

\u201cIt\u2019s the Byron bubble,\u201d Mia laughs. \u201cI think it\u2019s quite a conscious community, so you get a lot of people who are \u2018your people.\u2019 \u201d

<\/a>These women seem far more capable of self-reflection and self-deprecation than Adamo ever shows. Was that frustrating that she was your main character but wouldn\u2019t give you this kind of insight? Did you consider at any point whether to make one of these other women your central character instead?<\/span> Agreed. It was sort of frustrating, but ultimately, it was so illustrative of the phenomenon. She was in a very literal sense the foreign element \u2014 a construction that inserted itself in a host environment. The others come off as not just self-aware and charmingly self-deprecating, but as more real. I don\u2019t know that Courtney ended up really being the main character. It\u2019s more like she was the ideal they aspired to \u2014 the symbol. She did not show me anything beneath the surface at all.<\/span><\/span>

 

They both pause for a moment.

\u201cIt\u2019s good to leave,\u201d Mia adds. \u201cYou gotta leave.\u201d

\u201cOh, you gotta leave,\u201d Edwards emphatically agrees.

\u201cBut then you come back and it\u2019s such a good place to come home to.\u201d

There is a pause as they consider this, and then Edwards suggests I change the town\u2019s name in the article, just to keep from promoting it any more. <\/a>Did it take much work to get them to engage in this kind of conversation? Did you feel like they were comfortable with you right away – and did you do anything specific to achieve that level of comfort?<\/span> No, I just asked a few simple questions. I think that because they were self-aware and self-deprecating, and had a healthy sense of the absurd, they were having fun acknowledging the absurdity. It\u2019s clear they are confronted by it all the time.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cDo we need to move here?\u201d Edwards mimics someone having just read this article. \u201cHow do we become friends with Mia and Hana, please?\u201d

\u201cTourist season all year-round,\u201d Mia laughs.

Hana remembers one time at a campsite in Western Australia someone recognized Mia and invited them to her caf\u00e9. Recently, at the park, someone recognized Callan, or her sandwich, I didn\u2019t catch which.

\u201cI was walking down the street with Courtney once, when Wilkie was a baby,\u201d Mia says, \u201cand this lady was like, \u2018Wilkiiie!\u2019 And Courtney\u2019s like\u2026\u201d Mia mimes recoiling in alarm. \u201cAnd the lady says, \u2018I follow you on Instagram!\u2019\u201d

 

L<\/span>ater, back home in Los Angeles, I FaceTime with Callan, who has decamped to the Gold Coast for Easter week. Callan was the one who coined the term \u201cmurfers\u201d as a joke after the group of women started surfing. She had a lot of great photos she didn\u2019t know what to do with, so last May, @byronbaymurfers (3.3K followers; \u201cMums are like dads, only gnarlyer\u201d) was born. She set the feed to private at first. \u201cBut the girls were like, \u2018This is sick\u2014just put it on public!\u2019 We\u2019re just being silly,\u201d Callan says.

<\/a>Fyi, I started checking out (and following) most of these women on Instagram while reading this story. Did you expect or intend for that to happen?<\/span> Of course!<\/span><\/span>

 

On Callan\u2019s own feed, the Church Farm account, people can connect to the brand via photos of the products on the feed, of course, but mostly it consists of lovely pictures of fun life on the farm: Callan and Morris prepping gardens, or building a fire. Images from the recent @shopdoen shoot, which used Church Farm as the backdrop for its spring campaign. A clip shot by a local videographer of little moments on the farm\u2014Morris gathering produce, Percy hugging ducks, Callan, in a D\u00f4en baby doll dress, picking strawberries and hugging Banjo. The video, overlaid with a blown-out Super 8-style filter and set to a twangy \u201860s California garage rock track by the psychedelic rock band Allah-Las, looks like a home movie from a lost time. It looks like lost footage from\u00a0Wild Wild Country<\/em>. It looks like a high-end fashion shoot.

When Callan and Morris first moved to Byron Bay from Sydney eight years ago, they knew nobody and had no idea what they would do for money. They just knew they were sick of city life. They rented a house on South Golden Beach and took random jobs. Callan worked in farmers markets and Morris did a bit of farming. They came across their house while out for a drive in Northern Rivers. \u201cWe were thinking, Wouldn\u2019t it be cool if that church was for sale,\u201d she tells me. Sure enough, there was a sign. They bought the house from the church directly.

Not long after starting the business, the couple landed on the cover of\u00a0Slow Living<\/em>\u00a0magazine. \u201cWe were in all these magazines about living the slow life, you know?\u201d she laughs. \u201cAndrew and I used to joke\u2014because we\u2019d be like juggling the kids with our small business, and we\u2019d be frantic, trying to get orders out or something, before we had a staff\u2014\u2018Hey, slow living, eh?\u2019 \u201d she laughs. \u201cIt was almost funny that we were depicted in this slow-living, lazy lifestyle, but we were super busy, you know? It\u2019s hard to have kids and business! It\u2019s just the same life in a different location.\u201d

\u201cWe make jokes about Instagram,\u201d Callan says. \u201cMy school friend is coming down from Brisbane on Friday, and she\u2019s like \u2018I better get my linen ready!\u2019 I\u2019ve got lots of friends in other cities that ask me, \u2018Is Byron always like that? Do you all just wear linen and hang out with your kids and eat food and have picnics with your baskets?\u2019 It\u2019s not like anyone\u2019s pretending. We do spend a lot of time with all the kids, obviously. I guess it\u2019s just a bit of a different lifestyle than the city, you know. I am aware that from the outside it\u2019s funny.\u201d <\/a>This is such a great note of ambiguity to end this section on. Were you trying to keep return to these moments of contrast? Were you surprised or relieved that some of them were willing to reflect like this?<\/span> I was relieved. Without these insights, it wouldn\u2019t have worked. And I wanted to show how, although Instagram makes them seem like a undifferentiated bloc, they are different. They think differently. They handle the attention differently.<\/span><\/span>

At first, Instagram<\/strong> felt like a psychological balm\u2014a world apart from the sustained rage of Twitter and horror of Facebook. <\/a>This is a sudden shift in the story, where you finally dive into deeper stuff. Did you consider putting any of this material higher up?<\/span> No, I wanted to really establish them first.<\/span><\/span> All those pretty pictures of cute kids and lovely interiors and far-flung destinations were soothing, reassuring. Then Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012 and launched sponsored posts a year later. In 2016, the company switched from a chronological to an algorithmic feed to prioritize \u201cthe moments we believe you will care about the most.\u201d By 2018, there were 3.7 million brand-sponsored influencer posts on the app, and those, according to Statista, are projected to reach 4.95 million in 2019. In just a few years, the app has turned making your life look like a vacation into an actual job for some (yes, there really are all kinds) and, for others, has become a constant reminder that watching people live as though on vacation is the only vacation most people can afford. Instagram makes us sad now. Surveys have found it to be the worst social media platform for mental health.

The experience of following Courtney Adamo is a lot like falling down the proverbial rabbit hole. You pass through levels, like community and escapism, then through the looking glass, into the cognitive dissonance of watching her appear to effortlessly manage an unmanageable number of children of different ages, in constant togetherness, throughout extended travels, settling into a perfect dollhouse that never seems to get messy. People follow for the inspiration, for the aspiration, for the fantasy projection, the dopamine hit, or for a soothing respite from toddler tantrums, teen drama, financial struggles, processed food you wouldn\u2019t eat if you weren\u2019t so broke or stressed or pressed for time, marital problems, and ugly plastic crap. People follow for the self-harm, to pick at the longing and thwarted desires until they bleed shame.

GOMIblog (an acronym for \u201cGet Off My Internets\u201d) is another rabbit hole, a darker one, that leads to a terrifying subterranean mirror world, where the voyeurs obsessively dismantle the internet celebrities they can\u2019t help but watch. The hate Adamo gets there is hard-core. Commenters criticize her relentlessly\u2014for lacking transparency in disclosing sponsored posts and brand partnerships and gifts. For overexposing and commodifying her kids. For not letting them use screens while plastering them across hundreds of thousands of screens, where other people can see them but they can\u2019t see themselves. GOMI commenters obsess over and parse her background\u2014how the oft-mentioned tulip farm she grew up on, founded by her paternal grandfather, is the largest supplier of bulbs in the world. How she is a great-great-great-granddaughter of E.W. Scripps, who founded the Scripps media company, which was so successful that it was put into a trust for the family in the 1920s and which grew so large again that it was broken up in the 1970s. Adamo\u2019s maternal grandmother\u2019s portion, Pioneer Newspapers, comprised 22 publications in Washington, Montana, Oregon, Utah, and Idaho. In 2013 it was rebranded as The Pioneer News Group. When that grandmother died, Adamo\u2019s mother, Marnie Roozen, became chairwoman of the board. In 2017, the company sold its newspaper division to Adams Publishing. The remaining company is now owned by Roozen and her three siblings, along with \u201ceight next-generation family members,\u201d one of whom is an influential murfer. <\/a>Again, important information. Did you consider putting any of this information about her up higher in the story?<\/span> No, I wanted to start with the image we see, then pull back to reveal context, history, etc.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cWe live a lovely life and I\u2019m obviously not complaining about it,\u201d Adamo tells me later over the phone. \u201cBut on the other hand, I\u2019m not living a luxurious, extravagant lifestyle. And, anyway, that\u2019s completely subjective. What\u2019s luxurious to somebody is not luxurious to somebody else.\u201d

It\u2019s hard to<\/strong> gauge how much an influencer makes, but according to Later, an Instagram marketing company, one rule of thumb is $100 per post per 10,000 followers, so someone with 250,000 followers might make $2,500 per post. Things like category exclusivity (the influencer can\u2019t post about competitors) and content licensing, which allows the brand to post the influencer\u2019s content on its platforms, can also increase what an influencer makes. Engagement rates\u2014likes, comments, interactions\u2014are in decline, but that\u2019s less true among micro-influencers like Adamo, whose high levels of engagement are attractive to brands looking to partner. Where an influencer really aligns with a brand, there may be potential for lucrative long-term deals. So engagement is what brands care about. <\/a>You talked about how you viewed this story as more of a piece of cultural criticism than an investigation. Did you consider going deeper into research in this section, which seems like it could form the basis of an entirely different story on the inner workings of the influencer world?<\/span> Space is not unlimited! I actually handed this in at 10,000 words. Haha.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cAre [the influencers] responding back to fans? Are they getting comments? That\u2019s a big deal for brands,\u201d says Lisa Jammal, CEO of Social Intelligence Agency, a social media agency based in L.A. The mom-influencer niche is oversaturated, but Jammal estimates that someone like Adamo would make $15,000 to $20,000 a month if she were doing two or three campaigns on a monthly basis. Adamo, whose last nine posts (as of this writing) included three sponsored ones, says she makes nowhere near that much. \u201cIf I was money-hungry, I would take every promotion, or be a lot more lenient with the brands that I promote,\u201d she says. \u201cJust this week I turned down three, and they were big ones.\u201d

The day before leaving Byron, I went back to Adamo\u2019s house to talk about her new venture, a subscriber-based \u201ccollaborative e-course on family lifestyle.\u201d It was cleaning day, and two women to whom I was not introduced were finishing up in the kitchen. The course was only a week away from launching and Adamo was busy. Her schedule was packed. She had another meeting scheduled right after me.

The e-course\u2014which she conceived and executed in just three months\u2014is called In the Loop (@theloopcommunity, 838 followers). It consists of five themed PDFs with links to videos featuring Adamo and various local friends\/experts sharing tips and tricks on food, decorating, parenting, and family lifestyle.

Adamo feels that people lack community in their lives. She\u2019s grateful for her \u201cwonderful community of women\u201d whom she learns from every day, whether it\u2019s at the beach, during a girls\u2019 dinner, whereever. \u201cI come back and I\u2019m inspired and I\u2019ve learned.\u201d With In the Loop, Adamo wants to extend that sense of community and monetize it. A subscription costs $175. There\u2019s no sponsored content, except for \u201cexclusive discounts,\u201d as she later told BuzzFeed, on some of her favorite brands. \u201cI feel like it\u2019s an opportunity for me to do something that\u2019s completely unsponsored,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m only sharing what I genuinely love.\u201d

The e-course was launched with a promotional video, a gauzy montage of Adamo and her family walking to the beach, surfboards in tow, on a trail under a canopy of trees. It\u2019s a soft-focus parade of braids, straw hats, linen pinafores, overalls, and crisscross straps against some soaringly inspirational jingle with a Brazilian vibe. It looks like a promo for the remake of the remake of\u00a0Picnic at Hanging Rock.<\/em>\u00a0\u201cIf there\u2019s anything I\u2019ve learned in the 14 years I\u2019ve been a mother,\u201d Adamo says in the voice-over, \u201cit\u2019s that the parenting journey is an ever-evolving one.\u201d

In the comments, the mood can veer from mostly fawning into bloody: \u201cWill the course deal with issues such as bringing up children in a privilege bubble or white privilege worldwide and especially in Australian history?\u201d asks one commenter. \u201cAnd also having a nanny, a house husband and tons of additional help and support?\u201d adds another. This one prompted Adamo to reply: \u201cPlease don\u2019t leave untruthful comments here. We haven\u2019t had a nanny or help with the kids since we left London. My husband has a job and works five days a week. We have no help or family around (apart from supportive friends)\u2014not that I think there is anything at all wrong with having those things, but I just don\u2019t think it\u2019s fair to write these completely unfounded lies like that. Thank you.\u201d

In the\u00a0BuzzFeed article<\/a>, Adamo acknowledged that she\u2019s been \u201cfortunate\u201d in her life, but that \u201cobviously, the concept of privilege is completely subjective.\u201d She employs a housekeeper for four hours per week. She finds it sad that some people find it easier to explain away her happiness by making false statements about the incredible privilege she must have. \u201cWhen we first started traveling, there were people who said things\u2026like, \u2018You\u2019re going and staying in fancy five-star hotels.\u2019 And we weren\u2019t. We were staying in Airbnbs that were kind of rough.\u201d

\u201cAt first, I would take it so personally,\u201d Adamo says of the negative comments, which she sometimes deletes. \u201cNow, I really genuinely just don\u2019t care. Getting older, and being more comfortable in my skin\u2014I just don\u2019t care if someone\u2019s got a negative opinion.\u201d

\u201cI do agree that when you have a big following, you are responsible for creating an authentic vision,\u201d Adamo adds. \u201cNot that I\u2019m putting the blame back on the person. But if you\u2019re seeing someone\u2019s life and their beautiful home, and their perfectly dressed kids, and it\u2019s making you feel inadequate, then don\u2019t follow that person.\u201d <\/a>Although you are heavy on commentary throughout the story, here you really let Adamo speak for herself in response to her critics, leaving the reader to decide whose side to take. Were you tempted to add in your own judgement?<\/span> No, I really wanted everyone to speak for themselves, and I think they did it better than I could have.<\/span><\/span>


Last year, Adamo\u2019s<\/strong> neighbor, Claire Alexander-Johnston (the aforementioned @jetsetmama), decided to take a five-month mental health hiatus from social media. I spoke to Alexander-Johnston, who is from London and still sounds English, on the phone a month after I left Australia. She\u2019s not very plugged in anymore. \u201cI just wanted not to be beholden to my phone and that constant \u2018bing, bing, bing.\u2019\u201d She used to love Instagram for the creativity and the community it provided. Then Facebook bought it, \u201cand suddenly everyone is talking about being an influencer and algorithms and how to do it,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was a massive progression of these things, like, \u2018Can we monetize?\u2019 \u201d People were sending free stuff, and then the big checks started rolling in. \u201cLike, \u2018We\u2019ll pay you $5,000 if you promote this baby food.\u2019 I could get $5,000 to $8,000. It\u2019s amazing! You\u2019ve got to keep up that engagement! And then I was like, \u2018You know what? I\u2019ve got that engagement because I\u2019m not constantly selling things.\u2019\u201d

She dabbled in sponsored-not-sponsored posts, then realized she didn\u2019t want to do it anymore. She didn\u2019t need the income. (Her husband Richard Johnston\u2019s business TripADeal is one of the country\u2019s most successful travel companies.) She still wanted to support businesses but stopped accepting gifts. \u201cI needed to figure out how to be part of that space without feeling like I was selling myself.\u201d

It used to be that you would scroll through Instagram or look through a magazine and know it wasn\u2019t reality. \u201cAnd then suddenly it was like everyone was saying, \u2018No, this is my reality, actually. And this should be your reality. And actually, let me give you my top 10 tips about how to make this perfect reality your reality,\u2019\u201d says Alexander-Johnston. \u201cAnd I think that is really hard for people\u2014and hard for me\u2014to understand and swallow and take. [It] triggers so many people\u2019s insecurities about, \u2018I\u2019ll never be enough. I\u2019m not enough. I\u2019m not good enough. I\u2019m not clean or tidy or pretty or white enough. And I definitely don\u2019t wear enough linen.\u2019\u201d

Alexander-Johnston says she is aware now, in a way that she wasn\u2019t before, of the perception that was being created of this perfect life and these amazing friendships. \u201cI realized how damaging it can be for other women who are lonely, or who don\u2019t have friends around the corner, or who are working mothers and have to put their kids in day care every single day\u2026. I was just aware that the representation of this white privilege was actually becoming quite confronting for the rest of the world, but also for me.\u201d

<\/a>This is a pretty long story! Did you nail the structure down before you started to write or during the writing? Did that change much during the editing process?<\/span> I\u2019m not good at structuring. I tend to feel my way through a bit. I did some basic structuring like choosing what scene to start with, introducing characters, pulling back to reveal context, delving into history, etc. But it\u2019s a process.<\/span><\/span>


Adamo likes to<\/strong>\u00a0work with brands in an organic way. Every time she gets an email with a request, she looks at it with Michael. If it\u2019s something they would use themselves, they\u2019ll ask to test it first. \u201cThis is my Baba\u00e0 jumper,\u201d she says, indicating her sweater. The Spanish knitwear company makes a point of donating its samples to refugees. \u201cI work with [Marta Bahillo, who runs Baba\u00e0] on two or three promotions throughout the year. I have done that for three years now. There\u2019s a children\u2019s brand called Nellie Quats, in the U.K., and every new season we work together. A lot of these brands I work with are run by women, and they\u2019re small, independent brands. It\u2019s really a pleasure to be able to help grow their brand.\u201d

I ask how she gets her kids to wear what she wants them to wear, partly because my 10-year-old hasn\u2019t worn what I wanted her to wear since she was two and a half. <\/a>Thank you for speaking for the rest of us!<\/span><\/span>

\u201cWe just try so hard with our kids not to put any emphasis on what they\u2019re wearing,\u201d Adamo says. \u201cI mean, Easton\u2019s now a teenager, and he obviously has an opinion. He doesn\u2019t want to put on what he doesn\u2019t want to put on\u2014which is fair enough. But really, we\u2019ve never put an emphasis on clothes. Sometimes, with my husband\u2019s family, his sisters or his mom, they\u2019ll see my kids, they\u2019ll go, \u2018Oh, that dress is so pretty.\u2019 I don\u2019t want them to make that a focus, so we try really hard not to even talk about clothes.\u201d <\/a>Did you follow up after she gave you this non-answer \u2014 like, so when they say, \u201cNo. I won\u2019t wear it!\u201d What does she say?<\/span> This is interesting. I did not challenge her too much because it was so hard to get real answers that it felt counterproductive \u2014 like she would just put up more walls. So I made the choice to let her speak for herself. Her walls ended up standing in for her in the story. It was frustrating but also, in the end, interesting. Writing a non-fiction story is making do with what you have. That\u2019s what I got, so that was the story. I couldn\u2019t know it going in. It revealed itself.<\/span><\/span>

Authenticity is a big part of what Adamo is selling\u2014as is the idea that the life she lives is achievable. Her response to criticism suggests she feels accused of hiding things\u2014a fleet of nannies, say\u2014that she\u2019s demonstrably not hiding. But this take is off. Her privilege on its face isn\u2019t what gets to people. What gets to people is her reluctance to acknowledge how that privilege holds up a pristinely simple life. <\/a>You\u2019re commenting again here. Did this analysis come from conversations you had, or just from your own impressions?<\/span> It’s a mix of reporting and analysis, which I think ultimately is what profile writing is. I had to pull back and analyze, in part because there are entire forums dedicating to analyzing and critiquing them. So I had to weigh in on this stuff, too.<\/span><\/span> It\u2019s this disconnect that drives people to hurl themselves down the life-sucking force of GOMIblog. Because everybody knows how excruciatingly hard it is to raise children, to keep house, to stay solvent, to survive. And following people who appear to do this with ease, who make a talent and a virtue out of being lucky, creates an unbearable feeling of cognitive dissonance in the beholder. It feels like gaslighting. It makes Instagram look like a giant, continually updated portrait of Dorian Gray, stashed in our collective closet, getting prettier and prettier as the world becomes increasingly grotesque.

The path to Whites Beach at Broken Head is lush and shaded by a canopy of trees. It opens on a wide, white, secluded sandy beach. The Adamos came here today with the Winchesters and some friends visiting from Finland. Adamo is surfing. Winchester is cradling newborn Daisy. Clementine is riding Wilkie around like a pony.

Winchester moved here from Sydney eight years ago because she wanted her kids to have \u201can old-fashioned lifestyle,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s why I send them to Steiner school and all that\u201d\u2014no tests, no tech\u2014\u201ctrying to slow them down in such a fast-paced world.\u201d Sometimes she regrets not separating her personal Instagram from her business account, she says. Adamo looks at her in amazement. \u201cBut people connect to the brand through you!\u201d

Later that afternoon, I meet Mia and Hana and their little boys in Brunswick Heads at Ethel Food Store, a caf\u00e9 on a busy thoroughfare. They order flatbreads and their kids order kombucha. The sisters live in Mullumbimby, of which one tourist website says, \u201cIf you\u2019re wondering where all the hippies in Byron have gone, take a drive to Mullumbimby!\u201d Hana and Mia are happy to get out of their parents\u2019 house, where they are living while they Airbnb their own homes over the break.

For the summer, they took three months off and went on a road trip. They rented out their houses to \u201cget rid of some debt and stuff\u201d and spent three months camping outdoors. <\/a>Tell me what you wanted to achieve with this scene and conversation between the sisters. And why it comes here. And why as a dialog as opposed to a couple paragraphs of description with a quote or two.<\/span> I wanted to show the socio-economic differences which are flattened by the \u201cboho chic\u201d image. This is the world we live in \u2014 profound inequality masked by democratized style. It\u2019s really weird and pernicious.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cI was pregnant the whole time, so by the end I was so tired,\u201d Mia says.

\u201cI think I fell pregnant two weeks into the whole thing,\u201d Hana says. \u201cIt was good fun.\u201d<\/em>

\u201cIt\u2019s hard work,\u201d says Mia.

\u201cTwelve weeks straight, no hot showers,\u201d Hana adds.

\u201cYeah. I think the longest we went without having a hot shower, like a proper hot shower, was like six weeks,\u201d Mia laughs. \u201cThe kids were filthy, they had bucket baths.\u201d

Being away reminds them of why they love it here. Instagram helps make living here possible. \u201cI don\u2019t know how companies ever got off the ground before,\u201d Mia says. \u201cIt was so much harder.\u201d

\u201cThat\u2019s our outreach,\u201d Hana says.

They didn\u2019t start Instagramming until they had a product, Mia says, whereas brands with more marketing savvy, she realizes now, build a following before launching a product.

\u201cThey already have an audience,\u201d Hana says, \u201cand they go, \u2018Oh, we\u2019re doing this as well!\u2019 Whereas we waited until we had everything\u2026and then we were like, \u2018Here\u2019s our Instagram!\u2019\u201d They laugh.

\u201cI think it\u2019s nice for people to see that you are mums, you have all this shit going on, but you\u2019re still able to run a business and live your life a certain way,\u201d Mia says. \u201cI don\u2019t really know what I was posting [before], whereas now, I feel like you almost have to have like a brand identity.\u201d She pauses. \u201cThe less time you can spend on it, the better, really.\u201d

There\u2019s a lot of talk about the Instagram community but less talk about the effect of Instagram on actual communities. Byron is small and insular, and the brute force of social amplification has a way of distorting things. \u201cIn normal life, you\u2019d be out with girlfriends, and hundreds of thousands of people aren\u2019t going to see you eating spaghetti,\u201d Alexander-Johnston says. \u201cBut in Byron Bay, that is a possibility.\u201d Her husband grew up here and finds it quite hilarious to see his town turned into a social media hub. \u201cYou\u2019re an influencer, and you hang out with your friends who\u2019ve got 500 followers. Suddenly, overnight, they\u2019ve got 5,000 followers. Ten thousand followers. Then you\u2019ve all accidentally become Instagram famous by virtue of each other. It kind of self-perpetuates.\u201d

It\u2019s an awkward spot to be in, this influencer business, and it affects friendships. <\/a>Poor influencers.<\/span><\/span> Not just influencers\u2019 friendships, but their friendships in the real world. Many people in the area wrote to tell me how much the social fabric of the town had been messed with. \u00a0\u201cI know I live in this absurd white privileged bubble,\u201d Alexander-Johnston says. \u201cI know that. But I also do genuinely have a heart for women and change and community, and I care about my children.\u201d There\u2019s more of an understanding of the value of privacy now. Not everyone is thrilled to have their picnics uploaded every time. She thinks a backlash is under way, which she has been privately enjoying. \u201cThis only started happening the last six months, and I found it amazing,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople are having their birthday parties or baby showers, and they say, \u2018This is a no-Instagram event and you\u2019re not allowed to take photos, take videos, upload, post to stories.\u2019\u201d

<\/a>I see this section as pointing to some of the fall-out and a shift in the way even the influencers are going about things. But you let the women say that through conversation instead of saying it yourself. Did you want to avoid summarizing trends? I see this as another spot where the story would be very different if done as an investigation\/trend piece.<\/span> Yes, I thought it was more powerful and credible coming from her. Also, I\u2019m just more interested in the human side of the story here. How has this big, weird lens distorted this community? What is this bizarre amplifying force? What does it do to people\u2019s lives, especially in a small, hothouse place like this?<\/span><\/span>

 

People don\u2019t want to be the cause of other people feeling left out of a birthday or a dinner. \u201cOr if someone\u2019s smoking a cigarette\u2014they\u2019re a mum, and they have a cheeky cigarette once every six months\u2014and they\u2019re caught in the background of someone\u2019s Instagram video and they get absolutely slammed\u2026. Or they just don\u2019t want their baby shower plastered over 15 different Instagrams. They just don\u2019t want that anymore. And this is becoming much more of a thing in this area, actually, and I find it quite nice. It\u2019s quite refreshing.\u201d

On the flip side, she has noticed that when you log off Instagram, your invites can really take a hit. \u201cA lot of stuff in this town is like, \u2018Let\u2019s do something at The Farm!\u2019 So-and-so is there giving out free somethings, all your girlfriends are going\u2026. The thing is, there isn\u2019t anywhere else to go. There are, like, three places. It\u2019s just a small town on the east coast of Australia. You\u2019ve been here. There\u2019s not a lot going on.\u201d

Back in Los Angeles, I called Imogen Edwards. Recently, Edwards split from her partner. They sold the house in France and returned to Byron. <\/a>Adamo has been your primary character in the story but you choose to end with Edwards. Why? Did you try out other endings?<\/span> I ended on Edwards because I found her to be so insightful and melancholy, and I loved the idea of ending on this note of realness and depth. She was the one that grappled with it all most emotionally.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cIt was really just a bit of a fantasy game where you\u2019re like, \u2018Wow, could we do this!\u2019\u201d she says of the move to France. \u201cI didn\u2019t think it through too much. Kind of more, \u2018Let\u2019s have life experiences! We can do this! How lucky are we to be able to do this?\u2019\u201d

I remark that it\u2019s funny how she left one fantasy life to live another, similar fantasy life. <\/a>Why the choice here to mention you\u2019re there in the conversation instead of a third-person lead-in to the quote?<\/span> It seemed important to be present, to show that we were having a genuine conversation; that real ideas were exchanged.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cYou don\u2019t understand the level of people messaging me, basically shouting at me, going, \u2018What the hell are you doing?\u2019 Like French chicks\u2014going, like, \u2018I follow you all because\u00a0I<\/em>\u00a0want\u00a0your<\/em>\u00a0life!\u2019\u201d

On her return, Edwards says she was very honest with her \u201craw feelings\u201d about the experience of moving to not just another country, but the idea of another country. \u201cAnd that\u2019s the reality,\u201d she says. \u201cEverything looks beautiful, but something was missing for me.\u201d

It occurred to her that everyone is striving for this perfect life, posting perfect pictures, feeling the pressure to say that everything\u2019s perfect. \u201cAnd I\u2019m like, I don\u2019t want to have to say it\u2019s perfect. I don\u2019t want people to feel like I\u2019m living a perfect life, because I\u2019m far from it. You know? No one knows the internal battles and the ups and downs\u2014I\u2019m just sick of kind of putting that out.\u201d <\/a>You include a lot of her words here. Were you tempted to paraphrase more of it?<\/span> No, I was moved by her words. It felt important to let her express her complicated feelings, especially after Adamo\u2019s committed refusal to perform any real self-inquiry or engage in any larger questions. It was a very human moment and I wanted her to really be \u201cseen\u201d here.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cMum Instagramming,\u201d she says, can lead to real connections and alleviate the isolation of being a new mother. \u201cIt can make you feel like someone\u2019s got your back,\u201d she says. Like, \u201c\u2018Oh, I\u2019m not alone!\u2019 \u201d But it enables a false intimacy, too, and a lack of accountability. You can delete someone. You can disappear. The community is a shared illusion that\u2019s real, until it\u2019s not.

Speaking of France, I ask if she\u2019s heard that children there will now be allowed to sue their parents for posting pictures of them on social media as children.

\u201cOne day, I guess the kids are going to be like, \u2018Mum, why did you post that picture of me? I look ugly!\u2019 You\u2019ll get this backlash from your kids\u2026.You don\u2019t know until they\u2019re grown up, and they turn around at you, and they\u2019re like, \u2018Bloody hell, Mum! I can\u2019t believe you did that!\u2019 Whereas another kid might go to their mum and say, \u2018Thanks for doing that, Mum! I\u2019m a supermodel now! I never had to work for a place because you made this platform for me!\u2019\u201d

<\/a>Why did you choose this as your last paragraph?<\/span> I loved the ambiguity and the humor. It\u2019s an ambiguous story. She summed it up in a nutshell!<\/span><\/span>

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he Internet of 2019 is rife with social-media influencers and articles about them. Much of the coverage is fawning and superficial: how to become one, how to make $3,000\u00a0 per\u00a0Instagram post, how to make your house look like nobody lives in it, how influencers are the future of media and politics and culture and celebrity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8017,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[318],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-1914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-emily-sohn"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIs it real? 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