Naive Critiques of Social Media (2018)

This is a paper I wrote for my first semester of undergrad in 2018. I actually wanted to expand it into a thesis about the economics of online platforms (business people say stupid shit about it) before I shifted my research wholly into Greco-Latin poetry, but I still like the analysis and sometimes wish I could refer to it. So, here it is! Sorry for any eighteen-year-old bullshit. Also I removed the footnotes because they were annoying to reformat, but the works cited section is still there.

Shout-out to my professor who was an English literature guy forced to teach engineers how to write. He was very entertained by me, I think. And he was a great professor! Very patient with the STEM freaks. 

Introduction

Social media is a mode of discourse specific to the information age, an evolution of the personalization of commodities and the commodification of personality where users relate to each other in a manner not unlike celebrities and brand images. As a new means of communication and relation with others, social media is structured by interactions and etiquette that dictate acceptable behavior on the platform that there are social consequences for breaking—not at all different from person-to-person contact in real life. What differentiates social media from traditional social structure is not how alienated people are from either public image they create for themselves, but the very nature of that image: how it is created by the web developers that aim to increase ad revenue, and how it is maintained by users that aim to increase their own reputation and personal brand. Rather than naively critique social media as a phenomenon that uniquely splits the self-identity of a user, this paper will argue that preexisting technological and social tendencies made the advent of social media possible, and that participation on social networks simultaneously soothes and perpetuates the anxiety associated with real-life and online personal identity.

Companies that operate social networking websites are monetarily invested in the time that users invest to develop their online personalities and maintain their online relationships, utilizing site design and content algorithms that encourage users to increase website activity and profit. The business models of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all primarily based on venture investment and ad revenue, which generates vast returns on investment by placing ads on webpages and media files. Social networking websites also collect information on users and their browsing habits, anonymously or otherwise, which is valuable data for advertising firms who purchase it. In order to maximize ad revenue, social networks are designed to maximize the time users spend participating in the online community. This goes beyond providing the website as a mode of discourse—simple online discussion, as well as uniquely digital social interactions that carry symbolic weight like ‘favoriting’ and sharing posts—because the developer must craft an experience for the user that begs them to come back and stay online. The photo-sharing social network Instagram manipulates the chronological order of a user’s content feed to prioritize content that the user statistically enjoys more, as indicated by their consistent viewing or favoriting of previously browsed posts. Similar algorithms are employed to seek out new profiles for a user to follow based on mutual friends, related interests, and account activity. One such method is described by Twitter Inc. on an official blog post: “By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.”These measures, however invasive they might be, contribute to the phenomenon of novelty that social networks perpetuate and need to thrive as a recreational activity, as a social medium, and as a thriving modern business. The drive to appear new is a symptom of the modern commodity to constantly outdo itself and its predecessors, where “the outmoded [commodities] are denounced precisely by those who imposed them,” according to social theorist Guy Debord. However, the social networks do not sell any new experiences or even the platform on which they occur: instead, the network provides the platform to consume media and interact with others for free, and the commodity it sells is effectively the time and information of the users who freely enjoy their online experience. Social media websites do not try, nor do they need to convince consumers that they are worthy of its hypothetical price, but only that they are worthy of their time.

The pull of the social media experience extends beyond the mechanics and algorithms of the site itself, where the online community becomes necessary to receive news updates and participate in public discussion. Twitter has been accused of entertaining controversy on its platform by enabling President Donald Trump to post public threats against other countries, thereby allowing him to violate the formal terms of service in order to increase publicity and webpage views. President Trump’s social media activity has thus become a media circus, not just circulating on the Twitter website but being shared by online and televised news outlets. In a press statement released by Twitter Inc., the company responded by invoking their position to “serve and help advance the global, public conversation”, and asserted that banning a global leader would “hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions”. In the same statement, Twitter declined that the media publicity surrounding President Trump’s posts influenced their decision not to take disciplinary action against his account. Regardless, their response indicates the important role that social media plays as a medium of conversation that is central to understanding and participating in the modern digital world. Online personalities interact with each other through the framework of the website, sharing and signaling opinions that influence and interact with whoever they reach within and outside the network. The interactions of these personalities become a new dimension of communication and are the source of revenue for the websites who so graciously host them.

It follows that an analysis of the influence of social networks on the psyche of a user should extend from the analysis of the online personality. As previously mentioned, social media differs from traditional media or other industries in general because it inverts the role of the commodity and the consumer: the media is the subject that transforms the user’s activity into a commodity in the form of webpage views and ad clicks. However, the user is also the subject which generates the media that is shared and consumed, although not for a directly economic exchange. As demonstrated, the social networking website is therefore only involved in the two-sided process between users and media insofar as they provide the platform that it takes place on and as they structure it to facilitate behavior that increases revenue for the website. A critique that does not attempt to understand the online personality in these terms, instead approaching the topic like a digital Luddite trying to return to the good old days of face-to-face conversation, is baseless because it does not analyze social media as the result of existing technological and social tendencies or as relationships between people.

In order to understand the online personality and how it is not a distinct, especially damaging phenomenon, we must first compare a common critique of social media to preexisting notions of personality that predate social media by decades. Then, to discover its unique form, we must trace its genealogy from the conception of the earliest commodified personality—the celebrity—throughout the technological advances that enabled its development. Having arrived in the present, we must analyze the system of the social network both as a community and as a symbolic language, and develop a framework of analysis to understand the relations that take place between online personalities big or small. Finally, we will apply this framework to further analyze existing critiques of social media and their inability to articulate their actual effects.

Split: What the Online Personality Is Not

The accusation levied towards social media that it specifically fosters a false, public image of individual users is unfair. Dr. Bob Deutsch argues that the medium of social media “has become dangerously inauthentic” because the “very nature of it causes all of us to be fake.” According to Dr. Deutsch, posting status updates to a social network “can project an image of a life far better than the one we authentically experience,” specifically because it lacks the ability to tell stories which are the base of so-called “naturally occurring conversations.” This critique is presumptuous because Dr. Deutsch has a superficial understanding of the interactions that take place online and in real life: he ultimately relegates social networking to an inferior or incomplete mode of communication that is inauthentic at its base. He also fetishizes storytelling as the primary feature of social interaction—by which he means the ability to have fluid, active conversation. In doing so, he ignores the symbolic gestures and rules of conduct that give words connotative meaning, which by nature imply a gap between intent and action, or between private thoughts and public persona.

For French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the personal inauthenticity that Dr. Deutsch fears is what structures everyday real-life social interaction and even the notion of subjectivity itself. The individual is alienated from itself because it is split by language within itself as an object of grammar (the I in “I am happy”) and the subject that talks about or enunciates the I. The ‘imaginary’ object that is the ego depends upon the self-perceived unity of the individual, so that it is possible for the ‘symbolic’ subject to identify with and represent the ego without complication to other subjects or even to itself. Communication between two or more persons is therefore two symbolic subjects relating the content of their respective egos through established social convention, that is the broader symbolic order.

This phenomenon parallels the structure of the social network on three levels. First, there is the split individual that is divided between the personal-imaginary object and the ‘speaking’ symbolic subject. Second, the symbolic subjects interact through a network interface of symbolic exchanges, through which the subject parses its thoughts and desires and so on. For Lacan, this symbolic exchange is not just achieved through explicit verbal statements, but in silent communication or social conventions that convey connotative, symbolic meaning. The same is true for social networking websites by design: users communicate not just through posting typed content but through ‘liking’ and sharing other users’ content, posting reaction images and memes, et cetera. These actions that are performed through the interface of the social network convey meaning between personalities and dictate how they interact with each other on the website. Third, the inability for an individual to express itself as a subject through the established social interface causes distress, what Lacan calls trauma.

Trauma is closer to the ‘real’ of the individual than their imaginary objectivity or symbolic subjectivity: it is precisely what cannot be reconciled with the individual’s self-imagined unity because it cannot be integrated into the subject’s symbolic representation. The traumatic ‘bar’ that divides the imaginary and symbolic sides of the subject is thus part of what constitutes the subject as such, as it is what drives the subject to constantly live up to the standards of the social order. Dr. Deutsch recognizes this to a limited extent in the divide between the online personality of a user and the user’s true self, and through the drive of the user to post self-glorifying content that makes their life look better than it is (although this is an overgeneralized assumption). However, this is a fact of existing in a broader social sphere, not a specific byproduct of participating on social media. Sigmund Freud claimed, as summarized by Ali Yansori, that clinical neurosis is due to an “inability to deal with an experience whose affective colouring was excessively powerful,” which is called trauma. As explained above, Lacan universalized the experience of the neurotic to any given subject, claiming that trauma structures subjective identity because it is what directs the ego towards certain desires and actions. There is nothing truly unique about the phenomena that Dr. Deutsch attempts to assign to social media alone, so the notion of the online personality is necessarily something distinct from the notion of the false persona. In order to discover what is unique about the online personality, we must supplement Lacan’s analysis of the split subject with another form of so-called false personality: the celebrity.

The Genealogy of the Online Personality

Up until the nineteenth century, the word ‘celebrity’ referred to the very condition of being famous or ‘celebrated’. This is indicated by its Latin root celebritas, in which the suffix -tas means state of being. Surprisingly enough, this linguistic change correlates directly with the social change in what it means to be a celebrity, to use the broad definition of a widely celebrated person. The celebrity first appeared in world history as a simple thing, a person whose achievements granted them fame and fortune. The athletes of the ancient Greek festival games were such early celebrities: according to Doctor David Gilman Romano, an Athenian athlete who won an Olympic event in the sixth century BCE “could expect to receive… a cash reward of 500 drachmai,” as well as a daily free meal at the City Hall for the rest of their lives in the fifth century BCE. There certainly were not any amateur athletes at this point; the word athlete itself is related to the Greek words for ‘contest’ (athlos) and ‘prize’ (athlon). To be an athlete in the ancient world was to be a professional in every sense of the word, both in terms of physical effort and in economic relation to the activity taking place.

This is not to say that athletes only competed for reward, however: Greco-Roman culture was obsessed with the prospect of living beyond life, earning glory or kleos that remains in the cultural consciousness after a public figure passes away. The achievements of the athletes were therefore commemorated in lyric poems called epinicions, cementing the news of their victories in the broader culture. Nevertheless, it is far off from modernity because the person who enjoys celebrity as a state of being as not yet been fully identified with celebrity as a state of being. It is more accurate to say that Greek athletes had celebrity rather than that they were celebrities.

This identification of the personality with the state of being does not occur at all until the early nineteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary of 1831: “[a] well-known or famous person.” This is easily explained by a canonization of metonymy where English speakers continued to refer to famous persons by their defining attribute until it became commonplace, much like the word ‘brains’ became used to describe a person’s intelligence. However, this identification occurs at the same time that the nature of celebrity itself is changing. As mentioned above, it was not unusual in Greco-Roman society for poets to write hymns that commemorated the victories of athletes. This cultural phenomenon is representative of the pre-capitalist status of celebrity: famous individuals were those reported to have achieved great things and whose exploits became ingrained in the public consciousness. What changes in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries is the rise of mass media. It is not as simple as a famous individual gaining access to a greater audience with the printing press or the radio or the television or the computer; it is a societal shift in the relationships that exist between the famous individual, their fame, and the audience to their celebrity.

The modern celebrity is essentially a personality transubstantiated into a brand image. Guy Debord posits the celebrity personality as the “opposite of the individual,” a person who by “embodying the image of a possible role” allows consumers to relate to and live vicariously through their life and activity. This reputation of a famous individual is something exploited by businesses that recognize the cultural significance of celebrity in the modern socioeconomic world. The fame once enjoyed solely by the famous person is now directly identified with the person themselves for the enjoyment of the consumer. In some cases, the image of a celebrity is used to endorse products, like the famous partnership between Michael Jordan and Nike in the 1980s. Although this demonstrates that the symbolic value of the celebrity image is easily converted to a value on the market, the celebrity’s image is still supplemental to the actual commodity as well as occasionally to the brand image of the company—in this case, famous Nike shoes. This business practice thus presupposes the existing fame of the individual, as well as the publicization of their private life.

Celebrity journalism is the purest exploitation of the celebrity image, focusing entirely on the activity and lifestyle of the famous individual. It is this industry that simultaneously creates and maintains modern celebrity, like the Greek lyric poets of old: had it not been for celebrity magazines and newspapers, the knowledge of a famous individual’s private life would not be as widespread as necessary to create their modern celebrity-image in the public consciousness. Although gossip tabloids had existed since the 1930s, their scope was limited to local gossip about individuals or associations well-known in their community. It takes global culture to create global celebrity. Hollywood film stars were thus some of the earliest modern celebrities because they gained their celebrity by acting in movies that were distributed across the western world. Because of their social prominence, their private lives were broadcasted into the public consciousness just like the films in which they starred. Famous film star and model Marilyn Monroe was upheld as a sex icon of the 1950s, with updates on her romantic life and discussions about her sex appeal published regularly in Hollywood gossip tabloids like Photoplay. The same phenomenon occurred in the increasingly global and homogenous music industry, like with the highly publicized breakup of The Beatles that was laid at the feet of housebreaker Yoko Ono or the band’s greedy new manager Allen Klein. When an individual or group becomes world-famous, a cult of personality develops around them that intersects their public and private life, allowing people to relate to their successes and failures as a person. This cult of personality that is fostered by the celebrity journalism industry is the form that celebrity takes in the modern world.

Although their image is publicized by news media companies, famous individuals and the agencies that employ them will take steps to ensure that the image created is something that appeals to a certain profitable audience. The Korean pop music industry is especially notorious for crafting and managing the public reputation of its artists or idols. Stars sign exclusive contracts with a management company that can last for over a decade, as in the case of K-pop group Dong Bang Shin Ki whose contract lasted for thirteen years where the members saw virtually none of the profits. During one's time as a star, they are expected to refrain (or: are prohibited) from dating in order to have the appearance of availability, to implant in the minds of every fan that one day they could be the lucky one. The New York Times quotes South Korean media critic Kim Zakka: “The K-pop idol industry is still based on the agency owning the idol, whose character the company creates […] Since the business worked based on the fantasy of the fan having a pseudo-relationship with the idol, the idol dating in real life breaks the business model.” This marketing is incredibly effective, such that there are fans known as sasaeng fans that “skip school to stalk K-pop artists, secretly install CCTV cameras in their homes, hack their mobile phones, steal their underwear, and leave used tampons on their doorsteps.” Although this is an extreme case, it demonstrates the function of the modern celebrity to be a medium for fantasy for its fans at the expense of the individual ‘enjoying’ their own fame. The image of the celebrity that the company sells is what the consumer could be or could have, which is dependent on the consumer’s sense of lack.

The ancients gave us the earliest form of celebrity, a person who enjoyed fame because of their socially significant achievements that were recorded for posterity. Post-industrial capitalism gave us modern celebrity, where an individual directly identifies their personality with their fame so that it is enjoyed not just by themselves but by a mass audience that lives vicariously through them. Furthermore, the modern celebrity-personality is a brand image, that which is applied to a commodity to contribute to its imaginary value both in the market and in the social sphere. The modern celebrity is hence the intersection of the social and economic categories, and products that are stamped with a celebrity’s image take advantage of the person’s reputation to gain symbolic significance and sell themselves.

The only missing link between the celebrity and the online personality is simply its lack of universality. Whereas the celebrity enjoys an elevated symbolic status over the rest of the population resulting from their social prominence, the online personality need not be famous to be commodified. Whereas the relationship between the celebrity and individual members of their audience is generally one-sided, social networks universalize relations between online personalities by standardizing them so that each user interacts with other users using the same programmed set of rules. Whereas the celebrity’s activity is commodified by being published in gossip media or used to endorse products, online personalities create their own media that they enjoy on social networks, and the activity of viewing and sharing this content is what is commodified by the website owner via webpage views and ad clicks.

Social media is the transformation of consumers into celebrities and celebrities into consumers. All that was necessary to reach this development was the creation of a new digital-symbolic interface with new social conventions where users can interact with each other’s symbolic representations as equals without being limited by physical space or real-life social status. Through the social network, the latest evolution of the commodified personality is accomplished, whose reach extends beyond an image for consumption into a universal subject that participates in a symbolic social sphere. The online personality is the postmodern celebrity.

The System of the Social Network

The online personality or profile is a personality that interacts using the features of a particular social networking website and whose online activity is commodified by using the website. The social network is simultaneously the community of online personalities on a given website, and the digital rules of social conventions and symbolic exchanges that dictate interactions between users via their online personality. Unlike members of fanbases that followed and adored pre-digital celebrities, less popular online personalities are not barred from interacting with more popular personalities because of the universalized, digital nature of the platform. Aside from users that limit interaction with their profile through privacy features, online personalities are generally approachable and interactable with each other.

The primary means of interaction between online personalities on the social network is creating and sharing media—photos, videos, typed content, etc. This content is generally displayed on a feed that constitutes the main page of the website, where a user may interact with other profiles’ posts with three actions common to most social networking websites: liking, commenting, and sharing, to use the terminology of Facebook. Although the content feed is traditionally chronological, this is increasingly not the case because of efforts by the website developers to prioritize posts that the user is more likely to interact with, as explained before. The importance that the developers place on these interactions, as well as the symbolic significance they represent in the minds of users, signifies that they should be the starting point of analysis for the nature of the online personality as it exists among other personalities.

These three actions performed on a post carry different symbolic value because of the effort they require to perform and how the user relates the post to their online personality, according to a study by Cheonsoo Kim and Sung-Un Yang from Indiana University Bloomington. Liking a post takes minimal effort, is most commonly used on visual or sensory posts (photo, video, etc.), and indicates an emotive reaction to the content. Commenting on a post requires the user to type a public response to the content that appears on their individual profile feed as well as the main content feed of other users who follow that user. Responding to a post takes more effort on the part of the user, and signifies to the social network that the user’s online personality is engaging with the post on a conversational or rational level. Sharing a post is directly reposting the original post from the user’s content feed so that it will appear on the content feeds of those who follow that user’s profile, which indicates a direct association or identification with the media content on the part of the online personality. Although social network websites may differ on the specifics of how users perform these actions, like Facebook which has implemented a range of five post reactions besides just ‘liking’ a post, or Instagram omitting the ‘share’ action, the three modes of interaction between online personalities are generally liking, commenting on, or sharing media content posted by other profiles.

It is helpful to return to the cult of the modern celebrity to understand the symbolic role these actions play in the social network, and the nature of the interactions that take place between online personalities. A survey published by the British Journal of Psychology found three levels of celebrity worship. The first is characterized by “individualistic behaviors such as watching, reading, and learning about… celebrities for the purposes of entertainment." The second is participating in social activities related to the celebrity, “such as watching, hearing, and talking about the celebrity in the company of other fans.” The third is identification with the successes and failures of the celebrity, obsession with their private life, and compulsive thoughts and behavior relating to the celebrity. These three stages of celebrity worship correlate with the symbolic significance of the three Facebook interactions as analyzed by Kim and Yang: reacting to, engaging with, or identifying with the media content of the online personality. Although these actions can be said to constitute conversation in general as symbolic exchanges between self-alienated personas interacting on a common social interface, the specific manner in which profiles interact and their commodification by the social network indicates their shared symbolic heritage with the celebrity as well as the unique role that the online profile takes on versus the everyday persona of the subject in real-life. Fans turn into celebrities, and celebrities turn into fans.

Despite the universal language of actions and equal access between online profiles, there are personalities with more exposure that influence greater trends in discourse on social media because of their extensive reach. These aptly named influencers, according to marketing agency CEO Dennis Kirwan, are “people who have large audiences of followers on their social media accounts, and they leverage this to influence or persuade this following to buy certain products or services.” Resulting from their massive following, companies will utilize influencers’ fame in the same way as pre-digital celebrities by publishing news or having them endorse products. Modeling agencies will sponsor influencers on Instagram by renting out high-end apartments for them to photoshoot from and advertise fashion brands, with both model-influencers and their agency profiting from the deal. The founder of one such agency called Village Marketing is quoted by The Washington Post: “Their job is to create content, and we are another opportunity for that.” YouTubers, content creators and influencers on video-sharing website YouTube, are often approached by marketers to covertly advertise products under the guise of producing normal, ‘unsponsored’ content. This product placement is more deceptive than the old form found in television shows and movies because it appears to the consumer as a natural extension of the celebrity and their genuine lifestyle as expressed on social media. Just like once before, companies will exploit the artificially personal relationship between the fan and the celebrity to sell products, only to a greater extent because of the artificially closer distance between the two through social media.

There are differences between the pre-digital celebrity and the social media influencer besides their medium. First, the influencer’s reputation is the result of their content spreading virally through their social network by other profiles or the internet en large, not publicization on part of a gossip tabloid—although these factors are not mutually exclusive, like how business magazine Forbes reported on Canadian rapper Drake and video game streamer ‘Ninja’ streaming a game of Fortnite. Second, by nature of the social network platform, fans do not interact with influencers any differently than they would a lesser known online personality: likes, comments, and shares. This framework of interaction blurs the line between interacting with friends and interacting with celebrities from the perspective of the user by giving them the same form of interaction. By extension, it is not solely the activity of the influencer that is commodified as if by a journalist selling tabloids and gossip columns (although, again, it is not impossible as much as it is outside the scope of the social network itself), but the activity of both influencers and fans are commodified by their shared activity on the website through webpage views and ad clicks. Everyone on the social network is an online personality only with varying numbers of followers. This perhaps fulfills the allure of celebrity throughout human history: anyone can be famous if they put themselves out in the world. It only took the creation of the digital space for the simplistic definition of a celebrity as a popular person to become reality.

Because of the privileged platform that influencers have on social networks, it may be argued that lesser-known profiles are influenced by the celebrity image of the influencer as if by a pre-digital celebrity, while also trying to maintain or increase their own reputation within their online peer circle. However, this analysis only holds true for a specific subset of online personalities. So as to avoid generalization, this process should be said to depend on the level of the user’s involvement on the social network and their purpose in using it. Abstracting the levels of social media interaction, a user who superficially participates or lurks in a social network only seeks pure enjoyment, consuming the content posted there without social attachment to a larger online community or trying to foster an online identity for themselves. Lurkers constitute up to ninety percent of social media users and despite their presence being somewhat invisible due to their lack of profile interaction, they still interact with the site itself and provide ad revenue like any other user. Nine percent of users are what Mindshare PR executive Stephanie Boncich calls “occasional contributors,” who only casually post original media content but actively interact with other profiles’ posts by sharing or commenting on them. The top one percent of users are influencers, followed by a great digital audience and constantly creating media content intended to go viral. Most users do not try to be influencers despite how easy it seems to become one. All profiles are celebrities, but some profiles are more celebrated than others.

The notion that users on social networks must necessarily create an idealized image of themselves on their profile does not hold up when the vast majority of users are not productive, and even less so when considering the different reasons people use social media. Online profiles do not just exist to enhance real-life relationships but to participate in anonymous online communities or to act under fantastical identities or to stalk real-life people through their online profiles. Understanding the effect of social media on the psyche must either address one type of user at a time or attempt to generalize a mass of individuals with vast interests and levels of interaction, which is condescending towards every online community that exists. By applying knowledge about the structure of the social network, the interactions that take place between online users, and the nature of communication and subjectification, we will analyze why critiques of social media based in platitudes are inadequate to describe the actual effect of the social network on the social order and the individual’s psyche.

The Torn Fabric

There is a common thread that runs across all hysterical critiques of social media. In an anonymous editorial published on The Guardian, a self-described “young PhD student, not some cranky old professor harking back to the Good Old Days,” nevertheless fantasizes about the days before social media. They mourn the days when academics were not “tweeting and hashtagging [sic] their way through” conferences and when it was not socially necessary for them to post online about their studies to display interest in their field. In another article from The Guardian, former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya laments his role in building “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” by structuring online behavior to be socially and psychologically rewarding. He elaborates: “This is not about Russian ads, […] This is a global problem. It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other. There is an immanent fear that, as Mr. Palihapitiya argues, social media is tearing apart the social fabric of our world.

The same has been said for almost every advancement in communication technology: each development was accompanied by the reactionary fear that humanity would be rendered spoiled or intellectually lazy by its advent. An article by Peter Nowak for Canadian magazine Maclean’s outlines these historical complaints. Socrates complains about writing in Plato’s Phaedrus: “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” A sixteenth-century biologist complained that the printing press “would lead to information overload,” and that the public needed to be shielded from “a confusing and harmful abundance of books.” An article published by CNN as late as 2005 claims that emails are more harmful to IQ than pot. Interestingly, some of these claims are not necessarily false. Written communication reduces the need for memorization. Emails and instant messages are be a time-consuming distraction from ‘real life’. However, it is not the truth content of the claims that matters as much as their shared latent complaint: “My society is changing.”

Social media, however, is not just a technology or platform for communication but a complete dimension of discourse in the digital era. It is a language of online-symbolic interaction between profiles, whose existence presupposes the offline-symbolic importance of celebrity and its commodification by media. The assertion that social media is ruining society neglects the historical tendencies in the social and technological sphere that led to social media’s creation. Social media is not tearing up the social fabric of the world, as poor Mr. Palihapitiya so bravely blames himself for, but it is a development in the social fabric itself trying to mend the tear that constitutes its own existence—the alienation that the subject experiences from other subjects as they try to communicate, and the alienation that the ego experiences from within itself. Social media makes communication possible across vast distances, bringing people together and making the world smaller so to speak. Social media also allows the ego to develop a new identity for itself to compensate for the traumatic lack it perceives in its own being, crafting a public fantasy either complementary to or separate from the real-life mask it puts on. Social media is not a force alien to the social fabric that tears it up: it is the social fabric dialectically mending and tearing itself apart.

That the online profile is effectively an excess of real-life identity is best demonstrated in the host of misdeeds that take place on social media: bullying, stalking, sexual assault, false news stories, and so on. These online activities take on a unique method from their real-life counterparts, by difference of the platform and interactions that take place there. However, despite the platform, they share common intent and result. A review paper published by Elsevier Inc. found that “cyber and traditional bullying are highly correlated,” and that adolescents aged 12-18 experience traditional bullying twice about as much as cyber bullying. This indicates that cyberbullying does not take place in isolation from nor has it overtaken offline bullying. Instead, it is an extension of preexistent behavior that has found a new means to the same end.

A survey published by the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that 10-15% of students at the University of New Hampshire repeatedly received threatening or offensive emails or instant messages, which is consistent across all demographics except for sexual orientation. The conductor of the study, Jerry Finn, writes that “the Internet medium itself may promote cyberstalking” because its social interactions “can promote a false sense of intimacy and misunderstanding of intentions.” However, this false perception of closeness on social media is entirely akin to that which celebrities from Korean pop stars to social media influencers rely on to establish an audience. On social media, because interactions between profiles are universalized and constant, people do not interact with influencers any differently than they would with another user’s profile. This was demonstrated in February 2018 when online celebrity couple Gavin Free and Meg Turney were stalked by a gunman who had driven for eleven hours to Austin, Texas intending to kill Free. The internet is a new medium of harassing individuals through their online profiles. However, like with communication in general, it is only displaying and facilitating already-existent antisocial tendencies, not creating new harassers or new acts of harassment.

The Profile

We return to the online profile as the most unique element of social media: its inclusion emerges as the difference between real-life communication and online communication in all its facets. This form of identity may mirror the real-life subject insofar as it emerges from relating to other identities on the same network, but it occupies a unique space in the psyche of the individual. The online personality is not merely or even necessarily a mirror of the ego’s real-life identity (why assume?), but is the ego’s new online identity that solely exists in the symbolic relations of the social network. We have seen its excessive nature in how individuals harass one another through their online profiles, but it is also visible in its qualities of fantasy fulfillment.

In August 2011, the cousin of a prominent gay Syrian-American blogger reported that she was kidnapped by government agents in Damascus. However, as was soon revealed, both the blogger and her cousin were simply characters created by a PhD student from Edinburgh, who created the character of the rebellious woman to give credibility to his opinions on Middle Eastern affairs. In a case of so-called Munchausen by Internet, 39-year-old Debbie Swenson created a profile on blogging website MetaFilter posing as Kaycee, a fictional teenage girl with leukemia. When Kaycee ‘died’ two years after her account’s creation, the community realized they had been tricked within days.

In an interview by Buzzfeed News, cyberpsychologist Doctor Chris Fullwood explains this phenomenon:

The contemporary notion of self is that we don’t have a single stable self […] We have different selves that relate to different environments and different individuals. In the online world these boundaries become more difficult to navigate […] if I went to dinner with my friends or my parents I might act in a different way to reflect those different relationships. On Facebook I can’t do that. I have to present a single unitary self, and that can create all sorts of problems.

Here, Dr. Fullwood elaborates upon the inverse nature of real-life and online personality. The former is adaptable to different social situations, despite the ego inhabiting the same identity. Because of the universality and publicity of online interactions, the online profile is static in how it presents itself to other profiles, but the individual is able to have multiple distinct profiles to make up for this immutability. This leads the individual to take advantage of account creation, making profiles with false personas that are based in their private inclinations.

This understanding relies on the primacy of the ‘average’ Facebook profile which is supposed to represent a more perfect version of the user’s real-life persona. It treats false online identities as excesses of the ‘true’ online identity. However, Dr. Fullwood says it himself: there is no single stable self, in any case. There is no reason to presume that a false online personality presumes the existence of a ‘true’ online personality: both are excessive fantasies to make up for the lack in some other identity, whether online or real-life. Even real-life identity is driven by fantasy, where the ego must live up to social expectations that are impossible to completely fulfill. This trauma leads the ego to constantly make up for its imaginary lack to feel cohesive, both towards the social order and towards itself. We already know what differentiates real-life and online identity. What differentiates ‘true’ and ‘false’ online identity? It is only their relation to the real-life identity, not how they are treated by the website or by the online community or even by the individual themselves. The online personality is through and through a fantastical excess of the split subject.

Through its role as fantasy, it is easy to see how the online profile soothes the anxiety experienced by the ego as it is symbolized in and subjectivized by the social order—whether by the order of the real world or by the social network. The space to create a new identity allows individuals to disclose traumatic aspects of themselves that cannot be admitted through their real-life identity. Especially on social networks where users do not have to use their real names, queer individuals have found a space to discuss and act according to their sexuality or gender identity without undergoing negative social sanctions in real life. An interview by NBC News quotes the experience of a closeted gay teenager from Mexico:

When I was 16, I was a Directioner (a OneDirection fan), so I talked to a number of other Directioner boys in Mexico, and we were all queer and in the closet, and our conversations were via Twitter […] As I had deeper conversations with them, we started to come out to each other. It was easier to come out to each other on Twitter than it as to come out with our friends. This is my safe space to express my queerness.

This phenomenon is ignored by many critics who lament about the ‘fakeness’ of social media users, whose analysis is based in platitudes rather than the lived experience of individuals.

Social media does create anxiety for the user, but just like with online interactions and offenses, it is a digitized form of a mechanism that already exists. We have already reviewed how the gap between the ego and its subjectivity causes anxiety or trauma to the ego, and drives it to live up to the expectations of its social order. The online profile, being a digitized symbol of the ego, should also cause anxiety for the ego the same way. Having to live up to the standards of the social network to be the profile-ideal (a la Freud’s superego) by strictly adhering to online social conventions, posting socially-beneficial content, and keeping up with other profiles’ activity is going to cause stress for the individual user. On Instagram, some users have a separate profile called a ‘finsta’ to post private content that is not socially palatable to the larger audience of the network—rants, drama, drug use, sex life, and so on. The terminology used by members of the community is notable if not ironic: the ‘rinsta’ or real-Instagram is the public, sanitized profile of the user, while the ‘finsta’ or fake-Instagram is that which is not able to be reconciled with the profile’s public self. This is precisely the mechanism of Lacanian trauma: the subject’s identification with its symbolic representation causes anxiety when it cannot be fully symbolized in the social sphere and treated as real. The use of social media has other various side effects, like secondhand stress from being too aware of stressful events in friends’ lives. It also powerfully distracts the user from offline activity, which was monitored in the survey published by CNN that led scientists to declare emails to be more harmful than pot. The anxiety of identity is the crux of social media’s influence on the ego.

Social media is structured like a language, a system of symbolic gestures and rules. Its effect on the individual does not only resemble the ego’s subjectification by the social order, but it is a mirror process whose product—the online profile—depends on, complements, and maintains the product of its predecessor: the subject. Its existence was predicated on the development of culture and technology, as capital seized the symbolic sphere of celebrity and individuals’ lives became more interconnected through digital communication. Being the commodification of personality, the online personality’s activity is crafted and regulated by the website to increase ad revenue. However, it is driven by the perceived social necessity to participate in the community and the ego-driven fantasy to escape from offline anxiety. In participating, the individual finds what it is looking for: an outlet for the trauma it cannot escape. At the same time, the interplay between the distinct personalities of the individual increases the stress it was trying to escape. Social media therefore cannot be critiqued on the level of platitude: it must be considered in the context of users relating to profiles, its social background and history, and its position as a comprehensive mode of discourse in the digital era.

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