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How Does ‘Big-Reveal’ Content Shape Our Family Stories?

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Illustration: Hannah Buckman

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The other day, I watched a woman I’ve followed on social media for several years, Maia Knight, find out she was pregnant in an Instagram Reel. It felt like I was finding out before she did — she closed her eyes and held the test’s results tab up to the camera so that the audience could enjoy the experience of finding out “first.” After watching her reaction (muttering “shut the fuck up” to herself), I got to watch her share the news with her boyfriend. A couple days later, another mom I’ve been following for years shared a “new mom car reveal,” wherein her husband surprised her with an enormous Nissan.

These videos belong to an ever-expanding corpus of content, created by influencers and civilians alike, that can be broadly categorized as “big-reveal content.” The category dates back to the early 2000s, with the rise of proposal videos and gender reveals (a subgenre of big reveals that is going strong despite its many associated high-profile accidents), and has grown to encompass college-admissions reveals (often performed by an entire family gathered around a laptop together), college-decision reveals (some of which mimic the binary formula of gender reveals), proposals, and pregnancies. Vacation destinations are “revealed” to unsuspecting spouses and children in this type of content. Big-reveal content almost always takes place within the context of family life, but it can be about anything, as long as it involves the capture of a moment of sincere surprise.

The main appeal of this kind of content is never what’s revealed itself. The point is the authentic human emotion, not what color the flares are, or what college someone’s going to, or the vacation destination. Gender reveals are often criticized for reifying the gender binary, but I am confident that most people who throw these spectacles are not trying to police their babies’ bodies. They’re simply trying to create a spectacle — they’re trying to make something “happen” on social media. That is all big-reveal content is, really: It’s “proof” that “real stuff” is “happening.”

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We are living through a time when power and influence flow toward and coalesce around whomever is best at creating a spectacle. In Chris Hayes’s new book, The Siren’s Call, he argues that attention is power; this is obviously true in the case of the country’s leadership and how it is trying to govern, but it’s also a social condition that trickles down into the behavior and attitudes of everyday people. In a recent op-ed about the content-driven spectacle of DOGE, the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote, “Increasingly we cannot escape the closed world of bite-size performativity that feels like the real world. All of our emotions are fuel for the content machines that don’t care what we feel, only that we do.”

Big-reveal content is one such form of meaning-making that runs on emotions. All of us who continue to post content about ourselves to social media are competing with brands and public figures for our friends’ attention. We simply can’t expect to have anyone see our cute family content if we don’t juice up the emotional or visual impact of what we’re sharing. Big-reveal content helps to transform ordinary life into something splashier, and enlarges our modest domestic worlds into places that feel hyperreal and exciting alongside the manufactured excitement produced by brands and influencers.

We usually think of our relationship to the “attention economy” as wrapped up in how much time we spend on our phones, but staging our emotional experiences as consumable spectacles is part of that relationship as well. Children know the beat of this music even better than we do; they have long since learned to exaggerate their reactions of surprise and disappointment to mimic their favorite YouTubers, whose exaggeration is simply their workplace’s standard operating procedure.

Big-reveal content is the ultimate commodification of our emotions by a marketplace that pits us in a winnerless race against everyone we’ve ever met. It is also a mirror that reflects the way many people see the world, translating inner states into externalized reactions for the camera. Over time, this kind of content has aggregated itself into the contours of a worldview wherein something has to be visible for it to be interesting. The invisible; the mundane; the entire immense world of preparation, maintenance, care, repetition, and service — none of this exists in the world of the big reveal.

While watching Donald Trump and Elon Musk gut federal agencies and lay off tens of thousands of workers, it comes as no surprise that these are two men who haven’t raised their own children. Child-rearing is the original long game: The unending invisible work and long periods of tedium are intolerable for childlike adults. Both men are products of the big-reveal worldview. If payoff isn’t immediately visible, does it even exist?

The jobs being eliminated in the name of bureaucratic waste are the invisible jobs whose tasks can’t be contained in a single, exclamatory bullet point. What do forest-service workers who clean toilets and clear trails, auditors who examine drifts of data, and administrators who oversee the distribution of benefits all have in common? Theirs is the work of maintenance and conscientious checking. It’s the kind of work that Musk cannot imagine even being real, because it’s not associated with a cool payoff. Nothing in these sorts of jobs can be one-shotted. There’s no reveal, no spectacle, no winning.

We tend to think of social media as having sorted people of different political ideologies into separate realities, but big-reveal content is one form of storytelling that transcends politics. Through this kind of storytelling, we are all participating in a culture that has become so accustomed to spectacle that we’re beginning to forget how to tell other kinds of stories about ourselves. Our tools for describing emotions are rusting and our language itself is shrinking. Mostly, there’s no one to tell other kinds of stories to. Quiet, ruminative stories have no place in this iteration of social media.

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How Does ‘Big-Reveal’ Content Shape Our Family Stories?