See the Additional Resources for Topics for Critical Thinking and Writing and reading comprehension quizzes for this chapter.
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Online versus IRL: How Has Social Networking Changed How We Relate to One Another?
JULES EVANS
Jules Evans is the author of Philosophy of Life and Other Dangerous Situations (2013), and he hosts a Web site by the same name. He also runs the Well-Being Project at Queen Mary, University of London. In this article, published on June 10, 2013, in the Huffington Post United Kingdom, Evans notes that our desire for online approval and popularity might be coming at the cost of real-life happiness.
Are We Slaves to Our Online Selves?
The public rage over revelations that governments snoop on our online activity comes partly from a sense that our online selves are not entirely in our control. The more networked we are, the more our selves are “out there,” online, made public and transparent to a million eyes.
On the one hand the global interconnectedness of the internet gives us a feeling of euphoria — we are joined to humanity! We are Liked! On the other hand, we get sudden pangs of paranoia — what if all these online strangers don’t wish us well, what if they are stalkers or con-men or bullies or spies? How are we coming across? Are we over-exposed? Does our bum look big in this?
Growing up in today’s online world must be difficult, because every adolescent experiment, every awkward mistake, is out there online, perhaps forever. This makes me glad that I was a teenager in the 1990s, before the internet could capture my adolescent fuck-wittery for posterity. Depressingly often these days, we read about a teenager who has taken their own life because someone posted an unflattering photo or video of them online. They feel publicly shamed, desecrated, permanently damaged.
There is a word for what the internet and social media have done to us: alienation. It means, literally, selling yourself into slavery, from the Latin for slave, alienus. The word has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, particularly in Plato and the Stoics, who warned that if you place too much value on your reputation or image, you enslave yourself to the fickle opinion of the public. You raise the public above you, turn it into a god, then cower before it and beg for its approval. You become dispossessed, your self-esteem soaring or crashing depending on how the public views you. This is a recipe for emotional sickness.
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5 You can end up caring more about your image or reflection than your actual self. You replace actual loving human relations with the fickle adoration of the public. How many times do we see people sitting with friends or family at a pub or a restaurant, ignoring them while they anxiously check on their online selves? Our actual selves end up shriveled and unwell, while our unreal mirror selves suck up more and more of our attention. We can even turn our loved ones into props for public approval. Your fiance proposed? Share it! Everything is done for the public, for strangers, for people who don’t really care about you at all.
I remember seeing a family at the beach, in Venezuela last year. The mother was a rather curvaceous lady in a bikini, and she insisted the father take endless photos of her, standing by the sea in various outlandish poses. Literally hundreds of photos. They completely ignored their little daughter, who gazed on her mother in confusion. Occasionally the daughter would come up to get the mother’s attention, and she would be given a little shove to get out of the shot. It was like some grotesque fairy-tale. The mother was so obsessed with her online self, yet so palpably ugly inside.
The internet has become a vast pool, into which we gaze like Narcissus, bewitched by our own reflection. Our smart-phones are little pocket-mirrors, with which we’re constantly snapping “selfies,” trying to manage how the public perceives us. It’s like we have a profound fear of insignificance and nothingness, so we check the pocket-mirror every few minutes to re-assure ourselves that we exist, that we are loved. We mistake Likes for love. We look to celebrities with a million followers, and beg them to follow us. Because then we’d be real! Celebrities do this too, tweeting about the other celebrities they hang out with, to create a sort of Hello! magazine existence for the public to gape at. Everything becomes a pose, a selfie.
I’m probably worse than the lot of you. I worry that extensive use of social media over the last decade has re-wired the way I think, so that I now have “share” buttons installed in my hypothalamus. No sooner do I have a thought than I want to share it. In the old days, perhaps individuals quietly spoke to God in their hearts. Now I find my thoughts instantly forming themselves into 140-character epigrams. Sublime sunset? Share it. New baby? Share it. Terminal cancer? Share it. Let’s live-blog death, find eternity in re-tweets.
How much of our selves we offer up to the god of Public Opinion. How devotedly we serve it. How utterly we make ourselves transparent to its thousand-eyed stare, until we suddenly feel over-exposed and try to cover ourselves up.
10 What is the antidote to alienation? The Greeks thought the cure was simple: don’t put too much value on your reputation or image. Recognise that it is out of your control. Remind yourself that there is not a direct correlation between a person’s image and their actual value, that the public is not a perfect mirror, that it distorts like a circus mirror. And try not to gaze into the mirror too often. Tend to the garden within, to your deeper and better self, even if it doesn’t get a hundred Likes on Facebook.
This is not an easy thing to do. No sooner did I think of this, than I immediately thought, good idea: share it! Pin it! Reddit! My over-networked self needs to be reminded of the value of disconnection, of silence and contemplation, to let deeper thoughts rise up. With that in mind, I’m off on a retreat this week in the Welsh countryside (not a re-tweet, a retreat), in search of a deeper way to connect, a better Cloud to sit on. I hope they don’t have Wi-Fi.
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Jules Evans starts his article with a basic paradox of online existence: we don’t control our online identities, yet so much of our sense of self these days seems tied up with that identity. We resent those who snoop into our online activity, yet we get a “feeling of euphoria” (para. 2) when something happens online that confirms our existence (e.g., we get a Like!). What is the basis of this dynamic? Can something, if anything, be done to change it? Explain your response.
In paragraph 4, Evans cites the wisdom of the ancient Greeks: We shouldn’t put too much stock in what others think of us. He calls this a “recipe for emotional sickness.” Why is that? In your opinion, is it realistic not to care about what others think of us? Can good things result from an awareness of the opinion of others? Why, or why not? Be specific.
In paragraph 5, Evans calls out the problem of “caring more about your image or reflection than your actual self.” What is meant by the term “actual self”? How disparate or different are public and private senses of self likely to be? Provide specific examples.
Evans gives the example of a beautiful woman posing for pictures at the beach, all the while ignoring her little daughter (para. 6). Did this example surprise you? To what extent does the concept of the “selfie” take over the interpretation of this anecdote? (Consider that young men have been taking photographs of young women at the beach long before the invention of the smartphone.) In this sense, is Evans’s example deliberately misleading? Support your answer.
What is the point of the story of Narcissus? Why does Evans include a reference to it in this essay? In your opinion, is its use effective? Why, or why not?
Evans states in paragraph 8 that he’s worried that the extensive use of social media has “re-wired the way I think.” Research current findings on how the use of electronic media, the Internet, and social media specifically are or are not changing the way we think. Are our brains physically adapting to these changes? If so, how? What does this mean for the future?
Evans states that we offer ourselves up “to the god of Public Opinion” (para. 9). Later in the same paragraph, the god appears more like a monster with its “thousand-eyed stare.” According to Evans, our relationship with this god is contradictory: We seek its approval sometimes; at other times we cover ourselves to hide from it. In your opinion, is this assessment correct? Why, or why not? Cite specific examples.
Evans ends his article by stating that he’s going on vacation, hoping to “be reminded of the value of disconnection, of silence and contemplation, to let deeper thoughts rise up” (para. 11). Is he right to be worried that being overconnected somehow causes us to be separated from ourselves? Why, or why not?