The self in a wired world

I was attracted to this because it seemed to be dealing with the interaction between culture, technology and the self.

This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

What I'm cautious, if not skeptical, about is making claims that the consciousness raised is fundamentally different to previous eras. Now, I'm conscious that recent brain research seems to indicate that people do tend to gravitate towards different perspectives in different languages which suggests that different cultures would produce somewhat different habiti, ceteris paribus. However, we should be wary of overstating the differences, and at times I think that this article does get close to that. I think that by staying on the side of saying that it is how loneliness is experienced in relation to other culturally-related phenomena it holds together; but at times it seems to strain against that as if wanting to say that those acculturated by modern communications technologies are somehow fundamentally different as if loneliness didn't exist before. What is fair enough is to say that loneliness as a fundamental human experience means differently in different societies. I'm definitely wary of the "ain't modern life awful" tendency in cultural comment: it tends to forget the problems and downsides of the previous eras in a rose-tinted romance of earlier times.

A little later we are told that technology takes away our solitude. I'm definitely not convinced. I think that it's always been the case that solitude for most people has to be sought and cultivated. Technology just means that we need a different set of techniques to gain it. But in societies where families were typically bigger and shared space smaller, solitude was not something people found readily. To find it then meant a trip to a park or the country or a church or the toilet (working class men took the newspaper), to find it now means turning off the phone.

There is a good point made here:

The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem

This does offer a useful observation which has a great deal of truth to it. But wait. Is this really so different to how things have been for people before the internet; did people really not try for fame, notoriety, 'respect'? Of course not: the internet has merely offered more opportunities and a potentially bigger audience.

But we no longer believe in the solitary mind.

And a good job too: it was a myth of modernist individualism; the illusion created and nurtured by the technology called the book. It discouraged collective and corporate consciousness but didn't displace it entirely because we have to be social: we use language, we live through culture. We are in constant dialogue between individuation and socialisation; different cultures hold different ideals as to the proper kind of balance between the two; but we cannot escape that dialogue. Our sins are usually either to fail to take responsibility and to be individual or to be over-self-assertive. The trick is to learn which is which and when which is appropriate. I'm not sure that this article, in the end does much more than remind us that there are particular challenges to solitude in our culture. And this is true, it gives us a few insights to why they might be difficulties for our generations. However, I'm disturbed that it gives the impression every so often that this is unique and that our generation is in a worse state than any previous. I question those impressions.