Digital Narcissism?
My fellow classmate Kevin recently used the term Digital Narcissism to describe a phenomenon which seems to be commonplace over the web and is becoming more apparent within our offline culture too. Mark Zuckerberg, has been quoted as saying that “a squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa”, and perhaps on some immediate and mundane level, our personal daily experiences are more important to us than the broader world because they are unique to us and consequently noteworthy. We live within an ever expanding world, a world of media saturation and constant noise, a world in which a unique thought can sometimes be a rarity or something to be shouted out for all to hear.
It’s something that I’ve often considered after seeing Mike Wesch’s excellent lecture on digital ethnography and youtube, The Machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity. In this lecture Wesch quotes Henry Canby speaking in 1926 about the side effects of urban life and cities, saying that, “what we are encountering is panicky, an almost hysterical attempt to escape the deadly anonymity of modern life … and the prime cause is not vanity … but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization”. Wesch goes on to describe this sense of personal loss as a possible cause for the current voracious public interest in the subjects of popularity and celebrity, explaining that if the conversations of a the culture are happening on television, which is essentially a “one way conversation”, then unless you are on television you are without a voice. This would certainly help to explain the ever increasing number of blogs and vlogs online, but it is somewhat disheartening to consider the search for an audience as a search for recognition amongst a culture losing its sense of self worth.
Given the sheer volume level and noise produced by this massive chorus of voices, each striving to be heard above the others, is it any wonder then that Guy Debord has claimed that the world has turned into a ‘society of the spectacle’? (Debord, 1977, quoted in Rose, 2007). A society where each voice needs to be louder than the others if it is to be noticed?
I like the Debord quote….its a bit depressing isnt it? This is most definitely one of the manifestations of the ‘threat’ that Hand talks about. The trivialisation of culture, seen most recently in how grubby celebrity news can become, is something we all partake in and can’t seem to be able to stop. At the same time, perhaps mundanity ISNT a bad thing…the small detail against the larger crushing elements of society?
Thanks for the comments Carol. You’re right, it is a little depressing to think that we might be focusing more and more on style above substance, or listening only to the loudest voices in the room. But I think we can stop that. I think the root of the problem (online at least) is with current search technology and the way that popular trends tend to be self promoting. And while I do agree with you that a little bit of idle distraction can be beneficial, I believe that when it becomes the main focus of a culture, that culture has lost its way. The web offers everyone a voice and it is up to us to listen when something important is said. Perhaps the answer is in smarter search engines or perhaps its just up to us to look further than the tabloid headlines and seek out truth. If we are crushed in the process, at least we die with our eyes open.
This idea of noise and chorus is interesting, and I was reminded of Paul Virilio’s idea of ‘instantaneity’ . It seems that web presence has perhaps become more and more obsessed with ‘real-time’, updates, and status. Narcissism is perhaps linked to being current, being in the ‘now’.
Virilio, P. (1999). Red alert in cyberspace! The Information Technology, War and Peace Project. Retrieved June 7, 2004 from http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy2k/red-alert.cfm
This idea of the ‘now’ as primal seemed to also be reflected in your comment about search technology, orchestrating a kind of populism. Only what is popular now is acknowledged. I was reading about the Dark Internet and the Deep Web today, and I am also reminded of your previous discussions of ghosts and echoes. Not only has the changing architecture of the Internet excluded older networks, effectively ‘killing’ them, yet also relegating them to a kind of ghostly inaccessibility, but search engine strategies privilege the popular as you say, disregarding masses of information and banishing it to an unpopulated nether world. The analogy I’m thinking of are ghost towns; pristine web pages, untouched data, yet completely deserted of people.
Cheers Jeremy,
I’d heard of the deep Web but the dark Internet is fascinating. I’ve done some reading myself and was surprised (although I suppose I shouldn’t have been) to learn that crime networks like spammers or botnets can hide in these places. I like the idea that it is very like a ghost town. It reminds me of my first website, which I religiously updated every week in college… but of course it was buried deep inside the campus network and visible only to local users, if they were even interested enough to go find it.