Social Media and the Virtualisation of the Self
Is social media creating a dystopian reality?
Everything happens online. And everything that doesn’t happen online, is broadcast online anyway. Technology has formed a new reality, and it’s happened so fast that it swept the world from beneath our feet.
In replacing the physical space with virtual simulacra, social media has brought about a seismic shift in the way that we view society and ourselves in relation to one another. The Facebook generation must mediate themselves through sociality, distilling the self into its most facile, categorisable elements. Despite appearing to be a reaffirmation of the self in its focus on the individual, social media might be eroding our understanding of identity by alienating us from each other.
Full disclosure: this is a condensed version of an essay I wrote while high on my own self-righteousness at university in 2013. Much has changed since.
Everything is bad
First, let’s define what this means. The OED simplifies dystopia into an “imaginary society in which everything is bad”. The definition given by thefreedictionary.com is interesting: “an imaginary society in which social or technological trends have culminated in a greatly diminished quality of life or degradation of values”. Add this to the description given by the Merriam-Webster dictionary of dystopia as a place where “people lead dehumanised lives” and you have quite a dismal space from which to launch into an argument.
In our age, these “social or technological trends” have merged to form a Social Technology which might, ultimately, dehumanise its users. Social corporeality has begun to break down in favour of an all too real cyberspace. When tangible social connections are lost, society as a whole begins to crumble into a techno-paranoid dystopia. As Guy Debord so elegantly wrote in Society of The Spectacle, “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”
TL;DR — social media is probably bad for us, and we should all go outside and play in our increasingly polluted environments.
“I share, therefore I am”
The word ‘apocalypse’ derives from the Greek for ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal’. This is what social media does. It’s a platform that enables individuals and corporations to reveal themselves to the world, virtually.
Social media has transformed self representation. This is a space where the private sphere is made irrevocably public, exacerbating self-consciousness to extreme levels. With greater control over the presentation of personality, we are able to present the self as we want it to be. We get to edit.
The social media identity becomes defined by popularity and “endless personal promotion”, as Sherry Turkle says. This filtered, publishable vision, ensures that generic tropes of society steadily become the norm.
Over one billion people have created a Facebook profile. We are witnessing a plague of homogeneity. In the social media space, the performance of identity becomes virtualised, allowing for a drastic remaking of the self moulded to fit a neoliberal ideal. The virtual collective space disperses the logged on masses, filtering them into categories based on gender, sexuality, arbitrary affiliations to sports teams, fandoms, etc.
This is social conformity on a massive scale. As we identify our online selves by an algorithm of things liked, friends met and events attended, the real self is destabilised within its echo-chamber. To belong is to be.
Thus, the search for original experience becomes increasingly futile, and offline life is somehow diminished in importance. Users fall victim to “faking experiences so we have something to share,” says Turkle. This turns existence into a story; life becomes a search for narrative events to enhance our Instagram galleries — the very definition of ‘pics, or it didn’t happen’.
From the self to selfies
The essence of the ‘selfie’ lies in its pure performativity; the curated vision of a face in its best lighting. Social media acts as a mirror, a vain tool to view our virtual construction as a reflection. And it gives us the power to compare ourselves, not just to our friends, but to Beyoncé and the lifestyle elite.
Humans love looking at others, especially when they conform to our societal beauty standards (and sometimes even more if they don’t) — this is nothing new. But the rise of social media has given us the tools and impetus to share images of ourselves to death and rely on feedback to build our sense of self-worth.
How many of us wake up and, without a thought, slide open Facebook and mindlessly scroll through the updates we missed while we were asleep? (I hope this isn’t just me). We have to know what’s going on before we leave our bed, or we’re out of loop.
If we’re not being seen and liked and shared and commented on, do we really exist at all?
#Apocalypse
What would happen if the apocalypse was broadcast on Twitter?
32 Things To Do During A Plague Of Locusts via @BuzzFeed #apocalypse
Anyone know anywhere with some unspoilt cans of food? Literally anything will do #desperate
Was that 4 horse men? R u 4 real? #apocalypse #NoFilter
The idea of a dystopia dominated by social media is not new. Post-apocalyptic narratives are increasingly reflecting the trend: take Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, Zone One by Colson Whitehead, and David Eggers’ The Circle, as just a few examples.
In our current climate, fear and news is spread faster than a zombifying virus; social media is startlingly effective at scare-mongering and mobilising. Richard Grusin writes that, “premediation creates the effects of the disaster before they happen” in his Coda on Premediation and Preemption. In his blog, he suggests that there will be a pre-apocalypse before the actual event occurs; the media spreading panic in vast swathes of people.
Bad news spreads quicker than good news — any digital marketer can tell you that. With terrorist attacks, Brexit, extreme weather events, mass-murders, Donald Trump, famines, war, and various other catastrophes broadcast at our faces daily, is it any wonder that it’s all we can do to stock up on dehydrated foods and wait for our impending doom? Facebook’s check-in function allows friends to tell each other that they’re safe during actual disasters. Social media feels reassuring and comfortingly distant in times of crisis. It’s our constant.
Zombies!!
The classic trope of the zombie can be seen as a reflection of the Facebook human, mindlessly tapping and stroking away. Indeed, technology does feel like a drug at times. We wander around, eyes fixed on palm sized, black shiny screens hoping to see the best parts of ourselves reflected back. Jed Hallam writes of, “convergence, the seamless experience of seeing no boundaries between our online and offline selves — total integration,” the terrifying melding of the virtual and reality to create a monstrous hybrid Facebook human zombie.
This addiction is becoming a psychological issue, with people experiencing withdrawal symptoms when parted from their phones. We’re coming down with what Arwa Mahdawi calls “Facebook fever”. The very language of the internet implies a space riddled with biological catastrophe; things ‘go viral’ as they spread.
Technology is perhaps the opposite of nature. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis wrote of a distant future in which the values and morals of the majority are controlled by a small group of “no longer recognisably human” forms who rule by a “perfect” understanding of the psychology of the robot-like masses. John Gray expands this future-myth into a dystopia where our consciousnesses will be uploaded into the cloud, the body incorporeal, existing for infinity, until eventually we merge into a giant super-being. God. (I highly recommend listening to the 10 minute podcast). This is a fantasy advocated by Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering for Google. Perhaps The Matrix isn’t as far-fetched as we thought.
😂
This was OED’s word of the year 2015. It was chosen as the ‘word’ that “best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015”. I’ll just let that sit here while you soak it in.
The social media revolution has sparked a radical change in linguistic weather. The invention of emoticons has formed a semantic space previously unknown. Scott Fahlman was the first documented person to use them to express a feeling. They essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion without a voice or body — perhaps the original purpose of written language in the first place. But can a sexless yellow face really convey the complexities and nuances of human emotion in any meaningful way?
Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University, says that emoji give people, “the ability not to think as hard about the words they’re using.” Digital writing has devolved into shorter and shorter abbreviations: anything that boosts SEO rankings and draws in clicks. Does this mean that we’ve become more efficient in our communication? Are we more open than ever? Or are we using this to bury our understanding of ourselves and our emotions even further. “We remove ourselves from grief and go into our phones” according to Sherry Turkle’s TedX Talk. Distraction has become the standard mode of living.
Never has language held so much materiality and existed in such surreality. In a space where expression is everything, here we have an example of human emotion struggling to exist in virtuality.
Connectivity versus Connection
The sheer vastness of social media’s connectivity is incalculable. We are now connected. I don’t need to tell you how much easier it is to talk to people everywhere at any time. But what has this achieved? Are we now a cohesive globalised society, sharing ideas and creativity and awareness? Are we more culturally aware and respectful than ever? Or are we still sectional, sexist, racist, homophobic, closed-off, fascists who deny that climate change is caused by humans? The echo-chambers that we’ve built reflect our own opinions back at ourselves — we see only what Facebook thinks will make us happy.
“Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”
Dunbar’s number tells us that the optimal size for a cohesive group of humans is roughly 150. The average Facebook user now has about 338 friends. Shimi Cohen’s video, The Innovation of Loneliness, uses the analogy of a group of monkeys breaking down when there are too many members in order to reflect the impossibility for humans to maintain social order with such overcapacity. It is an unnatural mode of social connection.
Together, alone
It’s all too easy to bury yourself in the lure of infinite connection. We spend so much time alienated in splendid isolation. Social media offers us a gratifying fantasy that we will never have to be alone, but this has made us lonelier than ever before. Are we “collecting friends like stamps”? Such an idea would dehumanise the individual and our relationship to them; commodifying us into plastic profiles to accumulate in order to grow in perceived value.
Facebook is a virtual space for people watching, assuming an intimacy based on facile information gleaned from thumbs ups and carefully choreographed photo albums. ‘Friends’ are no longer friends but connections in a space where connection becomes greater than conversation.
“Hello, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”
We don’t feel ourselves without connection and so we are drawn to substitutions for human contact that feel ever more sci-fi. Langdon Winner predicts that we will inevitably start “avoiding direct contact in the public world” and dissolve into interiority, losing our sense of connection to outside. He suggests that with enhanced connectivity comes “increasing isolation, discomfort and even fear of the presence of other people”. Indeed, with rising levels of depression and social anxiety among young people, it’s easy to see interpret that social media could be helping to perpetuate genuine mental illness. According to a 2014 YouGov survey, people aged 18–24 were twice as likely to be anxious about being alone than those aged over 55.
Everybody is shouting, but no-one is listening
We are made to assume the collective delusion that a following of hundreds translates to a platform with automatic listeners, addicted to the attention we are promised. Facebook’s highly secretive EdgeRank algorithm reflects our own opinions back at us. We live in a little cosy hole of our own making, quietly scrolling, liking and agreeing with like-minded strangers.
With the infinite capacity for browsing, never quite reaching the end of a feed, we fall victim to information overload. The arbitrariness of our actions is publicised to masses, compulsively broadcasting the flimsy minutiae of their day-to-day. To scroll becomes the defining action of our existence, as we consume more and more information about others without ever becoming more informed.
Sell it to me, baby
We have learned to ignore the cosmic background radiation of adverts, but the internet only values our attention as a consumer; an untapped resource of open eyes, waiting to be advertised to.
This virtual community has been marketed as a truly democratic space. Everyone with access to an internet connection has a platform to be heard, allegedly freeing us from traditional prejudices. But who has invented this putative utopia for us? The infrastructure of this new reality is bound in class ridden networks of hyper-rich, privileged white men. It places more power in the hands of a small elite to control how we communicate (see: The Social Network) and can be used as a dictatorial tool for censorship, as seen in China and Russia, or to exploit through advertising.
Social media’s role in the Arab Spring showed us how the technology can be utilised to revolutionary effect. The space could be one of collective anarchy, but it is controlled and regulated within the structure of a surveilled society. It is a method of near totalitarian social control as community is mediated by technology and the corporations who claim ownership of it.
“All that is solid melts into air”
~ The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
8.7% of global users are not real. Millions of fake profiles exist as a cheap, dirty method of helping marketing managers to get graphs that point upwards. You can buy likes from these “farms” in order to boost your brand’s social media visibility.
A whole new economy has been built around getting people to click on things. Now, with every single thing you click on, someone, somewhere has made a small amount of money. This is not a space for humanity, it is a space for advertising.
The physical object is being replaced by simulated effigies — “things are disappearing right before our eyes” says Russell Belk in his essay, The Extended Self in a Digital World. The neoliberal design of the 21st century ideal — deregulated markets, an economy centred around the finance industry — makes the ultimate virtualisation of community space seem inevitable. It forms a convenient distraction from the reality of dismantled social institutions and ecological disaster.
“There will be no society, there will be no economy, there will be no art and culture on a dead planet.”
We live forever in the past; be it a few seconds ago, or back to the years of bad hair and debauchery. Our newsfeed is an endlessly updated log of our past which can be erased, edited and surveilled; time is no longer linear.
“Three minutes ago is dead and it’s never coming back”
Networked media “work[s] to collapse space and time into a moment of instantaneity and thus to produce a preoccupation not with the past or the future but with the present, the ‘time freeze’ of ‘real time’” according to Richard Grusin. Social media obsesses over immediacy and the present, but can only ever exist a few seconds in the past.
A status moves from “just now” to “31 seconds ago” to “a minute ago” and then it becomes ancient history. The relentless slipping away of time is somehow hindered by the invention of the Facebook timeline; it mummifies the moment.
The speed of exchanges is unfathomable. Grusin uses the term “hypermediacy” to describe the almost impossible speed of connection. “We share thoughts and feelings even as we’re having them,” according to Turkle. The longer we wait to post, the less relevant we appear. Emotions must be conveyed instantly to be considered original but the very medium denies access to the present. The modern paradox: technology is all about new, but social media plunges us into the past.
Will people forget I exist if I don’t regularly show up on their news feed?
Social media space cements virtual immortality. When we die, our Facebook profiles are, inevitably, left behind. In this virtual sphere there is an overwhelming sense of desperation to be acknowledged and, more importantly, remembered. “People rely on technology to remember for them,” according to this psychological study by Linda Henkel.
“His social media persona probably continued to punch the clock, gossiping with the empty air and spell-checking faux-friendly compositions, hitting send”
~ Zone One, Colson Whitehead
Premediation
Facebook is the extreme of media. With a population network addicted to staring at screens, maybe we wouldn’t notice if dystopia is already here.
The media concerns itself with the premediated future rather than the present. It predicts where stock markets will go, what Trump will do next, how climate change will strike, when antibiotics will stop working, when that asteroid is going to hit — an infinite amount of nightmares are coming.
Social media fulfils the “desire for a world in which the immediacy of the catastrophe, the immediacy of disaster, could not happen again — because it would always already have been premediated”, according to Grusin’s Coda. It’s clear in how much media attention is devoted to President-Elect, Donald [J] Trump, that this serves to normalise the strange.
Yet we are always taken by surprise, even though the same stories are regurgitated on our feeds which shocking punctuality: another mass shooting in America, another car bomb in Kabul, another innocent executed, another terrorist attack, another plane crash, another flood, another crisis, another apocalypse. Our reactions are the same: blind solidarity, sympathy, shock, awe, fear, outrage, terror.
“As we get sucked more and more into the technosphere, we become less and less capable of understanding it, because it becomes a technological milieu that we’re in”
~ Doug Tompkins
“Our love in a reflective age”
Social media exists as an ecology of waves and wires. It’s a copy of a copy of a copy of a centre-less ideal of society. The physical artefacts of the anthropocene will be totems to consumerism; our social interactions will be forgotten. This will be a dystopia of screens; a structureless, virtual wasteland of memes and trolls.
“What does apocalypse mean?”
“It means that in the future, things will be even worse than they are now”
~ Zone One, Colson Whitehead
