I’d once written that I don’t use social media. That seems to be an ever more common tendency, almost as common as using it. Take any popular trend, and the opposite will be popular too, even if just for taking a contrarian stance.
At one end, you have evangelists espousing ‘personal branding is the future’, and at the other, those with no social media presence, who, by their actions if not words, consider social media a cesspool of shit (though one not devoid of gems). One bunch who lives almost disconnected and unaware of what goes on in this virtual town square; another who lives mostly on, and nearly entirely for, it.
Both have their reasons, equally valid for their purposes. There are indisputably real reasons to be active on SM – for money, for attention, for work, for networks, for a combination. Your stance simply depends on whether you share those reasons, though one might be temped to put a moral spin on one’s position.
That was, more or less, my line of logic for not using it; a chain of thought I still stand by today. But there is a difference between ‘no reason to use’ and ‘a reason not to use’. I had – have – no reasons to use SM, but I wasn’t sure if I had any reason specifically not to use it. The innate aversion I have to SM tells me there must be one.
The time sink boogey is always present in any argument, but that applies to any recreation, although SM does amplify and weaponize it with its endless scroll and personalized algos designed to bait you and hold you as long as possible. Nevertheless, any engaging pursuit, I think, is more than somewhat addictive, be it video games or sports, particularly for obsessive types.
Diminishing attention span is likely true and probably a better reason, but not, I think, a sufficiently strong one on its own. Which is not to say that it’s not important – reading or studying always demands attention. Simply that, with sufficient effort, the required attention could be called forth when needed, unless one was completely enmeshed in short posts and reels, utterly incapable of focusing on anything longer.
The reason, I realize, is simply artificiality, pretense. By which I mean the performative aspect inevitable when communicating with, and probably for, an intended audience. Performativeness is the difference between how you talk with an audience present and without one, how you write for someone and for no one.
You can, of course, argue that some amount of performativeness may be inevitable, that no one reveals themselves fully to anyone. So whether you’re speaking to a close friend or crafting a post for a million strangers, you’re still posturing, still putting on a show. Whether that’s true or not – and I think it needn’t always be – it doesn’t negate the claim that the extent of performativeness is significantly greater when the audience is vaster.
Why is that so? For one, you don’t know the people you address on the internet, so you don’t know how they would respond to your authentic self, at least not as well as you know how a close friend does. In a milder, plainer, more lukewarm form, it’s similar to the social niceties and small talk one engages strangers with, safe things that shouldn’t draw adverse reactions. A more accurate parallel though, is the persona one adopts to impress someone – someone one wants to impress, be it a cute girl or a new boss – the persona you think impresses people. Perhaps it’s the persona that impresses you, a fact you extrapolate to infer that it might impress others. Or it’s one that has impressed some people, so might impress others too.
More importantly though, performativeness is about competition and attention, specifically, the competition for attention (which is, after all, the key to money, contacts, branding and validation, the other reasons for SM). Nothing is free, after all. To get the audience’s attention, you have to perform for it, give it what it likes.
It might just be that someone is naturally witty, interesting and the like, that they don’t need to put on a show, they already have what it takes to draw audiences. Be that as it may, for the rest of us, those unfortunate souls not similarly blessed, there is a need to perform.
In that sense, social media, I think, is much the same as – in fact the digital equivalent of – the talk one delivers to an audience; one venerated being addressing – or rather, ‘teaching, ‘instructing’ – a set of disciples. In its finest form, you have the rehearsed spontaneity and calculated naturalness of practiced gestures, pauses, dialogues of TED talks, what David Foster Wallace calls the self-conscious appearance of unself-consciousness of TV. “It is, of course, an act, for you have to be just abnormally self-conscious and self-controlled to appear unwatched before cameras and lenses and men with clipboards.” Just as you have to be abnormally self-conscious and self-controlled to appear natural addressing potentially millions of strangers on the internet.
It doesn’t mean, of course, that one goes the Holden Caulfield route, declaring everyone a phoney. Many do resist performativeness; their authenticity, in fact, is a reason for their popularity. Jiddu Krishnamurti, for instance, never gives the impression of preaching to an audience, only, engaging in, as he puts it, a conversation between individuals. “This is not a lecture, but rather a conversation between two people, between you and the speaker, not on a particular subject, instructing and shaping your thought or opinions.”
An audience, after all, presupposes and implies a hierarchy, an inequality, between speaker and listeners, the former a fount of wisdom, the latter a receptacle for said supposed wisdom. Hierarchy implies authority, and authority means the end of any real learning or knowledge. “All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.“
But in all this, there’s nothing of why such performativeness is undesirable. I use the word undesirable (rather than good/bad that comes with baggage) to mean simply something that, for various reasons, I might not want. The answer to this, I think, is related to an idea of mimetic theory. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”
I doubt many people begin with the ambition to be like everyone else, at least not consciously. Originality mightn’t be a universal aspiration, but it is at least a more common one than uniformity. Nevertheless, a high degree of uniformity exists – millions, maybe billions, worship the same deities – the same popular sport teams, artists, writers, holiday destinations, clothes, and more.
One reason is that, with so many billions of humans, nothing is really ‘niche’; overpopulation ended that world a long time ago. A 0.1% market share means a million souls, even assuming the market is only a fraction of the world, excluding children, poor, and others.
Another, maybe more satisfying explanation, is to say people in a particular ‘culture’ share norms, ideas about what’s desirable, and hence commonalities arise. That might suffice at the macro level, even ignoring as it does the question of how these shared ideas come about, but it doesn’t tell me anything about myself, other than that I am a puppet, moved and shaped and determined by my environment.
“Girard’s idea proposes that all desire is merely an imitation of another’s desire, and the desire only occurs because others have deemed said object as worthwhile. This means that a desirable object is only desired because of societal ideas, and is not based on personal preference like most believe.”
If I don’t know what I want, or I don’t want any specific thing particularly strongly, then it’s probably easier for me to go along with what someone else wants. It might happen in any number of ways. Groupthink, that I don’t know what I want, and I don’t want any particular thing, so I tell myself I should want what most people want, since it seems unlikely they can all be mistaken, and so I add myself to the crowd, making their desire my own. Or a model – I look at someone and get wowed, and tell myself I want to be like said person, and now their desire is my desire. These are imitation games – I imitate the desire of another. They always existed, but SM makes them naturally ubiquitous.
The ‘problem’ – I use the word loosely – is not in my hypocrisy – that has always existed regardless – but in the suboptimality of possibly abandoning my original desires, exchanging them for the imaginary accreditation of an invisible audience. Suboptimal, because you find yourself drawn away from an original, intrinsic desire of your own, towards a glittering one certified by the crowd, their fictitious validation supposedly making up the difference and tilting the scales towards the latter. Which is sufficiently sad on its own, I think, but sorrier still is my own metamorphosis into a creature who values, maybe craves, that validation, whose own values and desires are now altered to obtain it.
The insidious aspect of SM, therefore, is not in my attempt at imitation but in my transmutation. The very process by which I determine my desires is affected. It’s no longer about I want, nor even what someone else wants, but what I want to seem as, or specifically, want to be thought of, by others. My so-called self consciousness, that supposedly elevated awareness of mine of myself, and on the other side, the narcissism that forever sees itself in the third person, in terms of how others might see me, each always so short a step from the other, finally embrace.
Again, the tendency has always existed – there is a word like illeism after all – but perhaps it was never so easy as now, when you can tell yourself that millions of people are, supposedly, listening to you, even ‘following’ you.
A small detour, but I think an interesting one. Illeism always brings to my mind Caesar. Caesar shall forth. I don’t know whether Caesar was narcissistic, though even if he was, I for one could excuse it in him. But the mention of Caesar in this context in turn recalls these beautiful lines of Kierkegaard.
“Thus when the ambitious man, whose slogan was “Either Caesar or nothing”, does not become Caesar, he is in despair over it. But this signifies something else, namely, that precisely because he did not become Caesar he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently he is not in despair over the fact that he did not become Caesar, but he is in despair over himself for the fact that he did not become Caesar.”
Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death
A lot has been said about social media affecting mental health. The most obvious explanation is the never-ending, in-your-face glittering illusion that is the driving force behind SM, the carefully curated ersatz highlights of another’s life one is exposed to. The comparison – the artificially elevated highs of another vis à vis one’s own mundane lows, obviously affects a person powerfully. But what it also does, I think, is sell you your own spiel, help you swallow the story you sell others. That I can tell myself I have so many ‘followers’ – more, perhaps, than Caesar ever had – that so many thousands listen to me, that I am important. With so many apparent Caesars all around – and SM, after all, brings them into view, and more than that, creates them in the first place – it has never seemed more possible to become Caesar. And yet, if you want to become Caesar, and you can’t and don’t, perhaps you find that being yourself isn’t good enough anymore.
It needn’t always be so, I’m sure. It is possible, perhaps not easy, to retain your sense of objectivity about yourself. Unchecked, though, I might buy into my so-called significance – or worse, realize and accept it even while hypocritically proclaiming my importance to others.
To go back, before the diversion into illeism and Caesar, to the ever narrow gap between the self consciousness that can see itself, and the narcissism that is forever preoccupied with how the rest, the NPCs, see itself, the main character. The very process by which I determine my desires is affected, I’d written.
I might want something for its sake, for any direct or indirect reason. I might want it for another’s sake, for them to know I have it, and that’s when my own desires come under the control of another. That tendency, again, has always existed; action for the sake of display is nothing new. It goes back further than Christ. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men... And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.
What you have now with SM is the mechanism that makes this performativeness possible at scale effortlessly. When my potential audience is limitless, no longer bound by whom I know or by physical proximity, so are my puppeteers, those whose acclaim I dream of to myself and perform for.
And with the ease of propagation, so is the extent of my performativeness. It eats into every aspect of my life, taking over it. It’s no longer only luxury cars and apartments that you flaunt. The most ordinary of things, what you eat, where you travel, whom you meet, what you do, what you read, everything is up for show.
And that, in turn, makes the performative life complete. Performance now predominates life, life is subsumed to performance. No longer a performance one indulges in to feel better or to gain something in life, but a life itself dedicated to, and driven by, performance. Eating someplace, visiting somewhere, playing something, attending something, reading something – not because you want to do it, but because you want to show it. It doesn’t count, after all, if no one knows about it. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, it makes no sound.
The test of performativeness, I think, is a question I came across in The Good Enough Job (the subject of that book is a whole worthwhile debate in itself). If you could do it, but you couldn’t tell anyone that you did it, would you still do it?
It’s surprising just how hard this test is. To first of all, even admit that it’s not about the thing itself, but about other people. How many things fail to clear the hurdle. How difficult it is even to separate the motives driving anything – the thing in itself, or at least what you want from it, and what you want to be seen as, thought of as, for doing it. What makes it difficult is that the line separating the two passes through everything; you can, usually, recognize which is the driving force, but it’s not always crystal clear. This holds particularly, I think, in deeply ingrained things, where either attachment is involved or a lot of time has passed, so they’re almost a part of you. It’s hard then, to honestly and accurately say for what reason one lifts or exercises. Or whether one dresses or speaks or writes a particular way for show, or for self.
The proof of the pudding though, is in the eating, and, though it probably seems excessive, I believe you only know the answer to that question when you do it. Which is to say that, hard as it is, the real test, the answer, is even harder – not prospective but retrospective. The question is prospective – If you could do it, but you couldn’t tell anyone that you did it, would you still do it? But the answer is retrospective, the answer not to that question, but to the question – Now that you did it, did you tell anyone that you did it? Whatever I may think the answer to the former is – whatever I’d like to tell myself – the answer really is the answer to the latter.
Perhaps it really is excessive, making as it does secrecy paramount, and there’s a better resolution somewhere, but if there is, there would have to be a better reason for it than excessiveness, for difficulty by itself is no ground to reject a conclusion. In any case, it is hardly a prescription to anyone, let alone an aspiration to strive for, only a quirk for someone who just happens to care about this particular matter, of the extent to which their motives are driven by their entanglement with, and dependence upon, the validation of others.