Always On
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Highlights
- But something more subtle may be happening as well. Social media platforms, like all technologies that mediate the self, “heighten consciousness,” in media scholar Walter Ong’s words. But if earlier technological developments, like writing, heightened consciousness to extend the self, newer technologies may heighten it to a point where it no longer sustains the self but undermines it.
- “Alienation from a natural milieu can be good for us and indeed is in many ways essential for full human life,” he argued. “To live and to understand fully, we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides for consciousness as nothing else does.” By externalizing thought and expression, writing — the “technologizing of the word,” as Ong described it — distanced us from the flux of immediate experience and expanded consciousness into space and across time. The diary could be considered paradigmatic: It makes subjectivity an object of reflection, both in the moment of composition and for future readers as well.
- Writing’s extension of consciousness has a direct effect on identity. As philosopher Robert Spaemann argued in Persons: The Difference Between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something,’ “the constitution of personal identity is inseparable from the process of self-externalizing.” This process, in his view, took place in recollection rather than direct experience. “It is memory,” he claimed, “that really reveals us to ourselves.” Spaemann was thinking chiefly of unaided or organic memory, but in Ong’s view, writing externalizes this memory work, encouraging and sustaining deeper self-explorations of the psyche and novel forms of self-expression.
- The audience’s resulting dispersal through space and time leads to a sporadic and unpredictable set of interactions, which can anchor habits of continual checking or an intensified susceptibility to push notifications (part of how platforms try to elicit compulsive engagement). The result is that we can’t help but be aware of ourselves through these platforms as continual performers, moment by moment.
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To borrow sociologist Erving Goffman’s terminology, broadcasting on social media amounts to a substantial expansion of what he called our “front stage,” where we are consciously and continually involved in the work of impression management. In his metaphor of social life as theater, Goffman presumed the existence of a backstage, where we can let down our guard, but the open-ended communication in time and space on social media expands our front stage, divorcing it from any particular place that we could choose to leave. The audience is always potentially there with us, always soliciting new material, prompting us to think of our lives in terms of material. Those who give the appearance of inviting an audience into the intimacy of the backstage realm, in fact, often seem the most adept at using social media, as if this were the fundamental skill it hones. But they have really mastered the art of transforming the backstage into another front stage.
- Our own unrelenting self-consciousness may similarly cause our “enterprises,” be they great or trivial, to “lose the name of action.” The self that experiences itself chiefly in front-stage mode — owning the conspicuous artificiality of its situation and trying to manage the impressions of how much impression management it’s doing — may discover that it is both exhausted and no longer sure of itself. Whatever assurance we might have about our motives, intentions, and purposes dissolves under the withering light of such unrelenting self-consciousness. Hence the paralysis of will.
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Social media platforms, then, heighten our consciousness of the performative aspects of our identity and simultaneously aim to diminish our consciousness of how we use them. These two seemingly opposed tendencies transform the platforms into powerful dissolvers of will, leaving us more susceptible to the algorithms and the marketing that powers their economic model, as well as structuring a particular form of social order. Rather than foster the display our individuality, they devolve into mechanisms of conditioning. The cumulative effect of the networks of surveillance, self-monitoring, operant conditioning, automation, routinization, and programmed predictability in which we are enmeshed is not enhanced freedom, individuality, spontaneity, thoughtfulness, or joy. Their effect is to stabilize us into routine and predictable patterns of behavior and consumption.
- The practice of performing our lives before a diffuse, semi-present, always available audience has brought a withering light to bear upon our inner lives while suffusing our public acts with doubt, half-heartedness, and hesitation. But that doesn’t mean we should be striving to return to some more authentic or unmediated self that might now seem as though it had been available to us in the age before social media. Rather the point is that the experience of the self always emerges in relation to the media used to express it. These media are neither neutral nor interchangeable in how they give particular form to the self and circulate it. The question we should ask, then, is whether the distinctive experience of the self implicit in how we now communicate is conducive to our flourishing and to the cultivation of a more just society. We have reason to be skeptical on both counts.