Crowd-Sourcing

the Self: Facebook and the Future of Narcissism

January 26, 2013

In one of the Greek myths still famous today, Narcissus peers into a pool and sees his own reflection for the first time. Seeing himself, he becomes eternally captivated by the beauty of his own face. Todays virtual internet society most preeminently, Facebook offers the same kind of reflecting pool to todays generation. We can imagine Narcissus before the discovery of his vanity, an actor in the world reacting to his environment and other characters. He possessed the basic self-awareness demonstrated in subject-object statements: I am immortal. I love you. I detest mortals. I prefer ambrosia. I am going to Mt. Olympus now. What was added upon seeing himself in the mirror? An epiphany akin to a human viewing Earth from outer space for the first time. A sense of himself as I, You, and Him all-at- once. You as the ultimate Love interest, Him as an objective person with finite limits. Today, the mental ability to imagine how we are perceived by others figures prominently in our understanding of social consciousness. Mental mirroring is used by psychologists to analyze the autism spectrum, and factors heavily in scientific evaluation of animal cognition. Of course Narcissus mirror is a special case: his reflection was always returning reverent, flattering eye-contact. The mirror today has long been surpassed as a tool for vanity by the photograph, especially the endlessly copied digital variety. In this day and age, we have all seen ourselves from every angle, and chosen the best angle for our profile photo. How does Narcissus apply to the virtual self in the modern world? That can be answered with a simple question. Which version of you do you find most captivating: Yourself as you appear in your bathroom mirror, or as you appear in your online profile? Which version would you rather others see? Self-representation on the internet began with websites and blogs both simple tools for self-expression that include photos, resumes, and journal entries broadcasting from me to the world at large. Anyone alive during the Y2K era knows that the rise of social networking sites soon added the interactive element of testimonials from friends, and friend-only networks. Testimonials and invite-only friend groups help to guarantee that the personas displayed online are exaggerated but accurate depictions of real people. Facebook represents the current apex of the migration of real social networks onto the internet. Earlier sites like Myspace and Tribe also provided sophisticated virtual mirrors enabling each of us to reflect Narcissitically on our

ideal selves (support group included). But Facebook introduced a more 3- dimensional perspective. Although it includes our own basic reflection, the multi- user framework on Facebook churns the e-mirror like a rainstorm would a still pond. Ripples expanding from each drop refocus our eyes on the surface itself. In virtual reality, the medium of Facebook functions as a visible membrane between the interactions of its users. The mirror shows not only your own face, but how many faces are looking back at you, for how long, and what else those faces like to see. Each new update ripples like a raindrop across the surface of the network catching the eye for a moment until another raindrop diverts our attention elsewhere. Eventually the rhythm of profile updates outpaces the content. It should be mentioned raindrops or not that your virtual profile is not the same as your face in a pool: it is a stylized creation, a 2nd order representation of you made up of posts and pictures designed to impress your virtual admirers in particular. The words and pictures are under your control, but your medium of expression, the post is not. You and everyone else can like something, but no one can dislike or agree to disagree. You can post status updates, photos, videos; create events; design pages. But what you cannot do is alter the format that focuses on simple button-click actions. You cannot write a novel. Or meditate. Your mirror has a short attention span. What else happens to our selves on social media? Most importantly, there is a shift in self-awareness from 1st person to 2nd person; from I to You. The software asks You what you are thinking today, and you respond, in your cute snarky, trademark way. Your friends read your words or look at your cute snapshot and laugh for a moment before moving on. But what You said is on record, presumably forever. This 2nd person self is an artifact that you can leave behind and come back to; you cannot only regard your virtual self from every angle, you can tweak its content at will and realign it with other trends of the moment. It may even persist after you die. Who leaves this virtual self behind? Presumably the ineffable I before the mirror who gets low blood sugar, wonders what to do with her life, calls his parents, falls in love. The 1st person is the I who actually experiences the real world, and then reports about itself on the web from time to time. This I gazing into the mirror has traditionally been thought of as an essence sometimes aligned with the soul, or with consciousness. Life experiences for the essential self are dialectically incorporated into the living being, or the subconscious, and forgotten. Only the most radical pre-internet thinkers, Foucault for example, have come as far as regarding the self as a product of the relations within a social order. On Facebook, this abstract self is completely left behind, exchanged for a concrete series of Status Updates. A self-du-jour. Social media creates a virtual self which is actually a pattern of activity that can be mapped, cataloged, and archived. Not only is the content of this self shifting and evolving through self- representation; the mirror of yourself on Facebook includes every time anyone mentions you, tags you in a photo, shares your posts, likes you, and anytime you

remark on anyone elses profile. You become the accumulation of activity around your place in the network. The most powerful users online are the ones who spawn viral trends that reshape the pattern of exchanges between people for days on end. Such trending certainly includes a kind of populist power. A concerted YouTube campaign can bring almost any idea into the mainstream consciousness, at least for a moment, or until government censors step in. Grassroots movements have been given a new arena for activism, where memes spread like wildfire. But - The self no longer sits like the Earth at the center of the universe; the self has become one star in a galaxy full of stars. Or better yet, the virtual self resembles one fish in a school of fish. The behavior of the school is more important. This shift towards the school of fish represents a major change in the self that can be explained mathematically. The difference in the concept of self as essence and the self as pattern of activity is comparable to that between classical mechanics and systems theory in mathematics. Mechanics might show the cause and effect of something, the reason according to a proven natural law. I think, therefore I am. We can each enter our unique experience into lifes equation and come out with some kind of final answer to the question of human nature. The function of mechanics is to create utility. By contrast, systems theory can be used to describe complex, living organisms. This nonlinear model deals with feedback loops and energy flow through a system. Mathematicians use systems theory to visualize the set of all possible forms a system can take and the search is for new models that create more lifelike patterns of activity. The primary function of chaos theory is to mimic life. In terms of the self on social media, the implications are extreme. Being justifies itself in the essential, mechanical model. But in the systems model, to sit still is not to exist at all. Facebook users can choose to like something or to do nothing. Each update adds a binary blip to an endless fractal of 1s and 0s created by all Facebook users simultaneously. Without my vacation photo, I am unknown. And yet, more important than the photo is how many comments it receives we want to see that it has been seen. The tide of responses controls how we are reflected. In this systems model Facebook itself is the new Narcissisus. The Big Picture of what everyone is doing becomes much more important than what I, myself, am doing at this one moment. Individuals posting to their intimate friends animate the network; the patterns of activity which result begin to establish a feedback loop that changes how, when and why we interact with each other on the internet. The trending mood of Facebooks collective consciousness slowly begins to take on lifelike characteristics. And further, as the limitations of the social medium become evident through user feedback the software evolves, and new levels of network consciousness become possible.

By a pond in Greece, Narcissus was captivated eternally by his own eyes; Online, Lady Gaga is posting unflattering pictures of herself in lingerie, prompting hordes of her admirers to do the same. A Facebook user looks in the mirror past herself, over her shoulder, to judge whether anyone else on Olympus is paying attention. If not, she adjusts the angle, puts a new attitude on display until people begin to take notice. As we see when and why other people mention us, we learn which parts of our lives to cherish and value most. In fact, Narcissuss face is almost absent in todays virtual mirror; the self-du-jour on the menu keeps changing. Rather than eternal Platonic beauty, what the social media user beholds is a crowd- sourced, wiki-self. In todays culture of social media, perhaps the most Narcissistic choice an individual can make is to cultivate a following. Then you find your actions and opinions repeated not once, but endlessly. We find our 1st person selves aggregated into a virtual mirror allowing the network the virtual Narcissus to behold its own nature. From a Darwinian perspective, the collective consciousness represented by social media is capable of self-mutation at an unprecedented pace. Whether this inevitable evolution will lead to cancerous self-destruction or immortality? No one of us can say.