remixed: social media use

I had to submit various 500-word writing samples for a job application recently, one of which was the below post - which is made up of two previous posts w/ the fat trimmed and the purple prose toned down a bit. Figured I might as well replace those two inferior posts with the leaner version. This has to do with how social media use affects how we see ourselves and how we see others.

* * *

I’ve been thinking recently about the role that social media plays in our lives. I propose that, while social media use isn't “dangerous” in the sense of some malevolent ur-technology bent on amusing us to death, it does play a catalytic role in the split between our interiority and our public life.


Mirrors make us two, subject and object. And a facebook profile, mirror-like, offers the same effect. While the ostensible purpose of facebook use is to communicate with others, I want you to admit that you keep a closer eye on your own profile than is strictly necessary. You have scrolled from time to time through the photos tagged of yourself or through the recent items on your wall, imagining the impression of you that they will limn for others. Am I the only one who, after confirming a friend request, will often check my profile rather than the new friend's, eager to be sure that they'll be impressed by what they see? No need to point out the strangeness of my assumption that they'll be any more interested in me than I in them; this sort of solipsism is hard to shake. If you have ever untagged an unflattering photo or paused to compose a studiously witty online comment, then you too are familiar with what I think of as the "rhetorical function of truth-telling:" the way that authentic soul-type characteristics are contaminated by performance as soon as Others see them and approve of them, validate them. Facebook is one more mirror in the presence of which we become double, both “authentic” and performative.


I submit that our generation must be marked deep down by a self-consciousness magnified by the hours that we spend online polishing our public faces – but I want to go back to the issue of solipsism. DFW wrote in his Kenyon College commencement address that
everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. ...it's pretty much the same for all of us... lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.
It's hard to argue with that. But I now submit that the self-objectification that facebook foments might, when considered consciously, be one way to take seriously the subjectivity of others. Mirror-gazing may not be a healthy way to regard yourself, yet – in its implication of other people who perceive you – it may be one small way to regard others as subjects as "central" as you are. To fight solipsism, I mean. So while I argue that facebook makes us more self-conscious and encourages us to think as "Them" rather than as “I,” I propose also that “thinking like Them” can have anti-solipsistic powers when it is a deliberate choice rather than our default setting.


(And yet, like Borges, I still don’t know whether it's the public or the private "I" that’s writing this page.)