There used to be two kinds of words: written or spoken. Written statements were more consciously edited. You’d take full responsibility for what you wrote, and you’d have the chance to hone your words. One was always aware one was writing at least in part for posterity, whether literary or legal. One consciously crafted a voice. One expected to be judged for it.
And then there were the words used in bars and restaurants and rows, still performative of course but also meant to remain largely unrecorded: uttered to blow off steam, as a momentary flirtation or provocation, meant to then fall to the ground and be swept away.
Social media occupies a third, hybrid space – the worst of both worlds. On the one hand a post only makes sense in the context of a specific time and conversation, with its temperature and colour, like dinner-party discussion. But it is recorded like a seriously intended text, and can be judged with that severity long after the fact.
Or, naked and without context, these posts can be stripped for their behavioural qualities. Instead of information or meaning they are read for data: the frequency of certain words; how close certain words are to others; sentiment analysis; whether we use more aggressive language as a conversation proceeds; times of postings and what that says about our personality; whether our grammar, likes and dislikes indicate that we are conscientious or open, extrovert or neurotic.
The idea that our words can betray something about ourselves beyond what we think we are saying has always been the premise of psychoanalysis. When one talks to therapists the way we use words, our Freudian slips and ellipses, is how our unconscious is meant to emerge. But psychoanalysis’ confessions take place in a closed, secure space. Social media uses the same trick as the psychoanalyst: ‘What’s on your mind’ is the question Facebook asks when you open it, much like the shrink does when you enter their cabinet. But this time the unconscious is being revealed not to a doctor but a data broker.
This is the real nightmare of social media. Not so much that ‘they’ know something about me I considered private, hidden. Though that’s unpleasant it’s also somehow comforting, reinforcing the idea that there’s a stable ‘me’ I am fully aware of, to protect from ‘them’. More worrying is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that my data betrays more about me than I know about myself: that I’m not who I think I am. Ones complete dissolution into data.
There’s a morality tale here: social media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, propagandise ourselves, is also the mechanism that most efficiently breaks you up.
The more skilful social media user will claim that they have successfully created a persona, that they are involved in a creative game, that they are playing the data field not it them. But social media has its own logic which dictates that persona. (...)
‘The most tragic part of social media’, the writer Zinovy Zinik told me the other evening, ‘is that though people think they are expressing their personalities they’re always just quoting someone else’.
He meant that when people think they are writing ‘what’s on their mind’ on Facebook they are just following a set of sub-literary tropes, prescribed poses. And in the sense that people choose social media as the main forum to express themselves, that means there’s less of themselves all the time. For those who are more passive-expressive, there is always the option to re-post other people as a way of signalling your position: literally transforming oneself into a series of quotes.
As the evening wore on, Zinik and I looked back to the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 80s, a movement obsessed with the idea of how you could express the individual in a world where Soviet propaganda had occupied all modes of expression. Our politics are more Orson Wellesian than Orwellian, more Twitter-narcissistic than top-down totalitarian, but were there be tactics to be gleaned from them?
by Peter Pomerantsev, Granta | Read more:
And then there were the words used in bars and restaurants and rows, still performative of course but also meant to remain largely unrecorded: uttered to blow off steam, as a momentary flirtation or provocation, meant to then fall to the ground and be swept away.
Social media occupies a third, hybrid space – the worst of both worlds. On the one hand a post only makes sense in the context of a specific time and conversation, with its temperature and colour, like dinner-party discussion. But it is recorded like a seriously intended text, and can be judged with that severity long after the fact.Or, naked and without context, these posts can be stripped for their behavioural qualities. Instead of information or meaning they are read for data: the frequency of certain words; how close certain words are to others; sentiment analysis; whether we use more aggressive language as a conversation proceeds; times of postings and what that says about our personality; whether our grammar, likes and dislikes indicate that we are conscientious or open, extrovert or neurotic.
The idea that our words can betray something about ourselves beyond what we think we are saying has always been the premise of psychoanalysis. When one talks to therapists the way we use words, our Freudian slips and ellipses, is how our unconscious is meant to emerge. But psychoanalysis’ confessions take place in a closed, secure space. Social media uses the same trick as the psychoanalyst: ‘What’s on your mind’ is the question Facebook asks when you open it, much like the shrink does when you enter their cabinet. But this time the unconscious is being revealed not to a doctor but a data broker.
This is the real nightmare of social media. Not so much that ‘they’ know something about me I considered private, hidden. Though that’s unpleasant it’s also somehow comforting, reinforcing the idea that there’s a stable ‘me’ I am fully aware of, to protect from ‘them’. More worrying is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that my data betrays more about me than I know about myself: that I’m not who I think I am. Ones complete dissolution into data.
There’s a morality tale here: social media, that little narcissism machine, the easiest way we have ever had to place ourselves on a pedestal of vanity, propagandise ourselves, is also the mechanism that most efficiently breaks you up.
The more skilful social media user will claim that they have successfully created a persona, that they are involved in a creative game, that they are playing the data field not it them. But social media has its own logic which dictates that persona. (...)
‘The most tragic part of social media’, the writer Zinovy Zinik told me the other evening, ‘is that though people think they are expressing their personalities they’re always just quoting someone else’.
He meant that when people think they are writing ‘what’s on their mind’ on Facebook they are just following a set of sub-literary tropes, prescribed poses. And in the sense that people choose social media as the main forum to express themselves, that means there’s less of themselves all the time. For those who are more passive-expressive, there is always the option to re-post other people as a way of signalling your position: literally transforming oneself into a series of quotes.
As the evening wore on, Zinik and I looked back to the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 80s, a movement obsessed with the idea of how you could express the individual in a world where Soviet propaganda had occupied all modes of expression. Our politics are more Orson Wellesian than Orwellian, more Twitter-narcissistic than top-down totalitarian, but were there be tactics to be gleaned from them?
by Peter Pomerantsev, Granta | Read more:
Image: uncredited
