The Fictional Lives We Live on Social Media
by R. Anthony Arnold
October 2021
“All the world’s a stage.” So begins a monologue from Shakspeare’s comedy As You Like It.
But if the world is a stage, and we are the performers, then that means we are always acting. A performer is always aware that they are being watched. Judged. To perform is to constantly expose yourself to the opinions of others. Your opinion of yourself is much less vital.
Such an existence sounds hellish;
and yet, we live in a world that is constantly expanding the size of the stage, beckoning more people to join the rest of us in this grotesque show. We’re all performers now, pretending to still be people.
Perhaps you think this is unnecessarily dark or too macabre; but stop and consider the various ways we are all exposed.
Social media. Online gaming. Comment sections. Group emails. Group text threads. So much of our lives are now dedicated to interacting virtually with others, that it’s bizarre when we encounter someone who truly doesn’t participate or who doesn’t play along. We call them “introverts,” and we almost always position their withdrawal from society as the clearly inferior option. They are the weirdos, and we performers are the correct ones. How dare they not engage us!
In reality, I think we’re threatened by them. Their refusal to join us breaks the illusion that we all live under that to be a member of society requires performing. Their existence makes the rest of us out to be liars. If they’re able to live off-stage, and thrive, then why can’t we? What’s stopping the rest of us from simply dropping the act and leaving the entire thing behind?
The fact is that we like it.
While it may be unhealthy, we are completely addicted to it. Many of us spend significant portions of our life as either the performer or the audience. When scrolling, we are the audience. When posting, we are the performers. But one feeds the other.
When you post, you are engaging in a public act, and are therefore opening yourself up to judgement. But, when you anxiously watch the reactions and comments to your post, you have become the audience. We so effortlessly flip between the two modes that it feels natural to us at this point. Though, it is far from ‘natural’.
We know, on a gut level, that we are not meant to be watched. That people crave the solitude of a walk in the woods. The peaceful silence of an evening spent with a book. The calm of contemplation.
This is the exact reason that career performers are so highly esteemed. We shook our heads at the sad reality that our greatest performers would too often burn themselves out. They would glow brightly, illuminating our drab existences with their extraordinary light. But in doing so they would give too much, hold back too little, and would be too quickly extinguished in the process.
The life of career performers served as cautionary tales. Their lives, picked apart and scrutinized by the public, were ruined by the attention. Without a private and interior life they were constantly battered about by the judgements to which they are subjected.
Eventually the public facing persona becomes dominant. The plays and the performances are the only things that matter. The applause and the standing ovations generate a kind of Pavlovian response, and the unique individual underneath the costumes and the makeup is consumed by the need to maintain the act.
But whatever lessons we may have learned, they have proven unable to prevent us from all stepping onto the stage. Instead of internalizing the lesson that the spotlight of attention can be uniquely damaging, our society has instead embraced it.
It’s remarkable both how quickly this change has come and how recent it is.
Setting aside, but only temporarily, inventions such as the telegraph, the first real social media companies didn’t crop up until the late 1990’s. MySpace, which really began the craze, was launched in August of 2003. In less than 20 years the concept of social media has gone from something being done by “those crazy kids” to something ubiquitous. It almost certainly wouldn't be a stretch to say that few inventions have moved from outsider status to global acceptance with such speed.
This speed is made possible by the way in which the world has been connected. Ideas and inventions used to take time to move. That time would, hopefully, be used to answer the question “Is this good?” But social media insisted on having a seat at the table. Before any of us even had time to formulate the question, it had already established itself. And by the time any single body started openly wondering if it was good, it had already spread itself around the globe, establishing a presence and dominance previously reserved only for religions.
While the recency of social media is broadly understood, the recency of connectivity itself is less so.
In 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse sent the first telegraph from Wasington, D.C. to Balimore. It said “What hath God wrought.” An interesting, but appropriate choice. Before then, “fast” communication over vast distances wasn’t really practical. We were still using methods that were only slight evolutions over signal fires.
And the idea of individual people having extensive and non-stop communication over hundreds, if not thousands, of miles was certainly unheard of.
Before the telegraph, communicating with anybody further away than your local community would have meant writing a letter, visiting yourself, or sending a message with someone who was on the way. It’s this fact that makes engaging with pre-mass communication literature so difficult. Imagining a world without our modern conveniences is simply too difficult.
But that world, however alien it may be, is the one from which we evolved.
No part of humanity developed in anticipation of a time where we would constantly live our lives as either the audience or the performer in a global play. The inner thoughts or feelings of a person located 500 miles away were not only of no concern to you, but they were essentially unknowable. And on those rare occasions when you did know, like perhaps through a newspaper, it was certainly not the case that such a person could have made a material and daily impact on your mental, emotional, or spiritual condition.
This begs the question though. Why did such sweeping changes become adopted so quickly?
The quote “no man is an island” is attributed to the clergyman John Donne, and it simply states the beautiful truth we all know. We are all dependent on one another. And so it’s natural that our dependence eventually develops into a desire to form bonds with each other.
Mass communication and social media have enabled us to, seemingly, form bonds in a more efficient way. We can connect with one another from the convenience of our phone. We can connect without having to do anything more than moving our hand. I can talk to people I love without the hoop jumping that would have marked previous generations.
The intention was to make it easier for us to do something we all loved doing. Connection and social media was supposed to be the bridge between our various islands, ensuring that we would all come to see ourselves as part of a global community.
But just as the signal fire eventually developed into a more robust network of signal fires, the early days of the telegraph eventually turned into social media. Instead of building bridges between our various islands, we simply destroyed all the islands except one, and piled everybody onto it.
My regular job is an incredibly solitary one. For almost a decade I’ve been here, I’ve worked alone. With the exception of the days where I interact with one of our vendors, I complete most work days having never spoken to or interacting with another person.
Initially, I hated it. I found the loneliness infuriating. The silence and the sameness felt stifling. Boring. But over time, something strange began to happen. I started to grow. I started to evolve and change. Where once had been the constant input of others, I began to hear my own voice. My opinions and thoughts on the matters of the day began to be my own, as opposed to merely reflecting those of the people around me.
I then further accelerated this effect by limiting my time on social media. Eventually I started having time to read things that I found interesting, explore ideas I thought were intriguing, and began to seek out wisdom from the world around me. I regularly joke that the vast bulk of my learning has occurred in the last 8 years. But it’s beyond mere book learning. By having time to invest in myself, and to be comfortable with stillness, I’ve developed the capacity to look inside myself and reflect.
My job has many problems, but I’ve determined that they’re worth it. Because the nature of my work has allowed me to step off the stage. I still participate in the play, but when I do it’s on my terms. When it gets to be too much, I leave again. And I’ve completely cut out habits that were truly unhelpful.
That freedom, which is really a return to the kind of environment we came from, is what we’re missing now.
By turning the world into a stage, and the people into performers, we’ve replaced introspection with constant observation. We’ve replaced reflection with reaction. A play, no matter how well acted, is fiction. You can really only visit, and you should never try to stay.