It’s almost impossible to separate my memories of what the internet once was — what it represented to me — from my adolescence. It provided a space in which I was not only free to express myself, away from the pressures and stigmas of real life, but also free to choose the terms on which I did so. I could talk about my interests with others on forums, I could be as involved as I wanted to be in online communities, revealing as much about myself as I saw fit. In some cases, such as when exploring my burgeoning sexuality, I could simply ‘lurk’ and explore. I could observe but not participate. Key to all this was the anonymity that underpinned everything online, “never post your real name online.”
The early ‘social media’ that emerged in my teens began to peel back some of this anonymity, bringing parts of myself online and visible to friends and acquaintances I had made online. Each platform at the time was unique in terms of its functionality and set up. Many platforms offered the ability to ‘bend’ the structure of the site to my will — letting me be the master of how I curated myself online.
Our current platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — began in this tradition of offering their own functions and quirks, but over time have trended towards uniformity, meaning each site now shares a similar layout and list of features. The only real customisation and ability to your modify your experience based around privacy settings and what ads you see.The days of repurposing sections of a site — such as the ‘About me’ — to serve a new function with custom HTML are long gone.
This particular form emphasises the curation of the self. It encourages users to share every aspect of their lives with a wider undefined community. Everything you do is something to be captured, a moment to be remembered or ‘shared’. Engagement with others has, at the same time, become increasingly more abstract in nature, reducing genuine conversation to a game of influencing and engaging. This isn’t ‘sharing’: broadcasting would be a more adequate word. The only escape, for many, is to create an ‘alt’ account.
This results in a number of issues which I would argue are not only harmful and antithetical to the promise of what the internet could be but also, given how embedded these platforms are in our lives, severely limit the human experience by drastically narrowing our perspective.
Over the past year, I have found it increasingly hard to sympathise or engage with causes I care deeply about. Online platforms have reduced social, economic, and political phenomena to threads, stories, and brief ‘explainers’. Some are more sophisticated than others, but all too often this medium reduces experience to the milquetoast or even just outright false: the same points on in vogue topics being repeated again and again. The result is a cultural economy in which mass posting and sharing of these surface level engagements with topics prevails. Nobody is required to think too deeply about the issue at hand to feel good. Read something interesting and provocative? Just get it out there, instead of actually reflecting upon it. What matters is that you are showing your abstract audience you are one of the good guys.
This approach has given rise to what I feel is a dangerous cargo cult approach to philosophical and ethical concepts. Individuals are exposed to what are sophisticated and well-developed ideas in the briefest of encounters that emphasise their objectivity. Paradoxically, concepts such as intersectionality — things which stress the importance and subtlety of individual and collective experiences — are reduced to nothing more than easily definable posts that can be consumed easily. The result is that people consistently misuse concepts which they have failed to properly research. This is seen in many queer circles, where the idea that “gender isn’t a binary” has given rise to a plethora of rigid new gender and sexuality categories that people can be defined within easily, rather than a culture that explores shared struggles and difference through an interrogation of our performed identities.
I do not think that everyone needs a deeply academic knowledge of everything, and I oppose the ‘ivory tower’ approach to knowledge, but I find myself increasingly opposed to this misuse. It pays no justice to the work and struggles of others and undermines attempts to find political solidarity.
Similar phenomena have also taken root in the mental health and wellbeing communities. What was once a space where people could find respite and discuss their experiences has now become a place where people pass off their own experiences and treatments as universal objectives. We laugh at debates and memes around “Everyone should do mindfulness!” or “Everyone should get therapy”, but the truth is that underlying these absurd instructions is an attempt to define the human experience and the act of living in exceptionally narrow terms. We are reduced to vulnerable people with little agency in the world. Our desires, anxieties, emotions are reduced to stimuli that can be fed into the exact same models of treatment. A discourse that is fundamentally weakening and submissive gives the speaker a sense of fulfilment and gratification. As many of my friends who have delved deeper into these spaces have explained, it becomes very easy to self-diagnose yourself and render yourself powerless over your condition. And of course, to make matters worse, these platforms themselves emphasise this model in which a person is forced to engage with a wider world that is noisy, stressful, and anxiety inducing.
A friend of mine compared what has happened over recent years to a café. We enter it and search for a space in which we can sit with our friends and chat. But as time progresses, the café’s walls get smaller and smaller and the chat of others louder and louder. You begin to hear all manner of conversations that you otherwise wouldn’t care about: things which, frankly, you shouldn’t be listening to. This leads to frustration. It becomes increasingly difficult to escape the noise and re-center yourself on what actually matters to you.
Italo Calvino’s description of life as an inferno in Invisible Cities comes to mind;
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
I have found being online increasingly disempowering as my attempts to keep the inferno at bay have failed. Every attempt to keep my experience of social media to one which I find fulfilling — one based on my friends and people I find intriguing — has failed as sites like Twitter push more and more features on to users that are not only present on many other sites; but are also at odds with what made them good in the first place. Content and people I do not want to see appear on my feed, and the site tries to force me and others to engage with new features that lend themselves only to the curation of the self. Given these platforms’ importance in our day to day communication, I am left finding the whole thing to be a severely limited notion of the human experience:a world viewed through the narrowest of lenses, from the most rigid of platforms.
It’s difficult to know what comes next or where this leads. While I am increasingly finding myself offline, I do not believe this is feasible in the long term. Ultimately, I have made a lot of friends online and there are people on social media who I care about deeply. It has undoubtedly made my life richer. But I know that the internet I once engaged with is long gone. It exists now only as a language that can be ironically called upon and utilised by people who oppose all that made that space great: a ‘blue tick’ professional online can make jokes about being a ‘poster’ while rallying against the principles of anonymity. Perhaps one day I will find a means of recognising who and what are not inferno and a space that can be maintained for them. Or perhaps the whole thing will be consumed by it. Either way, it’s time for a change.
