How Digital Attention Rules Our Lives
Writer’s Blog 2
Erving Goffman created the concept of dramaturgy to define the varying ways in which people interact with the world. In this framework, people have a front stage with an audience who is witnessing our actions, and we have a backstage where we can entirely relax. This reminds me of the idea of a “social battery,” which gets drained if we do not allow enough time for ourselves to be backstage. The article, “The I in the internet,” discusses Goffman’s ideas in relation to the internet. As such, the internet as it exists today does not allow us to have our private, backstage moments. Instead, we experience what the article calls “hypervisibility.” On the internet, the performance is never-ending. This can be crippling as it relates to recharging a social battery by retreating to our backstages. If we can never truly retreat and be unseen, this could (and likely does) have serious psychological effects.
“We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever — you cannot live in a house like this anymore” (Tolentino, 2020).
Of course, this is an obvious issue for people like social media influencers whose job is literally to sell their personal lives to their audiences on the internet. For them, it seems that people don’t believe they have a right to a private backstage. Many social media influencers are mainly friends with other social media influencers and will talk about the blurry lines between true friendships and business partners. Are you able to stop your performances when the cameras stop rolling?
But what about those who are not online for their job? What about people who are simply existing in a modern society where they are interacting with the internet? Those people also experience a hypervisibility that they cannot escape. There is a looming feeling that an unseen audience is viewing your every action. While sometimes this feeling occurs and it is not true, with the internet, it is rather true. Someone or something (an algorithm) is watching everything you search, click on, like, post, buy, etc. There is no doing something in peace. Ordering a new book so that you can have backstage time and recharge your social battery? Now you will get advertised books in that genre for weeks, even if you didn’t end up enjoying it. Why didn’t you enjoy it? Probably because you couldn’t help but think about the opinions you had already heard about it. You saw multiple TikToks saying it was great, and all the comments agreed, so you bought it. However, when it didn’t live up to your expectations, you weren’t pleasing your unseen peers in the audience, so you felt that there must be something wrong with you.
This unseen virtual audience follows us everywhere. You didn’t buy those new pair of shoes that everyone else bought because they were advertised by a popular influencer? Now, you think, everyone knows that you are not up to date, fashionable, or obviously don’t follow the right people and are not in the know about the fashion trends. You’re still wearing tall Ugg boots, still call “flared leggings” yoga pants, or you are carrying a Hydroflask instead of a Stanley cup? Instant disapproval from that audience. Your whole life is a reflection of the way your attention and everyone else’s attention manifests online, and what you choose to do in your personal, offline life, is seen as a reflection of where your attention is online and if it is the same places other people’s attention is. If your attention isn’t where everyone else’s is (or you do not let your online existence dictate everything you buy or do in your offline life), then you must not be similar to your peers, you must be fundamentally different, and to some extent, you can be deemed a social outcast in your offline life because of the lack of physical manifestations of your online life.
