Hyperreality and the Social Self: Projections and Distortions in Social Media
Most of the written narrative of hyperreality is used to describe materialist artifacts simulating other simulations. The original template loses its identity as it is continually refracted through different mediums of the simulation process. Our expectations for Italian food are based on the Olive Garden, offering oregano, papyrus font on the menus, a salad bar, and a “When you’re here, you’re family” motto. What else is there to know about Italy anyway?
This trauma of perception is venturing in to new grounds thanks to the advent of social media, particularly social networking cites. Placing its hallowed origins in the meager URL space of Xenga and Friendster, social networking media is now the most omnipresent ingredient in the lives of Generation Y and Millenials. Social networking has even done what was thought impossible and unseated pornography as the #1 use of time on the Internet.
This revolution in connectivity has wide-reaching ramifications. Social media has created a legion of miniature Don Drapers, all hell bent on constructing identities and praying that someone is watching. Narcissism rates are at an all-time high, and it is not difficult to see why. In the following essay I would like to explore how identity is promulgated and perverted in the new framework of the Looking-glass self. Viewing how people promote themselves on Facebook and other similar mediums provides insight on how we became of a nation of people who like things, not do things. Examining social media also provides insight on how we react as we are bombarded by context, forced to examine everyone else’s interpretations of reality in a never-ending stream of solipsistic rhetoric. To more effectively dissect these patterns, I will divide my analysis based on three of the most popular social networks.
Facebook
Facebook was not the first social network, nor is it the fastest growing, nor did it assist in the Arab Spring. However, its presence dwarfs that of all other social networks (it has its own David Fincher movie!). One in nine people around the world has a Facebook profile. And to what end? Voluntary data mining? Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg’s claims his goal has always been to get people to "connect and communicate more efficiently." Consider us connected.
Facebook ascended to the top of the heap by relying on a clean interface to best display your vital information to the masses. Your online presence outlines many details that would normally take people a great deal of time to know. The obvious age, occupation/school, ideology etc. are covered, as well as your pop culture preferences and a host of groups you can belong to. The site also allows an unlimited number of photos, and has recently acquired the iPhone app Instagram for $1 billion, ensuring its cross-platform dominance. A 2011 study estimated that 96% of college students have a Facebook.
Facebook’s pervasiveness magnifies its significance. Web 1.0 already established that the Internet allowed anyone to act however they wanted with the opportunity of true anonymity. Facebook allows you the opportunity to shape your online persona with real world ramifications. With the new “Timeline” format, your hundreds of “friends” have access to everything you have ever done on Facebook.
Luckily, on Facebook you can create a better “you.” All of the unflattering pictures can be “untagged.” Your taste in culture can be peerless, even if you have a sincere distaste for everything you express interest in. Identities are forged when you make a picture of yourself holding a beer as your “Profile Picture.” You are now a party animal.
Back in the “real” world, people are discussing events that took place on Facebook. All of the photos from last week’s party will live on Facebook forever. People who have not seen you recently can keep tabs on you and know what you have been doing, or at least what you allow them to see. You have successfully filtered yourself in to an image you wanted to achieve, simulated it digitally, and have people interpret your existence based on the digital equivalent of your reality. Your social self is split and recombined, and you now share piece of reality with everyone who is in the network. And if you delete your Facebook? Go off the grid? Part of your identity dies, you are no longer “connected.”
Twitter
Facebook, however, leaves many people feeling too “connected.” Grandma does not need to see that badass picture of you chugging the beer, does she? And what to do about all of those annoying event invitations, and all those words in general? Twitter fixes all of these problems. Established in 2007, Twitter steals the “status” element from Facebook, limiting its users to 140 characters per entry and successfully ensuring the death of the paragraph.
Twitters also establishes a new level of neuroticism for its users, as you “follow” people and have “followers” instead of having “friends,” adding new dimensions of popularity contests to social media. Twitter identity is sculpted differently than Facebook, as everyone manically attempts to carve out their own trend niche via #hashtags# that get “retweeted” and increase your popularity. People are evaluated based on their brief statements instead of their constructed social identity.
What Twitter lacks in developed social profile, it makes up for in relentless self-promotion. And what is being promoted exactly? How you are, sort of. Half of Twitter is devoted to narcissistic play-by-play of everyday life. The other half is devoted to owning meaning in the world through carefully arranged #hashtags#. This version of reality is heavily filtered through multiple interpretations. Someone has a preconceived perception of how the world works. They log on to twitter and see someone make a comment they agree with. They add their own commentary and retweet what was already stated. This statement is introduced to an even larger audience, until the message is infinitely refined to populist nugget of golden semi-truth. The statement of “truth” is so removed from context that its meaning is almost impossible to interpret. And feeding this cycle is the primary activity on the site, so someone’s identity is the construction of the semi-truths they endorse, and how popular they are. And this site is so integral to maintaining “brand” in media that people are paid to operate business Twitter accounts.
Pinterest
Pinterest, the fastest growing of the bunch, embraces the other side of Facebook’s appeal, indulging all of its users’ deepest sociological post-consumerist fantasies. Pinterest users scan other users’ boards, searching for pictures of things to “pin” to their own board. These pictures range from furniture, to recipes, to actors, to cat poses, and they all serve to scream out to anyone who clicks your page that “THIS IS WHAT I LIKE, I HAVE GREAT TASTE.” Pinterest is the cheapest mall in the world. It allows its users to feel like they possess something and give them the ability to express it to other people, a dream combination for a social media magnate/broke narcissist. This site causes the greatest disassociation from reality by far, as viewers suddenly see the consumption patterns of their peers and cannot help but make associations between the “pinning” patterns.
When viewing the website, correlations emerge, such as numerous fans of the rapper Drake love a certain wicker chair, or fans of author David Foster Wallace like silver hybrid cars. Coincidental or not, these create a strange thread of flawed interconnectivity. Pinterest is the ultimate tool of solipsistic branding, a symptom of a generation trying to display its uniqueness by recycling cultural ephemera.
The Hyperreal Animal
Before venturing in to a social network, a person possesses an identity, a conception of self. This self is visualized, and then focused in to the social network framework, highlighting some facts, omitting others. A new identity is formed. People interact with this new identity using their own surrogate identities. Feedback reverberates within the echo chamber, and everyone modifies their identity correspondingly. The people interact in real life, each taking in to account the other’s “real” persona and their “online” persona. This interaction is hyperreal, as the people communicating become a fusion of their other identities, forming a third self. The more social networks a person belongs to, the more difficulty logical consistency is to maintain within the “real” persona. The “real” persona begins to fragment, as they become someone with 1,200 friends and heads up a group hoping to gain more fans for an anonymous pickle than the band Nickelback, while preaching to followers the true nature of #whitegrlproblems, along with the merits of a brownie recipe on Pinterest. To what end? Validation is a bull market. People nurture their disconnection, then demand to connect and relate with others. All meaning derived from these similarities is diminished as the networkers continually throw more topics in to the ether. I hope that pickle gets more fans than Nickelback. I really do.
