Gabbie Hanna Just Wants to Chill With Her Cat
I hate when people say they hate social media because that’s not what they mean. Especially when it is a content creator or internet public figure, it is such a misunderstanding of themselves and what they actually mean.
Entirely upon chance, I saw Gabbie Hanna announce on her Instagram stories that she had just started up her podcast again. Her podcast was an early precursor to experimenting with other projects and content formats that appeared to dissolve over the course of the pandemic and yet another round of the internet playing “we hate Gabbie.”
She has multiple channels claimed, all renamed, and content pulled as the last video project she began premiering in June 2021 never concluded.
Now, this new podcast project looks entirely different than her previous podcast, but more so the spiritual successor of her unfinished confessional series as well as her art and paintings.
In the video uploaded on her channel, The Gabbie Show, S1:E1 Save The World or Die Trying, Gabbie sits in her bed with cat Fred as she speaks freely into the microphone on her headphones. We never see her face through the entirety of the episode.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it a podcast because of the mixed digital media and editing. She uses screenshots and voice-to-text, animations, and drawings to illustrate as she talks — as a whole, it feels much more like a visual journal or personal digital essay.
From a composition standpoint, I like the creative approach to editing, animation, and overlays. It is hard to break trope-ish structures: the vlog, the documentary, the talking heads podcast, the cinematic short film.
In this episode, Gabbie talks to herself about what she is learning about herself through her relationship with her cats (a Godsend of love and reflection) and weed. She also speaks to what she believes makes her happy: her art and music.
But in order to create and sustain an income, she has to use social media to promote these things, which she hates. A conundrum of doing what she hates so she can do what she loves.
She repeats the sentiment a few times before clarifying that it is not social media that she hates but her relationship with it.
And this is what drives me crazy. People don’t hate social media. They hate their relationship with it — a twisted, loud reflection of their relationship with themselves colliding with others’ relationships with social media and each other.
However, there are artists and musicians that are beloved and successful without promotion and awareness for their art (product) filtered through their personal life as it is shared across the internet and social networks.
But that’s not the case for content creators and internet public figures who first built their success and awareness through their personalities. And once they realize that it isn’t sustainable or healthy or fulfilling, they want to create boundaries they never set in the first place or let fizzle away because they wanted to get out ahead of everyone and everything else.
I can’t blame them, and neither should anyone else.
Gabbie says, “I hate how social media makes me feel and has an effect on my life, and my life is a very different experience than a lot of people’s lives.”
And this is so true. Her relationship with social media is vastly different than the majority of people. There are content creators (former and present) who could relate to her experience, but not every single content creator has been a trending topic on Twitter because of backlash — multiple times.
But Gabbie Hanna’s problem isn’t that she wants to create and be known and fulfilled beyond her original notoriety. It’s that she has struggled to separate herself and feel a sense of control.
Her unfinished multi-part confessional series was an illustration of that. For whatever reason, she has struggled immensely to detach, to not have the last word, to not desperately defend herself. And I cannot speculate on how that must feel or what that must be like to deal with.
There are definitely things I don’t like that she’s said or done, but that is not my final judgment. I may not be a full-fan or admirer, but I’m not a hate-watcher. I’ve been curious and observant because her story of a career on the internet is such an interesting case study of parasocial phenomenon and what that means for the person at the center of it — the oxymoronic receiver of parasocial interactions and relationships.
Still, the data, the information, the patterns come from a person whose body of work is not clearly defined outside of the person.
This anxiety and turmoil around identity and career staked on top of each other is something I’ve noticed with content creators who have been on the internet and social media for about a decade. In the early days of a digital wild frontier, where everyone could be loud and proud and get rewarded for anything to get attention — forget the consequences of using formative years of discovering who I am and spill every bit of myself out on a permanent record for the whole world to see.
Jenna Marbles is an example that comes to mind for many. And many have criticized creators like Shane Dawson and Gabbie Hanna as repeat offenders returning to the internet when there is no evidence that Jenna ever intends to return.
And to be honest, if she did, it would be a frenzy.
Jenna didn’t leave a personal brand to launch another creative career or pursue media differently, but Shane and Gabbie do want to continue doing and discovering their (less problematic) passions, and it just so happens to involve being online in some form or fashion.
In all honesty, as Gabbie Hanna has tapered off in her content — YouTube videos, TikToks, Instagram updates — what I have enjoyed most from her is her paintings. Maybe because the style is more my taste than her music, maybe it’s because it is a more aligned (I don’t feel the word “authentic” conveys properly here and requires a lot of unpacking) passion.
As I said before, I appreciate the composition of the video (podcast episode) because she crafted something into a creative body of work. Regardless, we will have to see how this new project unfolds.
At the very least — and I wish this for everyone — I hope her relationship with social media improves for her own peace of mind. It is an awesome tool. We all just got to be less shitty when we’re using it.
This article also appears on Medium.com