explicit insecurity
In The Divided Self, R.D. Laing offers this description of “ontological insecurity.”
The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an overriding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially forced from his body.
This sort of interpretation of the self used to be my basic starting point in approaching social media. As Laing argues, a stable sense of self is required for one to have “sane” interactions with other people, otherwise every interaction threatens to overwhelm the individual with insecurity, with fears of losing oneself in the other or of being ignored and obliterated by their indifference. Monitoring these interactions and scoring them increases the chances that we will experience them this way; it both destabilizes the sense of identity security we have going in to an encounter, and it provides a quasi-objective way of confirming the degree to which one is winning or losing “identity” in terms of making others recognize the primacy of your point of view on the world.
Social media is a cause of ontological insecurity that masquerades as its cure. Social media networks literalize and make explicit the ways in which we are “precariously differentiated,” and the asynchronous nature of sociality online disrupts an individual’s sense of “temporal continuity.” The creation of an identity archive would seem to ground the self, but it merely creates an incomplete and inadequate double — a “self partially forced from the body” — over which one has even less control over the uses to which it is put. An online identity in a social media platform is not a medium for our autonomous expression; it is a means by which our identity is warped, exploited, misused, posited, manipulated, and articulated by outside forces. Other people and corporations and advertisers and so on can put “you” to use without your presence or knowledge. The contexts in which “you” appear cede even further from your control, and one is continually confronted with one’s incohesiveness, one’s lack of consistency.
If Laing is right, then social media systematically impose a sense of insubstantiality on users, which opens up the serial pleasure of reaching for small reassurances: likes, and other forms of micro-recognition made suddenly meaningful by the acute insecurity.
For the ontological insecure man, according to Laing, “the world of his experience comes to be one he can no longer share with other people.” In social media terms, this means that “sharing” on platforms increases to the extent that one feels no one shares their world, and it has the ironic consequence of increasing the sense of isolation. The more I mediate my experience to offer it you, the more I make concrete my feeling that you don’t know or share what I experience, or even see thatI experience, and that I have to keep shoving examples of it at you.
The point, again, is that social media inverts what it makes explicit. It turns identity into incoherence by archiving what we do and imposing on it a formal, data-based unity. It turns sharing into isolation, by often insisting on the lack of synchronous reciprocity and co-presence in communication there. It makes the attention of others measurable, storable, transferable, making it something that can only come at someone else’s expense, obscuring the idea that attention can vary in form and intensity, that it can be given without being surrendered, and can harmonize with the attention of others into something immeasurably greater.