Yesterday I attended a conference on social networking at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and was once again struck with how absolutely overwhelmed and engulfed our modern lives are with digital machines and technology. They are omnipresent. We carry them with us wherever we go. We transact business through them. We communicate with friends and family and even with that larger amorphous network of acquaintances and distant mutual friends and their mutual acquaintances. And if we are honest, most of us will admit that we even take those devices into our bedrooms with us when we retire for the night. It is now so easy for our lives, our minute-to-minute experience of life, to become permeated and mediated by our technologies.
The conference, “Are Social Networks Really Social? was sponsored jointly by the museum and the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy so I would guess therapists of various sorts were in the overwhelming majority. But there were more ordinary folk like myself who came out of curiosity to hear three speakers on the topic of social media: (1) a psychologist and author who specializes in technology, Sherry Turkle, (2) a novelist, Helen Schulman, who has written about the nature and consequences of all things digital on the lives of ordinary families, and (3) an artist, Rachel Perry Welty, who has explored media like Facebook and Twitter as performance spaces. Over a long and rich afternoon those speakers and the audience pondered how social media—everything from email to smartphones to Facebook—affects both our relationships with others and our own psyches. There was a general consternation, even fear, and some sadness too, about how distracted, unfocused, and isolated individuals are becoming in our society.
Many ramifications of such behavior came up: People are less productive, and they’re less capable of sustained and complex thinking. Some observed that there’s an intolerance, perhaps even an inability to actually cultivate
solitude. Not unrelated is a strong tendency to avoid, even again to fear, having direct conversations with others. And this of course leads to a lack of intimacy as well as empathy. Sherry Turkle worries that many people are actually substituting “connections” for “conversations.”
I’m thinking it may even be worse than that because when people post some thoughts on Facebook, send out a Tweet, or text someone, they are often not “connecting” so much as they are “performing.” My own experience with
Facebook and its current invitation to participate: “What on your mind?”is that it is a site for self-promotion, or as Norman Mailer once humbly (or maybe wryly) called a collection of his short works: “Advertisements for Myself.”
(Mailer was very good at the self-promotion thing, well before 2.0.)
The Yale computer scientist David Gelernter recently wrote a diatribe in The Wall Street Journal primarily against the careless disposable nature of “digital words,” and how sloppy and lazy (and idiotic) texting and smiley faces
really are. Yes, I agree that it’s all regrettable and one can only hope that everyone will come to their senses eventually. But what is even more interesting is Gelernter’s observation that “Generation-i is stuck in then“now,” neither pondering the past nor planning for the future. It’s the permeation and flow of the continuously new. “Merely glance at any digital gadget and you learn immediately what all your friends are doing, seeing, hearing,
. . . and (if you care) what’s going on now any place on earth. The whole world is screaming at you. Under the circumstances, young people abandon themselves to the present. Group narcissism takes over, as Generation–i falls in love with its own image reflected on the surface of the
cybersphere.”
Group narcissism. It seems we have far more of this phenomenon than we do of wise crowds and smart mobs. But it’s not clinical narcissism, which is a serious personality disorder characterized by dramatic emotional
behavior, a deep need for admiration, an inflated sense of self-importance, and an underlying fragile esteem for oneself. No this narcissism refers to the simpler classical myth of the beautiful Narcissus, who fell deeply in love with his own image in a pool of water as he drank from it. But he could never embrace or possess the image so rather than relinquish it he lay down by the side of the pool and was gradually consumed by the flame of his own
self-passion.
The conference, “Are Social Networks Really Social? was sponsored jointly by the museum and the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy so I would guess therapists of various sorts were in the overwhelming majority. But there were more ordinary folk like myself who came out of curiosity to hear three speakers on the topic of social media: (1) a psychologist and author who specializes in technology, Sherry Turkle, (2) a novelist, Helen Schulman, who has written about the nature and consequences of all things digital on the lives of ordinary families, and (3) an artist, Rachel Perry Welty, who has explored media like Facebook and Twitter as performance spaces. Over a long and rich afternoon those speakers and the audience pondered how social media—everything from email to smartphones to Facebook—affects both our relationships with others and our own psyches. There was a general consternation, even fear, and some sadness too, about how distracted, unfocused, and isolated individuals are becoming in our society.
Many ramifications of such behavior came up: People are less productive, and they’re less capable of sustained and complex thinking. Some observed that there’s an intolerance, perhaps even an inability to actually cultivate
solitude. Not unrelated is a strong tendency to avoid, even again to fear, having direct conversations with others. And this of course leads to a lack of intimacy as well as empathy. Sherry Turkle worries that many people are actually substituting “connections” for “conversations.”
I’m thinking it may even be worse than that because when people post some thoughts on Facebook, send out a Tweet, or text someone, they are often not “connecting” so much as they are “performing.” My own experience with
Facebook and its current invitation to participate: “What on your mind?”is that it is a site for self-promotion, or as Norman Mailer once humbly (or maybe wryly) called a collection of his short works: “Advertisements for Myself.”
(Mailer was very good at the self-promotion thing, well before 2.0.)
The Yale computer scientist David Gelernter recently wrote a diatribe in The Wall Street Journal primarily against the careless disposable nature of “digital words,” and how sloppy and lazy (and idiotic) texting and smiley faces
really are. Yes, I agree that it’s all regrettable and one can only hope that everyone will come to their senses eventually. But what is even more interesting is Gelernter’s observation that “Generation-i is stuck in then“now,” neither pondering the past nor planning for the future. It’s the permeation and flow of the continuously new. “Merely glance at any digital gadget and you learn immediately what all your friends are doing, seeing, hearing,
. . . and (if you care) what’s going on now any place on earth. The whole world is screaming at you. Under the circumstances, young people abandon themselves to the present. Group narcissism takes over, as Generation–i falls in love with its own image reflected on the surface of the
cybersphere.”
Group narcissism. It seems we have far more of this phenomenon than we do of wise crowds and smart mobs. But it’s not clinical narcissism, which is a serious personality disorder characterized by dramatic emotional
behavior, a deep need for admiration, an inflated sense of self-importance, and an underlying fragile esteem for oneself. No this narcissism refers to the simpler classical myth of the beautiful Narcissus, who fell deeply in love with his own image in a pool of water as he drank from it. But he could never embrace or possess the image so rather than relinquish it he lay down by the side of the pool and was gradually consumed by the flame of his own
self-passion.
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