On Self-Construction in Social Media

Bibliographic Data

ID4903485
AuthorsRoberto Simanowski (0000-0003-4745-1557, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume46
Issue2
Pages27-34
Publication date2019-08-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew German Critique (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/0094033x-7613242
OpenAlexW2969250077
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited8

Social networks, especially Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram, are so complex that Mark Zuckerberg famously and worryingly confessed in his hearings to US lawmakers in April 2018 that he and his staff have only now started to understand how “bad actors” may have “misused” Facebook’s system. There are many ways to look at Facebook and to discuss its ramifications for contemporary culture. The most common approach is a socioeconomic one that addresses the underlying business model and the fact that the company monetizes its users’ data and attention. Here one normally would tackle issues such as algorithmic economy, consumer profiling, and behavioral targeting. Another typical sort of social media critique would aim at the sociopsychological effect of self-presentation and identity construction in the context of radical transparency and immediate feedback. The approach I offer here and further elaborate in my book is an anthropological and media-ontological one.1I contend that the old human horror vacui as well as the mechanical, “posthuman” reproduction of the world via photography can be read as keys to understanding the escape of the contemporary self from itself in the process of sharing itself on social media. In the book I also grapple with Facebook’s mission to build a global community, an issue often hastily dismissed as a distraction from the company’s economic interests but that should, as I hold, be seriously discussed—particularly the possibility of an all-including community based not on shared values but on the value of sharing. I must admit that I was prepared to hear that my approach to Facebook and social networks in general—based on Blaise Pascal’s pensées on distraction, Siegfried Kracauer’s notions on photography, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of a “groundless community”—is too broad and perhaps a bit too ambitious.2 What I did not anticipate is that my perspective would be considered too “narrow in taking into account only certain direct and more readily apparent effects of the internet and its associated technologies.”While I do not consider the authors’ account of the scope of my approach accurate, I agree that I have not discussed the socioeconomic aspects of online life. I have not done so for the simple reason that these are the issues most frequently addressed in the literature on social networks. In fact, I made a point of not engaging with this discussion in my book and maintain that it would be fruitless to deliver it now in response to the received criticism. Rather, I wish to address the other objections brought forward.The authors argue that my “notions of an ‘instant’ and ‘episodic’ self-critically imply that self-reflectiveness and self-coherence are in danger of being lost in social media communication,” which, “in turn, implies the desirability of a more real and less virtual, a more complete and less shattered, a more profound and less random self.” While I would subscribe wholeheartedly to the first implication, I do not to the second. Yes, I do think that a quick photo is less reflective than a thorough description of a given scene, and I do think that the former is far more present in social media communication than the latter. When it comes to the evaluation of such phenomena, however, the matter becomes far more complex. In fact, I spend an entire subchapter in the book (“Narration and Enforced Collectivity”: FS, 118–31) addressing the problems of the concept of a coherent, narrative self. There I stress, with Seyla Benhabib, the risk of such a concept to homogenize differences in the illusion of a secure identity that is then advanced in opposition to other cultural identities (FS, 120) and support Judith Butler’s suspicion that ethical responsibility may lie precisely in the “non-narrativizable exposure that establishes my singularity” (quoted in FS, 120).3For this reason, I am also open to Galen Strawson’s defense of the “episodic” against the “narrative” self and consider the advantages of such a self for the “groundless community” that Facebook may be able to build.4 Granted, this discussion does not occur in the article, only in the book. However, one would have expected that readers of both would, if they felt the urge to bring up a lack in the former, be fair enough to also refer to the discussion in the latter. Instead, the authors are quick in attributing “unease and fear over potentially ‘inauthentic’ social media selves” to my position, dismissing it with a facile generational claim as one “shared widely in academic circles and older generations.”Another objection aims at the concept behind the title of my book, Facebook Society. The authors quote my explanation of a Facebook society as a “society whose forms of communication and cultural techniques are significantly determined by the practices of self-representation and world-perception on Facebook” and correctly add that I use the term Facebook metonymically. Nonetheless, they object to “the ascription of such a monocausal determinism to social media” that does not take into account offline operations of generating social values as discussed, for example, in Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956).5I could not agree more with the skepticism about monocausal explanations, which is why, in my discussion in both the book and the article, I include Zygmunt Bauman’s notion on identity construction from the 1980s (FS, 34–36, 68, 86), Walter Benjamin’s observation on the modern subject and experience (FS, 46–50), and Blaise Pascal’s anthropological explanation of the human desire to escape from itself (FS, 29). I absolutely agree with the authors’ notion that social media “only enhance, or prey on, more general social features that predate them.” In fact, I end my article with a similar note: “Those who overlook the horror vacui behind the need for recognition twist the causal relation and mistake the social network for the source of the oversharing when it is in fact the perfect solution to an old problem. Not that the social network prevents real life; it is the loss of a real life that makes the social network so attractive as a decent—or respectable—way out.”6As for Goffman as evidence that there is not much new with social media, I respond: Whatever the topic is, one will always find precursors. If the authors remind us that the notion of an “original actual self” was, long before social media, questioned by Goffman, we may add that long before him Karl Marx, in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach, stated that “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual” but “the ensemble of the social relations.”7 However, the role-playing of the 1950s is hardly comparable to the pressure and scrutiny under which identity construction or rather self-manifestation takes place in social media today. Never before has the “I” been subjected to such instant and point-blank feedback as today, when the score of views, likes, shares, and friend requests position the individual in the ranking of popularity and influence, and when the better numbers of others teach us the more successful strategies of self-presentation. If we dismiss this profound transformation in social interactions that has taken place since the digitization and datafication of everything, we might as well understand artificial intelligence merely as an extension of the computer and consider all the current talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution complete hyperbole.But the instant, numerical feedback is not even the point at hand. Rather than the peer pressure of self-presentation on social media, my objective is the escape of the individual from itself by sharing its experiences with others, that is, delegating them to its social network. Playing different roles in different social environments—be it offline in Goffman’s time or online today—does not necessarily prevent one from reflecting on the different roles one must perform in various social settings. If there is still “downtime” (or, as Goffman would put it, “backstage”-area), there are still moments of contemplation in which we may ask ourselves who we really are, even if, and despite the fact that, no definitive answer is attainable. The point I make is that the constant, immediate, and immersive “frictionless sharing” that Zuckerberg promotes, and almost all social networks practice, does not facilitate such interruption, distance, and reflection. This assumption is not answered by the fact that “people wish to present themselves differently, depending on the audience,” as the authors point out with regard to different “profile posturing” on Facebook, Snapchat, or Tinder. To my mind, such strategic differentiation has not yet earned the status of “reflection.” One may call it street smarts, but reflection it is certainly not.I also make the point, though admittedly only in the book, that this “frictionless sharing”—as well as the self-tracking that the Quantified Self movement celebrates as “self-knowledge through numbers”—may bring us closer to our real selves than any narrative reflection with all its deliberate and unconscious distortions.8 “Because it’s live, there is no way it can be curated,” explains Zuckerberg with regard to the video-streaming feature Facebook Live, which launched in April 2016: “It’s live; it can’t possibly be perfectly planned out ahead of time. Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s a great medium for sharing raw and visceral content” (FS, 162).9In techspeak, “raw data” signifies what in the humanities may be called “authentic.” Technicians such as Zuckerberg know all too well how to harvest and analyze those hardly “curated” or processed data that we gladly forfeit. As I underline in the book, it only makes sense to speak of authenticity in the context of the instant, episodic self, whose account of itself is necessarily the less reflected one: “Spontaneity and immediacy function here as synonyms for authenticity; they are the counterpart to frictionless sharing” (FS, 162).This is, incidentally, as far as I engage with the concept of authenticity, which, contrary to the authors’ account, does not play a central role in my argumentation—appearing in the article only once to describe Strawson’s take on the traditional identity concept. Now, I admit that it would not be entirely inaccurate to suggest that my argumentation is rooted in a “paradigm of authenticity” to the extent that I ask how the “I” reflects on its Self. But the crucial addendum here must not be ignored: authenticity is not the actual point in this examination on reflection. As I put it in the book: the surplus value of the narrative self lies not in any truer, more authentic account of itself but in the “cognitive activity that is involved,” that is, analysis, synthesis, and formulation (FS, 63). It is this cognitive activity that I am concerned with. To put it differently: I can also reflect on my inauthentic role-playing and still, in this process, become self-aware. My concern is self-awareness, not authenticity.If the authors underline that users “do not participate in their profile construction as passive data-punching automatons” and add “though clearly they are not the reflective narrators Simanowski wants them to be, either,” then it turns out that we may have less of a disagreement on the descriptive than on the normative level. This notion is enforced by other passages where the authors seem to suddenly share my findings: when, for instance, they admit that the fear that Facebook could dissolve authenticity “may well be true” or when they base their own concept of “profilicity” on the notion of a “reversal” from “being preoccupied with identifying the authentic inner self . . . toward the persona and its presentation in society.” Granted, this does not prevent them from otherwise still questioning such development when they speak of my “unease with the supposed inauthenticity the internet fosters” (my emphasis).I eventually bring up the “question about the political consequences of episodic identity” (FS, 92), which invites readers to see the positive effects of the episodic and the negative of narrative identity. Nevertheless, I end the chapter with the concern about the long-lasting political ramifications of a culture of communication “in which the model of reflective experience over time is replaced by a phatic model of short-term lived experience” supposing that “the foundations of a democratic society are secured by reflection and cognition, not sensation and immersion” (FS, 148). Our quintessentially contemporary inability to listen to each other and reluctance to engage with alternative perspectives may indicate that the communicative structure of social networks fails to prepare individuals for times of disagreement.While I was somewhat puzzled by the authors’ strategy to focus on refuting an authenticity claim that I did not expressly make, I greatly enjoyed their report on Henry Rosemont Jr.’s perspective on individualism and authentic identity. I completely agree with Rosemont’s notion that Western individualism cannot claim universality—and actually make this point myself in the book with a reference to the discussion about “Asian values” in the 1990s and the “Bangkok Declaration” of 1993 (FS, 123).10 I think that the link to Confucianism and East Asian concepts of identity and authenticity could have been well connected to the discussion of “profilic identity” that follows in the authors’ essay, where they present their own suggestion for how to approach identity in social media.The authors point out that photographs and status updates on Facebook are staged, posed, and written to “‘curat[e]’ a profilic persona or personas.” This is certainly still true—despite Zuckerberg’s claim about the increase of noncurated “raw data”—and reinforces a well-known fact with a new catchword. In fact, apart from the wording and reference, I see little difference between the authors’ theory of “second-order observation in the realm of the social media” and my own, admittedly terminologically less charged notion: “We look at reality with a ‘Facebook eye’ that seeks to determine how what we have ‘experienced’ can be presented most favorably and with the promise of the most likes” (FS, 35). That people observe how others observe something and manipulate their posting according to what seems to generate the most market value in the attention economy is a truism in social media research. Everybody knows that social media are a kind of permanent assessment center and that the activity of branding occupies most users. The interesting question is why people so eagerly engage in this activity; to what extent they reflect on it or just react on the grounds of reflex; and what this “social-validation feedback loop,” as the famous statement by ex–Facebook president Sean Parker, quoted by the authors, ends, is “doing to our children’s brains.”Again, it would have been interesting to connect the authors’ notion of profilicity as “a mode of value generation that evolved along with the shift from first-order observation to second-order observation,” with the social scoring system being established in communist (and Confucian) China as another form of social control. Social scoring is the translation of the “general peer”—that, according to the authors and in contrast to the “specific peer,” informs profilic recognition—even more radically into numbers than the typical numerical feedback in social media. It produces one number, which simplifies the ranking. If “profilicity can be regarded as a prominent late modern paradigm of identity,” as the authors correctly conclude, we may ask whether it is the mere preparation for something that lies in the logic of the datafication fostered by social media and that is already emerging on the horizon in the Far East. The West is not immune to the lure of such accountable management, and it has already started it under the camouflage of gamification and with the incentive of lower insurance fees. The dystopic warnings are already to be found in pop culture—think of the episode “Nosedive” in the British TV series Black Mirror, in which people rate each other at every simple interaction. No matter how we define “ourselves” and how many theories we know about social interdependence and the “death of the author,” such prospects may be a good reason to further discuss the consequences of social media for the way we see each other and ourselves. For that, we may still wish to hold on to “old” debates such as identity construction or, for that matter, authenticity

Social media · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

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