Is the Circle our realia?

Nowadays, everyone can catch himself sitting in front of the screen for hours, chatting with friends and family online and even ‘checking in’ every place you go. This is a modern life, and it makes our own life submitted to social media. Social media is like a ‘helping hand’ and there it is even more interesting than in real life. People suppose they can feel more free and important there. Dave Eggers, in his book The Circle discusses this nowadays panacea by creating the fiction organization The Circle, where everything is about social media. The sad issue that arises before us from our reality is that social media is making people anti-social, bounded to a false, self-perpetuating and meaningless cycle. People become dependent to this cycle, thinking that online conversations can substitute the real life. The profile that we can create in the Internet can be wittier, more active and interesting. With the Internet we can’t realize where our virtual selves end and where our real selves start. Eggers creates a fiction the Circle organization, which includes in it all type of social media, ‘subsumed Facebook, Twitter, [and] Google’. This conglomerate is like a dream place for workers, with lots of parks, dormitory areas, grocery stores and everything that the employees can dream about. Eggers also describes the character, Mae who is central in the story and who after graduating the university, gets this dream work in the Circle. She is completely involved in her work answering the questions from the customers and asking them to rate her work. She tries her best and participates in all company’s events. Mae does not realize that slowly she becomes swamped into this virtual and perfect world. She can’t live and communicate without Internet, blogging and putting pictures. Mae forgets about the reality and lives in totally virtual world.

The perfect world in which Eggers puts his character, Mae is obviously a fiction. But the thing is that is not it our reality, just little bit in maximization? The reader understands that all that is happening in the story is not true, but at the same time it is very closed to what is happening in modern world, where we can’t live without social media. This maximization is created for people to stop and realize our nowadays reality. That we are in circle just like Mae. But our circle is our own lives. While Mae is obsessed by the world she is living in, people who surround her try to tell her about that. One of the characters who is the most harsh in this sense is her ex-boyfriend, Mercer. He tells that everything what she does in Circle is not important and that it is not real. But Mae likes her job, and continues to be a good worker. But Circle demands from its employee’s total submission. Thus, after one event, they tell her:

“Not good. I know that. But I was at the circus event and that was great. So great.” [Mae]

“It was great, wasn’t it? And it was great to see you there. But we have no record of you being there. No photos, no zings, no reviews, notices, bumps. Why not?” [Dan]

“I don’t know. I guess I was caught up in the — “ [Mae]

“Dan sighed loudly. “You do know that we like to hear from people, right? That Circlers’ opinions are valued? “(Eggers 178).

The main question put in the Eggers’ book is that what happens when private companies have too much personal information and each your move, desire and action is recorded? Ellen Ullman in her review of The Circle book for The New York Times writes that the two main things about this reality are Secrets are lies and Privacy is Theft. She states that the reality of the Circle is that everyone’s past and present is revealed and recorded, nothing can be ever erased and that the Circle’s main aim is to have all aspects of people’s lives and these lives are revealed to all world.