A long read, but worth it. This essay talks about the nature of engagement in social media, how it conditions our behaviors and relationships with news and current events, and the ways it...
A long read, but worth it. This essay talks about the nature of engagement in social media, how it conditions our behaviors and relationships with news and current events, and the ways it conceptualizes and reinforces certain ways of thinking about the self as a unit of society.
There's a lot here, from the evolution of psychoanalysis to the evolution of culture and political engagement to management theory.
Thanks largely to the spread of smart scrollable devices in the last fifteen years, a certain concept of public participation – what is now known in the managerial vernacular as ‘engagement’ – is common to events of this sort, and to the way they are framed by the media. The individual is not conceived in the same way as in the liberal philosophical tradition – as an autonomous agent, possessed of reason and interests – or in the psychoanalytic tradition, as shaped perhaps unconsciously by past conflicts and injuries. Instead, each of us (celebrities included) becomes a junction box in a vast, complex network, receiving, processing and emitting information in a semi-automatic fashion, and in real time. Information and emotions bounce between these junctions, mutating as they travel, as instantiated in the memes and jokes that spread virally via social media platforms. In this model, each individual reaction is one more item of information thrown back into the network, in search of counter-reactions.
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Yet much of the anxiety provoked by today’s reaction economy consists in the possibility that, in our desperate hunt for feedback and our need to give feedback to others, we allow ourselves to be steered in directions we did not consent to, and may not wish to go. This has echoes of the mid-20th-century fears of advertising, PR and propaganda, with the difference that now, in the age of reaction chains, we are drawn towards controversy, absurd public spectacles, endlessly mutating memes, trolling etc. In these showers of feedback, much of the appeal is in the sheer quantity of reaction being circulated. Feedback mechanisms, which the cyberneticians viewed as instruments to achieve autonomy and facilitate navigation, turn out to be a trap.
A long read, but worth it. This essay talks about the nature of engagement in social media, how it conditions our behaviors and relationships with news and current events, and the ways it conceptualizes and reinforces certain ways of thinking about the self as a unit of society.
There's a lot here, from the evolution of psychoanalysis to the evolution of culture and political engagement to management theory.
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