It’s been difficult not to think about social media lately. Facebook keeps getting into more trouble. There’s plenty being published about the coming implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Plus I’ve been generally musing about what social platforms are becoming, and what we’re becoming ….
And then the media gods made things go kinda weird and metaphysical.
I’ve listened to a tonne of great podcasts in the last week or so, but a couple of snippets in particular stuck in my brain. The first was from this Dear Manoush: The Advice Episode of Note to Self.
Toward the end of the episode, the host, Manoush Zomorodi, makes this comment: “My deep, dark theory always was that Facebook exists because we’re scared of death.”
That took a bit of mental chewing on, but it started to make sense to me. And then while listening to the Rideshare episode of The Truth podcast, the character who plays the modern day Charon, ferryman of myth who ushers the dead across the River Styx into the afterlife, responds to his passenger’s mention of her trivia team winning with: “...it’s funny how mortality makes winning seem important.”
Which clicked into place with my previous mental mastication regarding social platforms and memento mori like the final, satisfying piece of a large jigsaw puzzle.
Now, this train of thought won’t give you the answer to whether you should delete your social accounts or not, but it may help explain why we engage with them in the first place. Why we creep the lives of people we don’t even particularly like. Why we feel real anxiety when we post something that gets little response. Why we refresh, refresh, refresh.
Some comments that artist Barbara Kruger makes in this additional Note to Self interview (I highly recommend giving the full interview a listen) are veritably Cartesian. She refers to our existence on social platforms, curating our personas and brands, and viewing others through specific lenses, as “the examined life,” which can equally be considered metaphorically or literally.
She also notes that, as social beings with ego constructions, of course we possess a need for attention and being liked, even with ephemeral, superficial expressions of it.
So, tying that back to the “Charon” quote, those with the most likes/comments/followers are “winning” at life, I guess, which perhaps in some way cheats death? Or at least pushes away our fears of mortality to some degree.
It’s funny, then, how we do also tend to equate online content with a certain immortality, but usually only in a negative context. That nude photo, that offensive comment — those will be searchable forever. But nobody will care by next week if your latest Instagram post finally cracked 1,000 likes.
Does anyone really think that having millions of Instagram of YouTube followers will convey any sort of immortality? I sincerely doubt it. Not when our internet-length attention spans mean that today’s hottest consumable trend will be utterly forgotten in six months. Or next month. And yet … click, scroll, click, scroll ….
But, as noted, the attention and approval are, in some way, our new measurement to prove that we’re winning at life. Or winning by proxy as we closely follow every word, picture, or video of the very popular.
Even as calculated and curated as online presences tend to be, if others engage with them, I guess that means we’re living well. Congrats.
On the flip side, there can be a certain Schadenfreude when Facebook enables you to learn that your high school bully is thrice divorced, working a crappy job, and ageing badly. Clearly they’re not living “well,” but does that in turn mean that you’re living better? Is it validation that you’re winning at life, or at least against eventual mortality? It seems … really hollow.
Perhaps, though, this grouping together of friending, following, and liking is more of a circling of the wagons of humanity. Gathering closely around life’s campfire for warmth. Safety in numbers and attempting to construct some sense of community since we’ve gotten increasingly bad at that construction in the “real” world.
Do we add people to our networks, hope we get added to theirs, and contribute our likes (hoping to receive theirs in return) so that by feeling less alone in some way, we feel safer and more protected by a net of humanity from that great unknown void? (Or from being picked up by a “ferryman” in a Hyundai if you listen to that above mentioned episode of The Truth.)
Or are we just confused and clueless about it all because these platforms and our engagement with them got so big and so consuming so fast, and we’re just scrambling, cluelessly, to keep up in the ways prescribed to us by people we don’t actually know, but who we’re told are “influencers”?
Granted, the responses of the executives of these social platforms to revelations of negligence or misconduct imply that they’re not really holding the reins, either ...
I don’t think our major social platforms were developed in response to a fear of death. Though a pre-Facebook incarnation (“Hot or Not”) was about getting laid, and you could go way down a rabbit hole exploring the links between sex and death ….
But I digress. I think, though, that the fear of death, in some ways, has led us to allow the social platforms to become what they’ve become. Our need for belonging is only marginally less strong than our need for survival. (And a lack of the former contributes to increased failure of the latter.)
We also tend to care what people think, especially people we hold in high esteem, so social attention and approval keep triggering those hits of dopamine, which keep us wanting more, more, more.
We’ve tricked ourselves that feeling high on (calculated, curated) life, which equates to winning at life, and potentially triumphing … just a little … just for a little while, over mortality.
Charon won’t accept your friend request, though, and he’s still got scheduled pickups for us all.
