SOCIAL NETWORKS: Have the tools of the digital age given rise to new generations of narcissists or merely amplified an inherent facet of human nature?
THE loneliest whale in the world has no name. No one is even sure if it’s male or female. The whale, of a species yet to be identified, trawls the Pacific Ocean in near absolute isolation, singing songs no possible whale friends can hear, because at 52 hertz to a normal blue or fin whale’s much lower-frequency calls, it can’t be heard; not its ditties, its complaints, its dreams, its opinions or its frank assessments. In an ocean vast with nothingness, it is a roving beast of incomprehensibility, untainted by correspondence, unilluminated by amity.
It is a saying oft repeated that “no man is an island”. Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. So, what gives human life value? Is it one’s inner compassion, moral compass, ethics and principles? Is it the books we read, the songs with sing, the movies we watch, the art we appreciate? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way we could share with the world all of these things without undertaking the dangerous business of walking out the front door?
Enter: the social network. A whittling down of much of life’s components to technologically microcosmic proportions, social networks have set the world ablaze in connectivity and led to a total increase in the number of Internet trolls by about 100 per cent. It has given broken hearts a place to post inspiring quotes, real estate for citizen journalism to flourish sans accountability, budding filmmakers a channel to post only all of the movements of their cross-eyed, angry-faced cats. Social networks: now everybody can have a soapbox.
On average, each person on Facebook has 338 friends, and 1.18 billion people log on to the social networking site every day. Each Twitterer has an average of 208 followers, and 310 million people actively use it every month. An average Instagrammer has up to 200 followers, and since its release in 2010, users have shared more than 40 billion photos. To reach out to so many people while physically making so little effort is a temptation too hard to resist for most of us. To say it is only human nature to want to be heard is missing the doughnut for the hole. Whales do it. Babies do it. Spam bots do it.
But why, though? Did the birth of the Internet and subsequent rise of social media open the floodgates for the individual to make public the case for their very existence or has that innate itch been there all along? Is our behaviour on social networks an incarnation of the ever-transforming nature of how we “share”, going from literal writings on the wall to “writing on our wall”? Are we indulging our narcissistic fantasies or building upon habits and conventions that date back centuries?
Undeniably, the progress of the way humanity consumes, disseminates and manipulates information runs parallel to the progresses of technology. But, has the nature of the things we share in this day and digital age changed as well? Where once bards deigned to sharpen quills to profess their love in 154 sonnets or less, our generation can do in 140 characters; love, by any other medium, would smell as sweet.
Some say we are guided on what to share by the ways we can share them. Dan Ariely, in his book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, said “by the time we comprehend and digest information, it is not necessarily a true reflection of reality. Instead, it is our representation of reality, and this is the input we base our decisions on. In essence, we are limited to the tools nature has given us, and the natural way in which we make decisions is limited to the quality and accuracy of these tools”. We are not simply vocal because the WiFi is free. We are vocal because our voices must be heard somewhere, anywhere, if we believe enough in the message, even if that message is just a tiny, indirect glimpse into who we are.
So, when we tell our tales, sung like an idiot, full of sound and fury, does it signify something? Are we a measure of our Facebook status likes, number of Instagram followers or retweets? Does it border on the narcissistic? Or, does the reinforcement and acknowledgment of our character, our likes and dislikes, the communal approval of our vacation photos and listicles we LOLed at serve a greater purpose by solidifying our sense of self? Is it an intrinsic desire of all forms of life to want to have a witness?
It seems like the easy way out to simply declare achievements unlocked on social media as banal, superficial and self-indulgent, especially for the luddite residing inside vast swathes of the population, quick to point their haughty fingers down on the double-tapping, hashtagging squads with goals from their high horse. Ariely also said “people are sometimes willing to sacrifice the pleasure they get from a particular consumption experience in order to project a certain image to others”. And the late, great comedian George Carlin once said “people who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think that they don’t care what people think”.
So, consider the human. Like the loneliest whale, we are but social mammals, and that means we are not plants. Symbiosis does not always happen organically. Sometimes, it has to be sought out. Sometimes, we swim in a lonely ocean as blue as Facebook’s banner, singing songs to our lonely selves, searching for a like. And sometimes, we upload old high school photos online, searching for a friend who can hear us.
The writer, Fuzeani Fauzi is an NST sub-editor who has recently reactivated her Facebook account and welcomes all prayers for her soul from followers of any religion or account. She can be reached via fuzeanifauzi@mediaprima.com.my.