Self-centered
It's easy for me to lapse into this way of thinking, that before social media, people didn't think of themselves as living within media, didn't think of life itself as a medium in which one's "self" was inscribed. Without ubiquitous connectivity and social media platforms and thus without the perpetual opportunity for self-expression, people could more readily assume that their self simply was there — a thing that could be represented, should the rare occasion present itself, but didn't need to be continually produced. This probably made it seem like one's desires too were inherent and unique rather than nurtured and instigated.
But the possibilities of self-expression as self-production didn't emerge with social media. Imagining a Self, Patricia Meyer Spacks's 1976 study of 18th century autobiographies, has several anecdotes of people being accused of living their lives in such a way as to have something to write about, "the obsessional turning of life into copy," and discusses how journal-keeping was seen as warping the self and nullifying spontaneity, and letter writing (or epistolary-novel reading) promoted the idea of an audience preceding the self, which is crafted in response to the audience's demands and expectations. In a novel like Pamela, readers could observe "writing itself literally affecting the course of action," which in turn also suggests how knowing you will write about something and have an audience for it changes what you plan to do. This foretells our contemporary condition of planning life around social media photo ops (as this terrible New York Times piece about "overtourism" whines about).
The point is we have long had trouble differentiating between "just living life" and self-documentation. Having means to document the self has always incentivized all sorts of behavior and altered whatever "intrinsic desires" we may have otherwise had. And it's always been difficult to separate representing the self from producing it. Each implies the other, or collapses into the other under closer examination. My representation of who I am changes who I am becoming, and who I become recasts my previous attempts at self-presentation. The ability to self-document changes what I remember and how I remember it, and intensifies certain forms of forgetting.
Spacks writes, "It seems certain now — although apparently it didn't in the 18th century — that people remember less than they think they do, that they imagine part of what they believe they remember, and that they are unable to distinguish, in such contexts, between memory and imagination." It seem plausible that people didn't fully recognize this then because it required a lived immersion in print media for the shortcomings of memory to become significant, palpable, inescapable. It seems to suggest that exposure to media (and not some kind of psychic fracture) is what creates the possibility of an identity crisis — of having to reconcile who you think you are with how you represent yourself or see yourself represented. Access to recording media makes it possible to regard memory as "unreliable." Otherwise there is no point of comparison to contextualize it.
Our immersion in social media culture may have made this condition — in which memory and imagination, and self-documentation and self-production blur into each other — more acute. It is just much more convenient to document yourself more and more of the time, and each moment of self-documentation and re-circulation brings memory, fantasy, and desire into play and recalibrates how we balance them in what we recognize as our "self." The self is constantly foregrounded — we always have reason to be thinking about it, how to display it, how it is being received, how we can make it come across more successfully. All media can be treated as though it is about the self — what does this say about or for me, how can I use it to show something about me. Everything at once represents and reproduces the self.
In "The Museum of Me" (2000), Ellen Ullman describes being unnerved by an infantilizing advertisement she saw on a San Francisco billboard: "'NOW THE WORLD REALLY DOES REVOLVE AROUND YOU.' The letters were lowercase, soft-edged, spaced irregularly, as if they’d been skywritten over a hot August beach and were already drifting off into the air. ” She links this message to how the internet was commercialized through a focus on disintermediation, "attempting to isolate the individual within a sea of economic activity." The internet, in other words, made its money by isolating people and representing this as convenience and freedom.
To achieve this isolation, Ullman argues, all the intermediaries capable of helping negotiate an individual's relation to modern life's complex systems were circumvented by direct internet interfaces. "Why trust anyone but yourself to make judgments about what is more or less interesting, valuable, authentic, or worthy of your attention?" Ullman writes. "No one, no professional interloper, is supposed to come between you and your desires, which, according to this idea, are nuanced, difficult to communicate, irreducible, and, most of all, unique.” Disintermediation forces individuals back on the inner personal resources they are supposed to have, cutting them off from the social context that actually makes choices have meaning. This reveals a "true self," but one that is hopelessly ignorant and overmatched by the decisions it is prompted to make, governed not by intermediaries who can be negotiated with and who can explain themselves, but by interfaces and platforms, which are structured to disavow the ways they shape user behavior.
Since that essay was written, disintermediation has been complemented with interactivity, with "social" as a layer bolted on to interfaces. Interacting through social media would seem to compensate for the isolation the internet imposes, mitigate it, neutralize it. But the degree to which it functions as a data-collection and ad-targeting mechanism, it reinforces the isolation, perfects it under the illusion of social integration into a "community" that might be more of a recursive mirror.
Ullman cites another commercial for a computer, that contrasts the dangerous world outside with the comfortable world at home:
It is a view that depends on the idea that desire is not social, not stimulated by what others want, but generated internally, and that the satisfaction of desires is not dependent upon other persons, organizations, structures, or governments. It is a profoundly libertarian vision, and it is the message that underlies all the mythologizing about the web: the idea that the civic space is dead, useless, dangerous, and the only place of pleasure and satisfaction is your home.
I am trying to sort out the degree to which self-documentation, and the confusions and "inauthenticities" that stem from it, is complicit in this vision of the world. Often what is labeled "inauthentic" is precisely what militates against the world that Ullman warns against — we are "authentic" when we see ourselves as isolated and uninfluenced, which in reality is when we are vulnerable, weak, left to our own devices. When we try to produce a self or strive to keep an intended audience and its approval in mind, we are resisting the isolation, trying to break through the interface to end it. But the interface itself and the company that profits from it typically has reason to want to isolate us again, and it uses metrics, algorithms, filters, and so on to remind us that we really are at the center of the universe, and that leaving our private episteme is optional.
Social media platforms profit from our sense of isolation and their imperfect solutions for ameliorating it. They profit from our relying on them to sort out our social life and in a sense disintermediate ourselves from it with algorithmic processing. They have economic reasons to make everything feel like it is about us and to confront us with how everybody else thinks everything is about them, reinforcing a mutual skepticism. But that skepticism only obtains when we are under the sway of "authenticity" and how it discredits effort. Authenticity has become a powerful marketing term because it serves a marketer's worldview, discrediting social influence and leaving people exposed to more direct, targeted forms of manipulation.
Self-expression usually strives for authenticity and confronts us with our inauthenticity, in how we strategize for it. The cloud of ideology around the "true self" and "real desires" means that this fuels more self-expression in search of the truth, and more disappointed feelings of phoniness for having to try — and anger at forms of media making us feel like we have to say what we are instead of simply being it. I wonder how that can be inverted, so that self-expression expunges fears about the "authentic" self and redirects us back to the realm of social influence, to an alertness toward other people and an embrace of ongoing negotiations with difference. Couldn't it be that our truest desires are only the ones we are provoked to articulate?