The Social Media Image of Self and The Will to Change the World

Today, there is a fundamental lack of reality acceptance — of accepting things as they are — and my hypothesis is that it stems from some crucial changes which have occurred in regard to our view of the body — more precisely, of our view of the public image of the body.

It is easy to be Foucaultian when dealing with the body, and easy though it may be, it is nonetheless essential. The body, as a significant part of the human experience, is more recently tightly linked with cognitive processes, mainly perception and representation. It is common neuroscientific knowledge that the body contributes to memory, emotion and — indirectly — to reason, to a considerable extent.

The image that a person has of their body will therefore have intensive ramifications in that person’s view of the world. The potential which that person expects and understands as possible in relation to their body will alter whatever potential and possibilities they expect of the world. This is terribly important if we want to understand the number of socio-political ideologies at work today, and even more so if we take into account their virulence and their will to power.

It is only in recent times that the image of the individual body has become an easy subject of manipulation. Changing the body at will has, up to the age of the social network, been a phenomenon restricted to the fields of art and science — it was not an undertaking available to the individual. It was, more importantly, not a thing that an individual could do to his public image.

With the advent of the social network, however, two changes have occured simultaneously; for once, the public discourse has moved towards the digital world; secondly, the public image of the individual has become easily modifiabe, according to that individual’s pleasure.

Basically, what happened was that an individual could alter their public image, and use that image to represent themselves as they made their voice heard in the community. The implications of this are enormous.

Since something as fundamental as the public image — and by that, I mean the image of the body: the avatar, the profile picture — can now be easily changed according to the individual’s preferences, it is almost inevitable for an individual to expect to change public opinions according to their whim. In days past, changing the public opinion was, by and large, easier than changing your public image, since that coincided with your physical body, over whose main traits — height, weight, facial features — you did not have much control. As an immediate consequence, for it to be easier nowadays to change your public image directly implies that one will expect — consciously or subconsciously — the same amount of control over the public sphere that they partake in.

It is in this context that I understand much of the ”social justice” ideologies of today, and their virulent will to close their eyes to and demand the change/repression of anything that ”offends” them. I do not wish to name any such ideologies, since, by and large, they are not ideologies in the proper sense of the word. They are more similar to aggregations of individuals whose only common trait is a grandiose sense of the self and a very limited tolerance to the opinion of the others. These individuals only come together sporadically with other like-minded individuals around fashionable ideas that are suitable to be used as weapons with which to demand the altering of the public sphere according to their individual wishes.

This will — and need — to change the public sphere according to one’s wishes has been augmented by the limitless control one has over one’s public image. This control has favored individuals prone to selfishness and a lack of acceptance of other, mostly become it has offered them a platform and an encouragement to expect to change the world as they like to. And while the body image causality that I attempted above does not claim to offer the only explanation of the ”social justice” problem we have today, it is most definitely worth considering.