The Age of Digital Media Killed the Carrie Bradshaw Fantasy

As I scroll on my phone watching Instagram reels about fashion and relationship content, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of message this is sending to young girls.

I didn’t even ask for advice but here it all is: what I should be wearing, how I should act to be a ‘high value’ female, why I should dump my boyfriend because he opened the door for a girl leaving the shops. These extremist views being placed in front of young people on social media are especially frightening because they provide no context. A twenty second video (at most) provides none of the contextual understanding that reading an article or watching TV brings.

All young people inevitably seek advice from outside of their family and friends. Perhaps about what shoes are best for their first office job. Or what it means when your boyfriend forgets an anniversary (hint- red flag). In the past, young people would find this understanding of cultural expectations and societal norms from TV shows (read my other article on the importance of 2000s Teen Drama TV), magazines and bloggers. But is social media today providing healthy advice?

Online algorithms function on a sequence of data items without knowing the whole input in advance whereas offline algorithms have access to the entire input prior to processing it.

The scary thing about the algorithms in the social media apps we use to comprehend our everyday world is that they present content over and over again that might not be (and usually isn’t) a true representation of reality. And here we get STUCK.

This is why I emphasise the importance of the OG Influencers, the influencers that had real-world context and you would have to seek out their content to be bombarded by it, the Carrie Bradshaws of the world.

I am a strong believer that every young woman should watch Sex and the City.

Fashion influencers today all wear the same thing. Microtrends and niche aesthetics have ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED individuality. Plus, the pressures of being everything but yourself! “The clean girl” aesthetic, but let's bring back “y2k” but dress modestly if you want to be a ‘high value’ woman. Carrie and the rest of the main characters wore what they wanted and the focus was put on the design process of pieces rather than adhering to trends. They changed fashion.

What also terrifies me about young women today is what I will call ‘sex influencers’.

Young women have always sought advice about sex, from Carrie herself or from the back of a magazine. We have always struggled with feeling valued and empowered, but women might have actually gotten close to liberation in the 2000s. Unfortunately today's integration of porn platforms into pop culture ignites a new era of exploitation for women.

Sex and the City used to analyse sex through a relationship lens. Young women have no context to these conversations anymore.

So what can we do now? For a start, we can start absorbing more contextual media, reading books and magazines or watching TV instead of scrolling on TikTok. But it will take a much bigger cultural shift to reintroduce the young woman's fantasy of unique fashion and authentic relationships.