Your information does not equate to you.
Drawing a line between online and offline life.
It is constantly written that the lines between our online and offline selves are being blurred. Since we administer more of our lives online, from our personal life to our banking, it is said that the difference between our online selves and offline selves matter less and less.
This schizophrenic reading of modern life by it’s nature splits human experience into online and offline, then proceeds to tell us they are one. I believe this is not only utter nonsense, but dangerous nonsense.
There is a limit to the spectrum of human experience you can feel while staring at a screen. You can be happy for some good news about a friend you come across on social media, but that’s nothing like being told in person and being able to communicate directly about it. We are, I feel, in danger of numbing ourselves to social experience, or at least engaged in making others think we’re numbed to it, which is just as destructive. But what is the process by which this happens?
We all know the ‘I’ we portray online has little resemblance to the ‘I’ in everyday life. In my experience the harder a time someone is going through, the greater they blur their online image. The happier someone may seem on Facebook or Twitter, the worse they are actually feeling.
Why is this? Sometimes it’s as if the person is engaged in an effort to re-define themselves after something bad or traumatic happens. As if to say “I’m absolutely fine, I’m handling it really well, I just shared a picture of a flying cat that looks like David Bowie to prove beyond doubt that I am absolutely fine”. Since the proliferation of the web we always have an audience, and through social media that audience is usually some of the people we are closest to, and a great number we are not. But the difference between an online and offline audience is that the former is not present. This is a huge difference. The very presence of someone else, someone you trust, can help through any depression or anxiety, help you deal with whatever is happening in your life. By posturing that everything is fine, because that is the normative behavior while using these services, we increase the risk of pushing people away or even lessen the likelihood of someone noticing there’s something up and offering an ear. Listening is the greatest thing a friend can do for you. They have to be there to do it.
I never take my friend’s David Bowie cat pictures as evidence that everything is ok, and I don’t think anyone else should either. I will admit, when someone mentions a friend or acquaintance to me and they are a friend on Facebook, their posts sometimes pop into my head. I receive some bad news about someone and think ‘really? He seemed fine yesterday when he posted that thing about that other thing’. This might sound dramatic; but this is conditioning, a reaction caused by habit. I flick through people’s online personas, and in turn am desensitized to their offline well being. I was going to edit that last sentence but it’s evidence in itself, what is an ‘offline well being’? As compared to what other well being? The language perverts our experience as much as the act.
These two versions of ourselves get farther and farther apart. Our online self, heavily curated by our social instincts, becomes a self with no negative aspects, one which works in a directly opposite way than our real selves. When we are feeling down, our online self gets happier, when we are happy our online self gets quieter. As we are told that being online is being ‘social’ and that talking to others online is the act of ‘connecting’, the inference that the demarcation between our online and real personalities is becoming less important, or even existent, seems to me to be a dangerous idea.
How many engagements, marriages, births, break ups or deaths have you heard about through social media? It seems to me that through the spread and increase of use of these services we are pushed more toward the curated, online versions of people and farther away from the person themselves. We engage more with an almost perfect version of someone. This increasing superficiality in our interactions atomizes us instead of ‘connecting’ us.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a place for sites like Facebook and Twitter, but I think how we use them and our attitudes toward them have to be defined more by the empirical evidence of their use, and less by the marketing and product design departments of the companies which run them.
After my last post the book The Circle by David Eggars was recommended to me. I bought it today, on the first page there is a quote from another great book, East of Eden by Stienbeck. It reads, “There wasn't any limit, no boundary at all, to the future. And it would be so a man wouldn't have room to store his happiness”.
