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Title: Over-socialization Author: Miftah Amir Date: 10th May 2019 Language: en Topics: social media, Ted Kaczynski, the spectacle Source: Retrieved on 21st December 2021 from https://www.economica.id/2019/05/10/kajian-online-over-socialization-is-social-media-killing-your-individuality/
“Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images
become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.” —
Guy Debord
Advances in information technology has culminated into an ever-present
force that we call social media. We are all surely familiar with it, and
for many of us, it has become an incredibly pervasive aspect of our
lives: we regularly scroll through Instagram, Twitter and Facebook,
keeping ourselves updated on what our peers and public figures have been
doing, where they went this weekend, what they had for dinner, or what
they thought about what someone thought about what someone said about
some (surely very important) event. We scroll through (and sometimes
partake in) everlasting debates in comment sections about whether or not
homosexuals should be criminalized, or the results of the presidential
election, or if a high-schooler far, far away really did stab another
high-schooler in the genitals.
The transfer of information between citizens have been streamlined to a
degree never before seen in human history. The rate at which we are
exposed to the thoughts of collective society, in the form of social
media, keeps increasing. The implication of this is that societal moral
codes would also increase its grip on individual thought and behavior,
subtly restricting our individual freedom to think and act. Could it be
that social media is paving the way for the collectivization of human
thought, or even consciousness? If so, what would the consequences be
for users of such technology? Notwithstanding the popular narrative of
social media as supremely beneficial insofar as it unites us all
(globalization, et cetera), This analysis will attempt to find answers
for these questions, and delve into what the existence of social media
might mean for humanity.
Ted Kaczynski, the American terrorist so-called the “Unabomber”,
embarked on a nationwide mail-bombing campaign in 1978, in a
self-professed attempt to kick-start a revolution against what he called
the “Industrial Society”. Following these attacks, he demanded that the
New York Times publish his manifesto, as a condition for him to desist
from terrorism. In it, he argued in detail that “The Industrial
Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human
race”, as it has destabilized society, made life unfulfilling, and
resulted in the erosion of human freedom and dignity.
Notwithstanding Kaczynski’s questionable bid to start a revolution via
violent terrorism, The Industrial Society and its Future raises striking
points regarding the unfavorable impacts mankind has suffered as a
result of industrial and technological advances. One especially
interesting concept he discussed was that of “over-socialization”, which
he defined as the condition wherein moral codes and social norms are so
well-internalized into members of society, to the point that attempting
to think, feel and act against social expectations impose a severe
psychological burden. He further argued that over-socialization can lead
to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, and guilt.
The idea of social control, i.e. society’s means of imposing rules and
punishing violators of these rules, has been well-established within the
field of sociology. However, the entrance of social media, with its
constant and ever-tightening grip on our lives, might change the way
social control works – perhaps for the worse. If this were the case, it
would stand to reason that people will increasingly be more prone to
over-socialization.
The notion of “collective consciousness” has been established by
sociologists far before the dawn of social media. Coined by Emile
Durkheim, he defined it as the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral
attitudes which is common throughout all members of a society. While
initially conceived as a collective “conscience” of sorts, it may well
be that the advent of social media is constructing for itself a true
pseudo-consciousness, consisting of the sum total of all its
participants. To understand this, imagine the entire social media sphere
as an organism in itself, and the people who communicate through it as
neurons of the creature’s brain, sharing and receiving information
through the interconnected network every participant is plugged into.
For its users, social media has managed to replace, or at the very least
enhance, nearly all aspects of society and the interactions within it.
The consequence for the participants, then, is that the distinction
between the “real” and the “virtual” worlds become blurred. Social media
theorist Nathan Jurgenson writes in his blog Cyborgology, “We live in a
cyborg society. Technology has infiltrated the most fundamental aspects
of our lives: social organization, the body, even our self-concepts”.
The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in June 2017 that social media is the
new “public square”, where people find entertainment, read the news,
communicate, and engage in discourse. The key difference is that now,
the public square is always in our pockets, readily accessed at the tap
of a screen. This means that we are nearly alwaysconnected to the
collective consciousness – for the pace at which we exchange information
with the web, there might as well be routers implanted directly in our
skulls.
Socialization refers to the process in which moral codes and social
norms are internalized into new members of a society. In essence,
socialization occurs naturally for each person, as representatives of
society around them control their behavior in order to instill
commonly-adhered values. Conventionally, this is done by traditional
institutions such as parents and schools. The individual gradually
synthesizes what they learn from these institutions, combines them with
their own personal experiences, and forms their own moral codes they
will live by, which are subject to changes as they accumulate more
experiences.
Moral development isdivided into two stages: the primary stage
administered by parents, and the secondary stage administered by the
rest of society. Social media changes things for both stages. At the
primary stage, young children are increasingly given access to
smartphones. One study found that across Europe, around 46% of children
9 to 16 own a smartphone, and the numbers are similar elsewhere. This
shows that kids are now not only raised by parents, but also by everyone
on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.
Similarly, the secondary stage of moral development is no longer done by
small communities in which the individual belongs, but by everything
they access online. In internalizing norms, socialization also programs
how a person views themselves in relation to society as a whole, and
people derive satisfaction and happiness in relation to their perceived
position in society. It has been found that social media directly
affects our brains’ reward circuitry. Coupled with how we are constantly
hooked up to social media, it becomes inevitable that it has become the
main force of socialization for everyone involved, and thus people will
increasingly derive their satisfaction and happiness from their online
identities, and how they are perceived online. As we have established,
the amalgamation of the “real” and the “virtual” means that a person’s
online identity will become indistinguishable from their “actual”
identity.
With the ubiquity of social media and the constant influx of the
collective consciousness manifesting itself through the digital screens
we scroll through on a daily basis, the dangers of over-socialization
raised by Ted Kaczynski start to appear extremely relevant. Can we truly
deem ourselves individuals, free to think and free to act, when nearly
everything we think and do is sources from, and eventually circulates
itself back into our smartphones? When we are spoon-fed news and
opinions about events near and far, and in return upload our entire
lives to Instagram as tribute to satisfy our hunger for social
validation? Have we become slaves to the all-encompassing collective
mind?
Eerily similar ideas have been raised, quite far back in history. French
philosopher Guy Debord wrote in his revolutionary Society of the
Spectacle that “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation
of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation”. If social media comes to mind reading that quote, keep
in mind, Debord wrote it in 1967. In line with Marxist theory, he aimed
to strike against the capitalistic machine of society and the “mass
media”, which he viewed as the tool used to pacify the masses – to make
them forget their true status as slaves to a system hell-bent on
producing and consuming goods endlessly. To Debord, the “spectacle” was
the great distractor, hypnotizing people to chase hollow pursuits such
as wealth, fame, and all the conventional trappings of “success”. The
spectacle was advertising, television, and celebrities, which functioned
to keep people from self-reflection, from independent thought, from
contemplating the self as an entity apart from the restrictive shackles
of common norms and values.
It would not be unreasonable, then, to consider social media as the
ultimate spectacle. While manifesting itself today as billboards, popup
ads, and the latest political news, the spectacle also takes the form of
holiday photos we post on Instagram, the fierce debates we take part in
on Facebook, and the hoaxes we unknowingly share on Whatsapp. Every time
we participate in social media, we become the spectacle, adopting the
role of the collective mind, and agglomerating ourselves to the great
“global community” that is social media. For each selfie we take, and
each minute we sit fidgeting, anticipating the next “like” as an instant
placeholder for social validation, we are letting the collective mind
strengthen its hold on our individual consciousness. The alienation each
individual inevitably feels, Debord argued, would mean that people will
eventually be wholly subject to the spectacle, with no time or energy to
live a life for themselves.
For some, the argument presented above might not seem sufficiently
compelling. You might, for one, flippantly deny that social media has
such a strong hold on your subconscious, your thoughts, and your
actions. You might feel free, but for one moment, you might want to
re-think: are you really? How long can you spend, on your own, with your
own thoughts, without feeling the nagging urge to take out your phone
and connect yourself once more with the Instagram-“stories” of people
you barely know, or felt people should know (and would care) about some
tiny mundane detail of your day? How many times have you woke up and
immediately checked how many people liked your newest post? Have you
ever been self-conscious of how many “followers” you have compared to
your peers? How many of the “personal opinions” you passionately hold
are truly, wholly yours, and can’t be traced to some random rant on a
comment section somewhere? Contrary to what you might think, you might
be surprised just how much the “collective mind” has influenced you.
For Debord, the perceived degradation of humanity inflicted by the
spectacle was simply unacceptable. Suffering from depression and
alcoholism, Debord shot himself in the head on November 1994. An article
called him “the victim of the spectacle he fought” – perhaps Debord felt
he could never escape, lest by death. His view of media as such an evil
force might give too shocking or radical of an impression – however, it
is plenty food for thought. In any case, while we are not yet literal
cyborgs with physically implanted internet connections, perhaps this
might be our last chance to rethink what relationship we would like to
have with the collective social consciousness – while we still have the
option to keep a distance.