A month ago only a handful of people in Sydney’s well-heeled eastern suburbs really knew who Charlie and Ellie Aitken were – the ambitious power couple having forged a fairly low-level media profile in a town where ego and money go hand-in-hand.

Now, thanks largely to the power of social media and a seemingly picture-perfect offering of luxury holidays, glamorous star-studded soirées and never-ending stream of designer label living posts, the Aitkens have become fully fledged media stars. Their marriage breakdown was given the sort of treatment in mainstream news outlets once preserved for the likes of Tom and Nicole, Charles and Diana or Brad and Angelina.

Admittedly, there were elements of their story which helped fuel it along, such as the discovery – via a baby monitor – that money man Charlie Aitken was having an affair with his wife’s former best friend Hollie Nasser, the wife of one of his biggest investors, millionaire Sydney pub heir Chris Nasser.

But there is another element of this story: the role social media and its normalisation of unbridled narcissism and shameless bragging have played in the couple’s social downfall.

With so much of the Aitkens’ otherwise private life forming “content” in the public domain thanks to platforms like Instagram, it is undeniable that social media helped feed fascination among less affluent, “normal” readers of news websites, from the scandalous Daily Mail to this one, who have clicked their way through this tawdry tale of high society woe in their hundreds of thousands.

And when those posts turn downright nasty, as they did when Ellie opted to reveal her private text messages with her former best friend Hollie, it’s hardly surprising it all exploded so spectacularly.

But what does this say about our social standards thanks to the artifice of Instagram and Facebook? Have we really become so vacuous as to value ourselves by how many famous friends or glamorous parties we can post about on social media? In the Aitkens’ sphere, it certainly looks that way.

I, too, have fallen victim to this most unedifying aspect of social media behaviour – though in my defence, posting on such platforms is primarily an extension of my work, which has always been about sharing information in the public domain. My job is to also provide comment, analysis, context and insight – elements largely lacking from the most self-indulgent timelines.