By Tommie Worrall
“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
— Aldous Huxley, “Ends and Means”
Author’s Note: This article does not aim to offer any concessions to opposing perspectives on the issue of social media. This is a stone-cold diatribe – an unwavering condemnation of all digital mediums of cultural exchange. The author is in no way inclined to defend that which he views as having a decidedly atrophying effect on human society.
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The contemporary western world has fundamentally compromised all current and future generations. One may cite myriad examples of how this has been achieved: through the systematic destruction of the natural world, the impoverishment of the third world, through the legitimisation of a system of political and economic backwardness which prioritises said destruction…the list can continue indefinitely.
Within this dystopian mire that our everyday existence has become, we are not even afforded the luxury of normal human development. Late-stage capitalism dictates that every aspect of our lives is managed and maintained by someone other than ourselves: our time, our resources, and now even our identities are no longer our own. What I would like to emphasise in particular in this article is the latter issue – that we are no longer in control of the development of our own identities. Our thoughts, attitudes, and aesthetics now seem to be determined entirely by somebody else.
I wish to clarify prior to further elaboration that I fully acknowledge the role of community in the growth of individual identity development. Our nature as social beings demands that our ego develops only after years of interaction and comparison with others; that is to say, we discover who we are largely thanks to inspiration and feedback from other people. This process of the death of the self-crafted identity that I am describing is not a vilification of the conventional role that others play in the development of identity; it is a condemnation of the fact that, in our unique set of circumstances in the modern western world, one is now largely removed from the process of the development of his own self.
I attribute the death of the individual to social media: that great, all-pervasive network of communication which has forcefully imposed its values of vanity, consumption, and alienation upon the masses in flashy, user-friendly style. There are few that can resist its temptation, and few that can live without it, try as one might; the burgeoning class of administrators and professionals in the United States is virtually required to possess, and consistently engage with, user profiles on LinkedIn, while local businesses will likely remain obscure outside of their town of origin unless they take to advertising on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
Still, by far the largest demographic that has taken to (or rather, been coerced into using) social media is adolescents. Indeed, so much of the modern adolescent experience has been digitised that the common caricature of the American teenager now portrays them, often without exception, with a smartphone in their hands, obstinately unwilling to disengage from their online world. This is where the trouble begins – and where classic identity development ends.
What has heretofore occurred among the juvenile population of the West, in accordance with the theories of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, goes as follows: if all has gone well in one’s life up to the point of adolescence, they have successfully developed the competence and confidence necessary to act within and upon the world around them and pursue the activities for which they possess a combination of ability and curiosity. At this point, however, the adolescent finds themself in the midst of a crisis of the greatest possible magnitude: Who are they? – and furthermore, how do they fit into society as a unique individual? The adolescent, in the burning frustration of their youth, finds that they cannot yet answer this question. In order to do so, and thus resolve their “identity crisis,” the adolescent tries on various roles, experimenting with and employing a variety of different – and often nonconformist – attitudes, behaviours, and activities, until the embryo of a unique identity is formed. In this stage of life, the adolescent is able to personally select the values, convictions, and persuasions that they want to adopt, and personally reject those which they find distasteful. They are the master of their own identity.
Under the modern social media paradigm, however, the adolescent is no longer granted the privilege of taking part in the development of their own identity. Indeed, as the contemporary youth agonises over who they are, and who they wish to be, their social media feeds inundate them with pre-scripted, pre-crafted identities to adopt without a second thought. These are commodity identities, able to be acquired without any effort on the part of the adolescent other than mimicking the carefully curated content on their screen. Western youth are now able to develop a personality without engaging at all in the self-examination inherent to the process of identity formation – they are able to adopt beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours that have already been decided for them.
The digital content that bequeaths these prefabricated identities to our youth, however, is not unique to each individual. These identities are, like material commodities, intended to be acquired by as many consumers as possible. As a result, their proliferation is more important than their quality, and they are woefully mediocre. Commodity identities are a series of one-dimensional, watered-down caricatures, each crafted with their own superficial aesthetics, attitudes, and buzzwords so as to be instantly recognisable and transmissible – and as more and more adolescents adopt them, they are becoming ubiquitous. It is one thing for a material good to be adopted by majority groups, but an identity with no variation whatsoever is quite another; never before has such a level of identity homogenisation existed within human society.
True, adolescents have always divided themselves according to the similarities found in their nascent identity patterns (think of the clichéd groupings of jocks, nerds, goths, et cetera), but the members of such groupings were all recognised to be individuals, each with their own distinctive ideas and aspirations; a circle of friends that all were identified as, let us say, “nerds”, would have undoubtedly all possessed a certain bookishness, but each friend would have had their own unique intellectual interests, one being interested in the humanities, another in the sciences, and so on. Each friend would have brought different ideas, values, and aspirations to the grouping, despite their shared attributes. Now, however, the uniformity of adopted personalities has virtually eliminated such differences; the interests, mannerisms, and even patterns of speech of each member of an in-group are now totally identical, having already been scripted online for use in the real world.
What, then, has the West left to its progeny? – A hopeless future, one under which they are not even afforded the ability to develop as unique individuals, consigned instead to adopt shallow, prepackaged identities that hold as much depth as a puddle holds water. If our youth are relegated to an existence as carbon copies of one another, if they are denied the possibility to distinguish themselves personally, behaviourally, and intellectually, then we have truly entered into a period of unique cultural decline, unlike anything that human society has hitherto experienced.
THE CONVERSATION PIECE 