Courtesy: Netflix.
Ashoak Upadhyay
“the imperial actio proper…is a meta-physically or panoptically-enabled act of circumscription, cultivation and colonization.” Jarava Lal Mehta
Y
ou wake up groggy-eyed to a bright dawn and reach out unthinkingly but resolutely for your mobile, your thumbs get to work and a slow spectral dusk gathers upon you with its promise of soporific enchantments. You Facebook, you twitter, Instagram and you stare with glazed eyes and fogged-up mind at a beautiful face of a poet you recognize and you find the right emoji and your thumb is impatient and moves down to a photograph waiting for your response, a series in fact of visuals of a family vacationing, you learn from a signpost behind the smiling father in Prague and you are steered towards a profound exclamation of “Awesome!” and a green shoot of envy grows inside your awakening mind and you stare into the happy face of your friend who looks ecstatic and you wonder, very briefly, if they paid their obeisance to Kafka’s ghost but you will not ask because your mind wanders following your thumb that is now flicking past instructions from Facebook to bless five people for having been born this day and a doubt sparks in your nerves then dies out as your thumb awaits its instructions, inching its way towards the obvious simply because your choices have been circumscribed by an unseen power that has cultivated your feelings and led you here , to this exact moment when you will affirm what others before you have expressed: a feeling of community even though a doubt still sparks: why is she posting this photograph of hers? Is it a mask? Can I just ignore it, perhaps ask her to post a poem instead. But you will not because that photograph stripped of all meaning other than its own representation invites you to be nice! And perhaps you will hunt for one of yourself: better still than a portrait why not a landscape visual of yourself in a bar sipping a mocktail. Now that tells a story too! Perhaps one of a hike to Vaishno-Devi when you were a strapping college student, perhaps a little faded but what will photoshop not do that it has not done to the Kardashians? And you jump out of bed, after making sure that your thumb has pressed all the right emojis for all the posts that you have forgotten already in your pursuit of self-interest and belonging to that community of fellow-solipsists. This is a fraternity of goodness, you say to yourself as you rummage in your cupboard of memories for a sepia post that will validate your own selfhood in the eyes of those hundreds of friends out there in cyber space. This is what separates us from those malevolent trolls haunting social media platforms with red-eyed hatreds and violence-drenched spewings against people like us liberals who would like to use this precious gift of post-modernity to create fraternal communities. You feel privileged by this thought of social media as a highway to a utopic bonhomie, as an alternative to bigot-polarization
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Enough has been written on how social media perpetuates hatreds. On board what Nishant Shah once graphically summed up as the rage and outrage express insecure, fearful human beings hyperventilate their worse instincts towards their fellow human beings, breeding if nothing else, a demagogy of violence unfettered by any social contract for civility. Such violence has been evident right across the world among white supremacists, bigoted Hindus, misogynists and self-appointed guardians of public morality. As if that weren’t enough gaslighting adds its own pernicious trope of violence on the victims whose pain and trauma is questioned and interrogated on social media, sometimes ridiculed and mocked at.
Enough has also been said about the ways hate speeches propagated via the “rage express” polarizes net users, cleaving communities, peoples and nations. It is also evident that after pornography, hate sells. Social media platform owners are loathe to intervene and if the attempts by European and US lawmakers are anything to go by Big Tech companies that own social media will use the increasingly dubious expression of freedom of speech to allow hateful messages and ridicule to get by, despite lukewarm and belated lip=service to policing such activities on social media platforms.
Such polarisations are fairly obvious to spot and you, a liberal can distance yourself from it either by responding with your own outrage or even better by refusing to clamber on board the rage express. But the social media do not just contain such Manichean representations. Does the participation on social media platforms by those who wish simply to “share” their holidays/fun times, their evergreen youth, their material successes, their joys not equally polarize by their very exclusivity? What you see when your thumb scrolls down to the face arranged to transmit a message that is not lost on you because it is devoid of any context but itself; or down to a regular facebooker sitting below the statue of a European philosopher? Are these not self-conscious transmissions of narcissism that must be acknowledged with gratitude and applause? Envy, perhaps ennui, a despair at your role as spectator perhaps drive your thumb to the key pad and you want to ask: “So what?” but you do not because you wish to belong to that community of privilege, to feel closer to evergreen youth, appropriate that mask of beauty by sharing in its denoted message.
You share in it as a fellow narcissist. The exchange between the mask-face and you is a transactional narcissism wherein the sender’s display of self-vaunting is matched by your belief in your own self-worth as an appreciative recipient of that message. Its transactional nature rests on a rain check to be redeemed a selfie on a boat out at sea off Apollo Bunder that must draw similar approbation. The narcissism binds you to this community of self-approbation mediated not through dialogue and conversation, through multiple exchanges of words as symbols of shared memories and perhaps of dissonance and differences too but through an emoji.
This narcissism embeds within itself a furrowing despair at the momentariness of that transactional exchange. On social media the language of intercourse is stripped of shared memory, of cultural syntax and context, the modes of communication floating into view to be dragged down by your thumbs. Their finality…”Awesome!” permit no discourse of ambiguity and ambivalence that could help build bridges of empathy; catchphrases served up by algorithms that have thought it out for you like printed greeting cards and you are left with a feeling of despair at the lifelessness of that exchange. The virtual world of social media will offer overloads of information and limit your capacity and curb your desire for engagement precisely because it wants you to stay engaged on its terms, with its tools. This is the age of the two-minute read and a quick tweet. Not the mind or the heart but the thumb thinks, and it is restless…
Narcissism polarizes you into cell blocks of isolation just as despair at that isolation unites you in the virtual world of illusion. You are aware you are in a hall of mirrors where reflections offer up masks and you wonder why with all the Likes you get for that photo of you at Lincoln Center in New York, you hunt for more visuals, rummaging among college reunion pictures to load onto your page hoping it will build a narrative through streaming selfies of a life worth the return favour of approbation. Your narcissism also rests, crucially, on the expectation of that approval because you belong to that community of good people. And you are grateful for that mediation of social media; you are hooked to its ability to get you those Likes and bouquets and smiling-face emojis from your Followers. And having seen them, you smile and move on. Rather your thumbs take you “social snacking.”
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A Google search would show up enough material to support the proposition that social media heightens loneliness. But that is really half the story. The underlying context for that despair at loneliness stays coupled to the insidious creation of narcissism. The first glimpse of the process and its pernicious effects on the human soul were offered much before the advent of the digital age: Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” written in the 1930s foresaw a world in which pleasure-seeking and consumerism would drive human beings into a frenzy of self-satiation and despair. He didn’t think the boot on the human face would be required to get people to stay the course and worship the State and an unequal distribution of power as George Orwell would a decade later in his own dystopic novel 1984. Books, as Huxley pointed out in a correspondence with Orwell would not need to be burnt because no one would read them.
Huxley surely was prophetic in the manner in which modernity has panned out into a self-centered pursuit of endless consumption. And the digital age allows you to that in a way that fully occupies your attention and soul as you chase a social contact with fellow human beings mediated by the terms of its engagement. The handshake, the hug, the warmth of empathy and contact has been replaced by the emoji, the hollowed out clichés of fellowship.
The idea of mediated social contact too has now become commonplace after studies and commentaries that point to the ways in which users of social media are manipulated, into an addictive usage (like drugs?) and then increasingly into servitude to commercial interests of advertisers and the owners of those platforms. The knowledge that national elections can be hacked by ‘foreign’ powers or rivals in an electoral process becomes headline “breaking” news. At a more protean level, the lives of social media users are hacked even when a wedding photograph is posted on your FB page or tweeted. It’s free and you work under the illusion that you can escape it whenever you want. But as a protagonist in the documentary Social Dilemma puts it: “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” And the nature of that product is the gradual change in the users’ perceptions and behavior. Social media “is a market place for human futures.”
Shoshanna Zuboff’s “Surveillance Capitalism” contextualises this marketplace and paints a composite picture of a world that intertwines the dystopic visions of Huxley and Orwell, a world that reveals a Panopticon-type world of monitoring and surveillance of our fissured consciousness:
““Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified. It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, created excuses that operate like defense mechanisms (“I have nothing to hide”), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness”
This quote calls to mind J.L. Mehta’s prescient observation decades before the advent of the computer that imperialism’s routes to power were not just through material means but through a “panoptically-enabled act of circumspection cultivation and colonization.” This perspective brings us uncannily close to Zuboff’s view of the social media user “…being tracked, parsed, mined and modified.” But Zuboff’s quote also contains the paradox of unease, of resistance and resignation to social media’s charms that lead to a numbing acceptance of its presence in our lives. Resistance to its charms echo criticisms of its ill-effects on users that are hedged in with qualifiers or what is considered a balanced approach. Writing in Psychology Today, David Ludden provides that balanced viewpoint with references to studies on social media that show such media extend loneliness and other studies that suggest they do not. The verdict? “According to these researchers, whether using social media makes you lonely or not depends on what you do with social media.”
This cautious and at first glance, a judicious view in effect endorses and legitimises social media by leaving the onus on the user and blaming her for its ill-effects. This recalls Roland Barthes’ viewpoint expressed in his essay “Operation Margarine” on how the ‘Established Order’ is sustained and perpetuated. by a “complacent portrayal of its drawbacks” a process that turns into a “paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it.” Criticisms of what is now clearly an ‘Established Order’ operates as “a kind of homeopathy…” doubts and misgivings about the social media are dispelled by showcasing the possibilities and potential of its ills.
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The exaltation of social media and the digital world into vital constituents of the ‘Established Order’ has created its own mythologies as potent as other modern mythologies: the nation-State, the national flag and national anthems. The mythology of social media allow for contradictions of perception: a sense of unease at their capacity to propagate social evils that negate empathy among humans, across and within societies and nations on the one hand and on the other an acceptance of such media as channels of social bonding. But at core, the social media platforms remain value-neutral, a technology that can be used, like the national flag to rouse passions of hatred or love; peace or war, truth or post-truth, news or fake news.
Myths add up and the mythology grows to encompass its emancipatory possibilities in an age of rampaging inequality in wealth and power. Social media offer solutions to disenfranchised peoples to gain empowerment. If the Internet was seen as a vehicle to decentralize knowledge, information and power social media have done so even more it is felt. The thumb rules, it taps on an emoji to express the power of freedom of expression. Rules, it is hoped, can be framed to control trolls of hatreds and violence and fake news; don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Its potential lies in garnering support for social change. in its decentralizing potential that allows the dialectic of a million likes favouring change.
But we should keep in mind the mediating agency that transmits such sentiments from so many discrete individuals is a highly centralized operation with its own agendas. Reviewing Steven Johnson’s book “Future Perfect: The Case for Progres in a Networked Age, Evgeny Morozov pointed to the centralization of data reservoirs by Google that allowed the giant to show a user more precise ads suited to the preferences those data throw up. That was in 2013. Today as Shoshana Zuboff points out, it’s not preferences that are automated; we, are; individuals as human storehouses of manipulative needs.
What does this do to our consciousness? Living in a “panoptically-enabled” world, itchy thumbs frantic for the touch of the spectral dusky-surface of the cyber world, we are carriers of carceral consciousness. “Most people are other people….Their thoughts are other people’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” That was Oscar Wilde over a century ago. What would he have said about this post-digital age when we are not sure that our thoughts are not the thoughts of Big Tech’s surveillance capitalism?
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References --J.L Mehta at head of text is from Chapter 1 of Thomas B. Ellis: The Death of the Pilgrim: The Post-Colonial Hermeneutics of Jarava Lal Mehta. Springer. --Shoshana Zuboff: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism --David Ludden quote from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/201801/does-using-social-media-make-you-lonely --Roland Barthes: Mythologies. p41. Granada Publishing 1983. --------- Also Read in The Beacon “We Know Everything About You!” By Padmaja Challakere --------- “The Lives We lead” series in The Beacon Remembrances of a Dead Soul: Notes on Mournful Reality Weeding Out The Weak: Ways of Living Colouring Within the Lines: Press in the Hall of Mirrors
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