The Mirrorball Self

An excerpt from Superbloom.

My new book, Superbloom, won’t be out for a few more weeks (January 28), but I’m pleased to share a preview here at New Cartographies. This excerpt comes from the seventh chapter, “The Dislocated I.” It opens the third and final section of the book, where I shift from examining how digital media has reshaped personal relations and social dynamics to looking at the fate of the self in a world where everything is mediated.

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Paul Klee, Senecio (detail)

It happened quickly. Twenty-five years ago, at the century’s turn, we still talked about “going online” the way we talked about going to the movies or going out to eat. It was an experience outside ordinary experience, a special event bounded in time and, as wifi networks were scarce, space. You logged on, then you logged off. Now we’re never not online. The climate of social media, a clammy hothouse through which blows, as the writer Patricia Lockwood says, “the blizzard of everything,” is the general climate. The digital information flow, incessant and efflorescent, almost pornographic in its blurring of the intimate and the public, has invaded our consciousness and, even more so, subconsciousness.

Social media is, to use the psychological jargon, a priming mechanism of unprecedented intensity. It keeps us in a permanent state of anticipation, awaiting the next stimulus, craving the next glance at the screen. However banal the revelations that come through our apps, they’re always novel and they usually tell us something about ourselves. We know that, behind the screen, our social life continues to unfold around the clock, with or without our active participation. People are looking at us and talking to us or about us. We’re being sized up — envied, celebrated, shamed, shunned. We exist today in the liminal space between the material and the mediated, present when absent, absent when present.

What happens to us when we live so much of our lives through communication systems, when the self, reconfigured as a pattern of information, becomes media content? There are many ways to approach that question, but a good place to start is with the work of the pioneering American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley. In his 1902 book, Human Nature and the Social Order, Cooley introduced the idea that would make him famous in academic circles: that of the looking-glass self. Selfhood, he argued, emerges not from the inside out, as thinkers as diverse as Descartes, Emerson, and Nietzsche had supposed, but from the outside in:

As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it.

Our self-image takes shape through a reading of signals, through feedback loops between our own mind and the minds of everyone we interact with. “That the ‘I’ of common speech has a meaning which includes some sort of reference to other persons,” Cooley wrote, is revealed in “the very fact that the word and the ideas it stands for are phenomena of language and the communicative life.” Our communal mind-reading forms the very essence of human relations: “The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.” With those italics, he acknowledged a paradox: what’s solid in society consists largely of images flickering in the mind. He wasn’t implying that individuals lack inner lives or innate qualities. He was a firm believer in human nature and personal character. His point was that the self cannot exist except in a social context. Without the presence of others, we have no cause to picture ourselves as distinct beings — or to speak.

Central to his thinking was a belief in the self’s adaptability and flexibility. We tailor our words and actions, our behavioral self-portrait, to whomever we sense to be observing us at any given moment. Nature may give us an underlying score, but like jazz musicians we improvise the music together, in response to one another’s often tacit signals. The “content of the self” — Cooley’s wording here is prescient — varies “indefinitely with particular temperaments and environments.” The “I” is contextual; it changes as situations change.

Cooley was not the first to posit a protean self. His elder contemporary William James had made a similar point just a few years earlier in Principles of Psychology, a book Cooley knew well and admired deeply: “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” As the twentieth century unfolded, many other thinkers would explore and refine the idea of a socially fashioned self. Cooley’s sometime colleague George Herbert Mead argued in The Social Self that children gain a sense of individuality only when they start to play roles, shaping their own words and behavior to the words and behavior of others. To the subjective “I” is added the objective “me.”

The idea’s fullest expression arrived later in the century, via the sociologist Erving Goffman’s celebrated 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Whereas Cooley and Mead had focused on how we interpret others’ perceptions of us, Goffman concentrated on the other side of the feedback loop: how we adjust our behavior to influence those perceptions. He framed his argument with a famously elaborate analogy to the theater. We go through our days like character actors, taking on different roles depending on which “stage” we happen to be on. We play one part when we’re at home with family, another when we’re with colleagues at work, another when we’re at school, another when we’re out with friends. We modulate our tone of voice, our words, and our demeanor to suit whatever social context we’re in, and when we move into another context we readjust our aspect and affect for the new audience. We’re all masters of “the arts of impression management.”

Intervals of solitude give people the sense of privacy that’s so essential to a healthy, cohesive psyche.

Goffman assumed, as pretty much everyone else did at the time, that social contexts were defined by in-person interactions in actual places — schools, offices, factories, homes, bars, churches, shops. One’s social life was situated in the material world, its pace and texture linked to the presence of one’s own body and the bodies of others. Because events were bounded in space and time — you couldn’t be in two places at once — a person had to travel from one social setting, or stage, to another. Performances of the self were sequential. One ended before the next began, with little or no overlap. And there were gaps between the performances, when a person was off the stage — alone in a room or a car, or taking a walk, or eating a sandwich on a bench in a park. Such intervals of solitude provided respites from social pressures, opportunities to relax and attend to one’s own inner voice. They gave people the sense of privacy that’s so essential to a healthy, cohesive psyche.

The separation of social situations in time and space acted as “a psycho-social shock absorber,” explained the communication scholar Joshua Meyrowitz in No Sense of Place, a 1985 book that built on Goffman’s ideas. By allowing us to be selective in “exposing ourselves to events and other people,” it gave us the power to “control the flow of our actions and emotions.” We weren’t called upon to respond to many different situations with many different sets of people all at once. The well-defined boundaries between social events exerted a deep if often unrecognized influence on the quality of our emotional and moral lives, Meyrowitz argued. “Compassion, empathy, and even ethics may be much more situationally bound than we often care to think.” Our sense of ourselves and others might be drawn from mental images, but those images were situated in a concrete reality. Being together with others in a place, face to face, gave a richness to our sympathetic and emotional attachments.

Goffman, with his single-minded focus on traditional, in-person interactions, paid scant attention to mediated communications — to conversations conducted through letters or telegrams or telephone calls. He dismissed them as “marginal and derived forms of social contact” that supplemented but didn’t alter the fundamentally physical nature of personal relations. Meyrowitz, writing a quarter century later, after the introduction of the home computer and the modem, took a different view. Seeing the growing importance of online and other mediated communications to people’s lives, he realized that Goffman’s old, orderly state of social affairs was doomed. Radio, television, and the telephone had already weakened the connection between social events and physical spaces; happenings from all around the world, and even outer space, were routinely beamed into people’s living rooms. The spread of digital media promised to sever the link altogether. “Electronic media destroy the specialness of place and time,” he wrote. “What is happening almost anywhere can be happening wherever we are.”

Society, he sensed, was entering a time of profound dislocation, when “social reality” would be defined not by physical interactions in discrete places but by crisscrossing “patterns of information flow.” Messages and other social stimuli would “flow constantly and indiscriminately.” The psycho-social shock absorber would be gone.

That’s where we find ourselves today. In their early form, online social networks reflected, at least by analogy, traditional patterns of socializing. Their design maintained divisions of space and time. Each member of a network had his or her own “place,” in the form of a profile page, and people traveled, through hyperlinks, from place to place to “visit” friends. Status updates and other postings were arranged chronologically. They unspooled sequentially through time, as thoughts and experiences had always unfolded. When Facebook introduced its automated News Feed in 2006, it replaced the familiar structure of the social world with the logic of the computer. It erased the divisions and disrupted the sequences, removing social interactions from the constraints of space and time and placing them into a frictionless setting of instantaneity and simultaneity. Socializing in this new sphere follows no familiar, human pattern; it vibrates chaotically to the otherworldly rhythms of algorithmic calculation.

The social and the real have parted ways. No longer tied to particular locations or times of day, social situations and social groups now exist everywhere all at once. We move between them with a tap on a screen, a flick of a finger, a word to a chatbot. And because our phones allow us to socialize all the time, even when alone, interludes of solitude have largely disappeared from everyday life. There’s no offstage anymore, no place insulated from communication and its demands. Everyone is always within earshot and eyeshot. The old social architecture, with its walls and doors, its mornings and afternoons and evenings, has collapsed.

Socializing in the digital sphere follows no familiar, human pattern; it vibrates chaotically to the otherworldly rhythms of algorithmic calculation.

The disembodiment of social relations has seemed liberating to many, particularly those who feel isolated or trapped in the rooms available to them in the material world. In its expansiveness, the virtual can be accommodating in ways the real cannot. And for pretty much everyone, online society is at times exhilarating—so many people to talk to, to gaze upon, to be watched by; a never-ending passeggiata, with what seems to be the entirety of humanity circulating through the clamorous ether. But it’s also exhausting and oppressive. Social media is a neurosis machine. Like a bad parent or a cruel lover, it simultaneously indulges and punishes us. Even as it encourages the id to run free, it cracks the superego’s whip. We know we’re always being watched and judged, and we know the shamers lie in wait, knives sharpened. Beset on both sides and cut off from solitude’s refuge, the ego wilts.

For creatures such as ourselves, fashioned by evolution to live closely together as physical beings in physical places among physical things, disembodiment also brings a perpetual sense of disorientation and dysphoria. When we carry our acute sensitivity to social signals into a world where such signals are no longer regulated by time and space, no longer tied to bodies and places, no longer subject to attenuation by personal discretion, the performance of self takes on a frenetic quality. It “metastasizes into a wreck,” in the words of New Yorker essayist Jia Tolentino. Or, as Meyrowitz put it years ago, “when we are everywhere, we are also no place.”

The looking-glass self has turned into the mirrorball self, a whirl of fragmented reflections from a myriad of overlapping sources. We see bits of ourselves in the responses (or nonresponses) to our posts. We see bits of ourselves in all the messages we receive and send. We see bits of ourselves in the photos and videos that flow through our screens. And because we know feed algorithms are tailoring all the content we see to their assessment of who we are, we see bits of ourselves in everything else as well.

In our new milieu, having “a central presence in experience hardly matters,” the sociologists James Holstein and Jaber Gubrium write. The self flits before us “in myriad versions unanchored to concrete experiences.” It collapses into, and must compete with, everything else in the feed, from news stories to celebrity memes. Media programming used to be something we looked at and listened to, something presented to our senses from the outside. Now it takes shape within us, its production exerting a formative pressure on our being. We’re not just actors playing roles anymore. We’ve been required to take on the jobs of producer and impresario, hawker and emcee, for a show that never stops. Even when we’re not posting, we’re scouting locations and looking for material.

The transfer of the self’s setting from bodies to communication systems is not something that’s happened all of a sudden. It’s been going on a long time, even if we haven’t always been aware of it. As we’ve adapted our ways of life to the demands of the modern bureaucratic state, to a weblike society woven out of strands of highly processed information, we’ve gotten used to expressing ourselves through and seeing ourselves reflected in documents and photographs, audio recordings and films, ledgers and registers. As the feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith wrote in 1990, “Our lives are, to a more extensive degree than we care to think, infused with a process of inscription.”

But until the ascendancy of social media and the smartphone, inscriptions of the self tended to take material or at least analog form. They were attached to particular places and times and had limited, usually administrative purposes. We could keep them at a distance, viewing them as another set of props on the various stages we trod. Even if their abstract renderings of the self encroached, bit by bit, on the body’s material sovereignty, they didn’t displace the body as the site of the self. It’s only with social media that we’ve become able to separate being from body, to inscribe ourselves moment-by-moment on the screen, to reimagine ourselves as streams of text and image.

The effect is a strange, needy sort of solipsism. We socialize more than ever, but we’re also at a further remove from those we interact with. The sympathetic imagination that Cooley and Goffman took for granted — the ability to get inside the heads of others, to sense their perceptions and feelings through direct observation — weakens and warps when the others are hidden behind screens, their thoughts and emotions filtered through algorithms. Rather than relying on empathy and intuition to navigate social relations, we’re forced to decipher others’ attitudes by tracking and evaluating explicit, often quantitative measures: follower counts, numbers of likes and shares, the time that elapses before responses arrive, the types of emoji that appear in a comment, the number of exclamation marks that punctuate a reply. Even the presence or absence of a period at the end of a text message becomes laden with meaning, another clue to how we’re perceived. The more mediated our lives become, the more we come to see ourselves, and others, as abstractions.

When acting within the constraints of the physical world, the self would feel its way into the corners of the various places and moments through which the body moved. The body was our means of being a separate and distinct individual, but it was equally our means of exploring and accommodating ourselves to society in all its contingency and complexity. To shape ourselves to others with whom we shared actual time and actual space was not to become broken or fake or to lose integrity. It was to undergo an enlargement of the sympathetic imagination and in the process become at once more fully an individual and more fully a part of society. It was in and through the body that the individual self and the social self emerged and melded.

When the self collapses into content, it shrinks to fit the medium that carries it. Like all the other content it travels with and competes against, it has to be recognizable and decipherable at a glance. It needs to mug and wink and wave, to be memelike. The “I” squeezes into an “identity,” a set of descriptive or ideological codes suitable for transmission through high-speed networks. As the self’s vessel in the virtual world, an identity serves as a stand-in for the body. It provides, as the body did, a means for being part of society, for bringing the “I” into the “we.” But unlike the body, identity works through the explicit process of group affiliation — through self-categorization — rather than the fuzzy accumulations of sympathetic understanding. The society it keeps is exclusive, not inclusive.

Our contemporary way of thinking about identity, as a set of extrinsic markers that define one’s affiliations rather than a set of intrinsic traits that add up to one’s personal character, is a recent development. As Kwame Anthony Appiah explains in The Lies That Bind, it came to the cultural fore only in the second half of the twentieth century. The assumption underpinning the idea of shared or social identity — “that,” as Appiah writes, “at the core of each identity there is some deep similarity that binds people of that identity together” — may be a fallacy, but the idea has nonetheless provided a powerful means of enabling historically oppressed groups to organize to counter prejudice and secure civil rights. It engenders political solidarity, regardless of whether it reflects anything other than superficial similarity.

Social identity plays an important organizing role online as well, but it can also, when it usurps individual character, lead to a kind of self-stereotyping. It becomes a cage, if a comfortable one. In social media’s flux, identity serves as a defense mechanism. It gives the entropic mirrorball self an appearance of stability and cohesion by reducing it to a set of ready-made tribal markers: hashtags, emojis, slogans, gestures, acronyms, flags, in-jokes, buzzwords. This is who I am. This and this and this. The self is formed through a curation of symbols.

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I hope you’ll consider supporting my work by preordering Superbloom, through Bookshop.org, Amazon, B&N, BAM, or your local bookstore. And thanks for reading New Cartographies.