The Machine Looks Back
i'm noticing a trend in critiques of social media
Disclaimer: I’m DEEP in pregnancy brain territory and the brain fog is real and oppressive, so please excuse where I clearly lose my train of thought mid-sentence. I think I’m onto something, but I’m temporarily running on extraordinarily low cognitive reserves — my enthusiasm is fully intact even if my ability to articulate it coherently is... a work in progress. Bear with me! Babies are almost here and I’m not going to take a break!
I’m offering this steep, steep discount to make up for the fact I’ve been slow on updates. Please help me support my army of babies:
There is a wave of books asking how social media platforms shape the stories we tell about ourselves and, through that shaping, what new kind of self they are producing. Megan Garber’s Screen People argues that the language and ethos of entertainment have permeated every aspect of life, so that we now see each other as characters in an ongoing show whose continuity we are responsible for maintaining. Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s The Story of Your Life, out in August, makes the related case that algorithmic platforms have disciplined what counts as a shareable experience into what Jia Tolentino’s blurb calls a “rigid, optimized, phone-shaped norm.” I haven’t read either yet, but I’m willing to bet they’re basically right. It’s a topic I’ve written about myself.
We think in a televisual frame: Spotify provides the soundtrack of our lives, we accuse people of “main character syndrome,” we reference the invisible “writers’ room” and “seasons” constantly.
If television introduced this framing, then social media fortified it.
I think this is the last critique of social media we’re going to get. The era in which we treated our screen-lives as fake is ending. Not because anyone won the argument, but because the objects on the other side of the screen have started to seem like they have interiors of their own — and that pull, I’ll argue, is dragging us back into our bodies rather than further into the feed. In fact, I will say this: social media as we know it is dead. Technology-saturated lives are not.
To see why the narrative-self critique is the last of its kind, it helps to walk through the others.
