A critique of online social communication and its effects on identity.
Despite the breadth of communication that exists online, much of our digital interaction is limited to the physical technological material in our hands and its vast invisible cyberspace, where we are not always certain who is lurking on the other side of the screen. The internet sphere and its online social media platforms shape the way we communicate and how we relate to each other. Numerous articles have been written about how human interactions are changing in the digital age, but I never quite felt the change until some years ago when I realized that one of my friends was living an entirely different life on Instagram.
My Laggard Existence
I turned twenty years old the same year when Instagram launched in 2010. Its emergence seemed to be a logical next step in a technology-soaked culture consumed with images and beauty. Most millennials remember a time before life-on-the-internet. Although I am a millennial, I was part of the (probably small) group that didn’t really use the computer until I entered university at the age of eighteen. The bulky computer we had in our family home was mostly used to play knock-off-Super Mario Brother’s computer games.
When I first got a laptop for university, I used the internet for homework and to stream episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central the morning after it aired. I didn’t join Facebook until my co-workers at HMV told me I needed an account if I wanted to be invited to parties, so it was used exclusively for such notifications. And, I didn’t start using YouTube until the age of twenty.
Years later, in 2016, I created an Instagram account to document my travels through Europe. I discovered that people I knew in real life were involved in an entirely “other” life on a subterranean-level of social media. My friend Lola, who I saw once every two months, was living a different life through Instagram. What I learned through her Instagram account was that she had collected an assortment of experiences that I had not heard about. Decadent dinners with groups of friends, a jaunt through Vancouver Island, wine and cheese on a sailboat in Portugal. Most of my peers were connecting online through social media, and seeing each other face-to-face was just an additional way to accommodate that connection. It left me wondering, am I missing out on an important feature of communication with my peers?
Replacing Traditional Communication with Social Media
As our hustle-culture for more money and success shows, we have less time to get together with friends and family. The internet has allowed for a space where we can take short minutes out of our day to interact with those we’ve neglected in person. It has shaped the way we think about connection. More weight is now given to online social communication.
There is no right or wrong way to communicate, but the current prominence of internet-based communication is simplifying what was once a complex system of human interaction that involved active listening, managing tone of voice, reciprocal body language or gestures, eye contact, and courteousness that avoids confrontation.
Relegating interaction to mostly texting and short messages narrows our ability to communicate. When sending a text, drafting a post on Facebook, or creating a tweet, we have to cleverly edit our messages that rely mostly on written text, and sometimes simple emoji reactions, rather than additionally using our physical bodies to convey our message. Although some facial cues can be read through video chats, it does not allow one to read the other person’s body language. In addition, video glitches can break the flow of communication.
At one time we could choose when to engage in this complex system of communication. Now, our choice to interact is limited. The reality of online communication means you have to be available minute-by-minute, day-to-day.
The constant availability of friends and family online can be exhausting if you are not in the mood to respond, risking offending the person in the relationship. Add to that, the interactions with the public through social media such as Twitter or Instagram, as we are bombarded with ads and large amounts of new information, take a mental toll. Nearly replacing an optional complex system of communication with a pervasive simpler system of online communication depletes a person’s mental and emotional energy.
When I created my Instagram account and checked my feed daily, my anxiety increased and I noticed I was more tired—a fatigue similar to watching endless amounts of television without mental stimulation. I obsessed over hearts, spending a scattered amount of time on Instagram throughout the day, swiping up to see the next content or flipping through endless IG stories. Staring at boxed-snapshots of other people’s lives I admired, I would stress over not having a life similar to them.
I also began to see a lot of activism content on my feed because the algorithm followed my online behaviour and fed me more of what I looked at in the past. One after another, posts asked me to donate, re-post, speak up, fight, and use my social media power to bring down the powers-that-be. It was forcing me to act now, not think, but to act immediately. Overwhelmed, I stopped looking at my IG account and found that in the mornings when I woke up, I didn’t feel a sense of dread. Was this type of mental exhaustion really worth it just to interact with friends online when I can see them in-person?
The Limits of Online Communication
In recent years, public attention has turned towards the increasingly negative side effects of the internet and online social platforms. The unregulated private tech companies such as Google and Facebook are in positions of God-like power to consolidate and disseminate information, as well as shape the online behaviour of their participants for the benefit of capitalist interests such as advertisers.
Jaron Lanier, a former Silicon Valley computer scientist turned activist against the business model of technological companies, urges young people to abandon their unrealistic social media self-avatars, including their phones. He says the internet’s social media platforms manipulate and mold your identity through advertising and algorithms that warp your sense of self. If you are a young person who has spent most of your life online, instead of having a chance to find out for yourself who you are, companies decide for you. Although advertising was available in the past, the ubiquitous use of the internet is fast-tracking people into behaviour modification through constant feedback from external, unknown sources.
Many argue that a positive side effect of the internet is its ability to allow an egalitarian voice. Everyone, no matter their race, gender, or sexual affiliation, can contribute. Yet, scholars and academics have noted that artificial intelligence technology will be the largest human rights issue we will face as the 21st century progresses.
Safiya Umoja Noble makes it clear in her book, Algorithms of Oppression, that coding language written by a select tech elite, combined with advertising and algorithms, create an online atmosphere that reproduces the social problems we see in our real world, such as racism and sexism. She writes that “[d]espite the widespread beliefs in the Internet as a democratic space where people have the power to dynamically participate as equals, the Internet is in fact organized to the benefit of powerful elites, including corporations that can afford to purchase and redirect searches to their own sites” (pg.48). She continues that “[s]earch results, in the context of commercial advertising companies, lay the groundwork…for implicit bias: bias that is buttressed by advertising profits” (pg.116).
Reproducing false one-dimensional views of black individuals and women that existed in the past which many activists have struggled against, reverses the hard work in combating harmful biased perspectives.
What about the fact that social media allows people from all over the world to organize and protest through digital activism? Although this is also true, there is an alternative downside. Real-life protests that agitate powerful, rigid systems, are more effective in the physical realm than in the digital realm because, not only is it visible, but it also disrupts everyday life on the street.
When I attended a dean’s lecture at Simon Fraser University that featured Dean Spade, American lawyer, writer, and trans activist, discussing Pinkwashing, he mentioned an interesting fact in his activism work. He noticed that younger individuals were less likely to leave their homes for activism workshop gatherings or to even speak-up during such workshops. Spade believed this was because of social media’s constant online pull. Without practice, young people nowadays are having a hard time conversing in real life. He said conversations in real life are messy and it requires practice, a back and forth that involves listening and speaking, staying on point and present in the moment to keep up the energy. But, the less practice young people have, the less likely they are confident to speak-up in front of others in-person about something they might be passionate about.
If you think about mass protests in the past, especially during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s in the U.S., in particular the Black Panther movement that began at the tail-end of the 60s, many chapters of the organization opened all across the states. Thousands of people organized against discrimination of black lives, including an end to the Vietnam War. Their success even allowed them to have allies in Cuba, Algeria, China, and Vietnam. While they faced government opposition and internal instability, within three years, the Black Panthers were able to mobilize in a massive fashion. Without social media’s existence, we can still organize against those who derail human rights.
As the recent Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma proves, algorithms used in social media are not tools for connection, rather they are more successful in dividing groups of people. Noble similarly points out in Algorithm that “[i]t is certain that information that surfaces to the top of the search pile is not exactly the same for every user in every location" (pg. 55). The more you see one side of a story through social media or web searches, the more confined you will be in one particular idea without seeing the scope of information available through credible sources that have a historic vantage point.
There is no doubt that communication is an evolving process. We can see this in the evolution of language. However, our evolution into an online world which was initially imagined as a vast utopia of free creativity has taken a dark left turn into a dystopian future where our identities and behaviours are mined for precise information by capitalist parasites to manipulate groups of people into resources that provide the optimum amount of monetary value.
Unfortunately, now that we are living in a pandemic, our lives are moving more and more into the online environment. Certain parts of the world are offering ideas to regulate the internet as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation shows, allowing for individuals to control their personal information. But, the process to regulate or intrinsically change how free online platforms are built has been slow and mainly non-existent.
Disappearance of Complex Identities in Online Communication
What I gathered about Lola online from Instagram was different from the Lola I knew as a person. There were similarities of course, but also a difference in how she performed. Even my reaction to her as a person was different. I gathered only positive snippets of her life. If I didn’t know her in real life, my idea about her would have been completely different. And this is the underbelly of our online human interaction that needs to be investigated and reimagined: the lack of nuance in human beings.
Online, we are reduced to personal data, images, and short sentences about our lives. This informs how we see ourselves and how we see others. If you see yourself and others in such a simplified form, combined with a larger-than-life audience that is difficult to manage, it can lead to confusion about who you are as an individual, both within yourself and among those online. In contrast, interacting with a single person in a non-virtual world allows the speaker an easier-to-manage feedback, and the listener to see the speaker as a nuanced and whole individual by gathering various kinds of information the speaker is emitting through body language, tone, and eye contact.
Each sphere, the online versus the tactile world, demands their own unique set of guidelines of behaviour. Joshua Meyrowitz writes in No Sense of Place that as social humans we modify our behaviour depending on our audience and the environment we are in. Like an actor we play different roles in different spheres. But if one sphere is heavily weighted over another where the majority of our lives are lived online, then we will no longer understand the complex shapes of ourselves and each other in the tactile world that inevitably exists outside of our computer screens.
At one time I experienced FOMO for my lack of online connection with friends, but as I grow older, I am realizing that the connections I’ve made in our physical world are more significant and fulfilling. Unlike the online world, I get to choose who, when, and how I interact with others, and identify for myself who I am as I build a connection.
--- Dipa Barua