“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Kurt Vonnegut
In 1977 JG Ballard prophesied:
Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.
And:
Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day.
And here we are, 2019. In our Twitter feeds, through our Facebook updates, Instagram, and all the rest, we record the entire spectrum of our domestic life. There isn’t a thought, not a single moment of note, that does not go unreported; sifted, filtered, and purified to tell the epic story of the Glory of You.
(Click the PDF icon, upper right, if you prefer reading a black-on-white script)
There’s a kind of sickness in this. Most of us, of course, like to imagine ourselves as the star and hero of our story, and these occasional daydreams are a fun way to expend a healthy imagination. But I’m not talking about these entertaining distractions from our every day. This is about the will to self-obsession relentlessly pushed by giant corporations (because they found a way to monetise it). This not about daydreams, but the new reality, living inside the dark prophesy of a science fiction writer.
I want to talk about the implications this has for the self. How these revolutions in communications technology are altering human identity.
The first and most obvious consequence of this excessive self-regard is a tendency towards narcissism. The medical definition of which includes: “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.” Because of these traits, narcissists find themselves in shallow relationships that only serve to satisfy their constant need for attention.
Sound familiar? Social media of course promotes only the most shallow of relationships. Fleeting awareness of others based on a tweet or a picture. Shallow relationships that are nonetheless more insistent and intoxicating than real-life ones. The endorphin rush we received from a retweet, or a like, or even an email landing in our inbox is analogous to the rush of a poker machine (slot machine). Indeed, social media platforms use the same techniques as gambling firms to create psychological dependencies in users.
This increasing egoism has been confirmed via peer reviewed studies. Certainly, while social media will be exploiting tendencies that already exist, the trend away from empathy seems clear: the ceaseless grandstanding of social media, the sociopathic spectacle of political point scoring after a tragedy, the edited rushes of one’s life compulsively spewed out into the ether.
A second consequence of being the star of one’s very own social media melodrama is a life lived in the spotlight.
The observer effect in psychology well known and fairly straight-forward: an individual will modify their behaviour in response to their awareness of their being observed. Related is the idea of the panopticon devised by social theorist Jeremy Bentham: that by being constantly observed, we will self-regulate and self-discipline. The original version of the panopticon, appropriately, was a prison, where every prisoner could be observed all the time, but never precisely knew when they were being watched. Orwell’s 1984 was a totalitarian version of the panopticon, the world as a prison, where all were constantly monitored, and regulated, and punished.
Orwell and Bentham’s mistake was to assume we did not want to be observed. We live in a voluntary panopticon*. We thrust ourselves into the limelight. While there are some holdouts who value privacy, who minimise their online footprint with dumb phones, who hold back personal information from the voracious maw of social media, these types of people are increasingly rare, and liable to come under mockery (I should know, being one of them). Being observed, for most, is not punishment, it is reward.
Of course, no-one simply acts like themselves as they step up onto the stage; as J G Ballard predicted, they act like the best version of themselves. Or to be more precise: they embody a carefully written and edited character. Thus everyone learns to become their own publicist. Cultivating their public image, working and reworking public statements or pictures they feverishly hope will go viral. When we all act as our own shills, constantly refining and spinning our opinions in relation to our audience, are our opinions our own anymore? Do we like a book, for example, as a thing-in-itself, that speaks to us as an individual, or do we like the book because we 
think the relevant peer group will want us to like the book? Do we watch a film with our own eyes, or with the imagined community of a thousand twitter followers looking over our shoulder?
It has got to the point where I fear we are losing our interiority. We are losing our capacity to appreciate and reflect on the world in solitude, rather than as stars in the domestic saga of our lives. This will vary, of course, in relation to one’s profession and social class. It seems to me that, in particular, the university educated, hyper-self-conscious demographic desperately seeking to build a fanbase (authors, opinion columnists, lifestyle gurus, social media influencers) have become addicted to the opium of the retweet, obsessed with their “audience”.
I started this article with a quote from Vonnegut; it is one that comes to my mind more and more lately.
What is our true self if we play act this role online the vast majority of the time? What is our true self, when our conversations with people in the real world are mediated by the imaginary community in the back of our minds: the audience we will report to after this unsavoury interaction in meat space is done?
Let me give you an example. Recently I read a series of tweets from an author describing a trip to the cinema. They not only denigrated the film, but also the poorly-formed opinions of those who went with them to see it. That is, the friends – and it was clear from the tweets that these people were part of the hero’s friendship group – enjoyed the movie, but our protagonist, clearly more politically and morally sophisticated, saw various problematic elements, and proceeded to insult both the film and the opinions of the companions who enjoyed it.
Three observations. One, the community online seems to be more important to this tweeter than the flesh-and-blood community they socialise with. Two, it was clear they never spoke up to make their disgust clear to their friends (otherwise our hero would have dutifully reported to us an edited version of the conflict, where our 
protagonist gets all the most winning lines), and rather, saved up this vitriol for their virtual audience. And three, well, not an observation but a question: do none of their friends follow them on social media? What is this disconnect between real life and online? Who stands by quietly with friends in real life, nodding at their words, then promptly goes and shits all over them on the Internet? More and more of us, apparently.
Which is to say, we talk with people who aren’t there anymore. For many of our interlocuters, there is no there there. They are not talking to us; they are constructing their version of the conversation in their minds, to be replayed tonight in a heightened re-enactment of the day. When they talk to us in real life, we aren’t the intended recipient of the message. It’s the audience. There, in the room with us, watching the hero.
We are, of course, social creatures, we tend to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and our personalities are cultivated by us because of this, whether online or in real life. However, when we spend all our time pretending to be someone online, we become that person. The self we create in the virtual world – if lived in for long enough – ends up colonising our real world self. And the character we create online usually lacks the contradictions and messiness of our true personality (Our political bubbles, for example, discipline and punish any of us who stray from the orthodox political line, so expressions of doubt or nuance are dangerous).
The self is mutable, and always has been. But what is the self, online? Who do we become in this shallow pool of narcissists and the empathy-free? What happens when we are stretched so thin, over the minds of ten thousand strangers?
I rarely share much that is personal online. But still, even I am susceptible to this kind of thinking. When I have a funny conversation with my partner, or my children, I think: this would get a few retweets, many likes. When I have a moment of solitude, see real beauty in an autumn sunset, I think: if I take a photo now and upload it, will this give my audience a glimpse of the glory of me? I often find myself thinking of the cinematography of my life, the wonder of these rare sparkling moments, framed on Facebook. I resist these urges, most of the time. But I’m forty, which means half my life has been without this relentless interconnectedness, so I can imagine another cosmology.
Many cannot. They can’t because their audience is watching always watching, so they, in turn, have to be telling, always telling. In this exchange I fear they are losing depth, and authenticity, and the joy of solitary and unshared experience.
To end our interiority is to fundamentally change who we are as human beings. We are living through a cyberpunk present, where morality is dictated to us by giant corporations, assuring us a shoe or a movie or a razor blade can embody meaningful political change. Where political activism has been reduced to a retweet. Our virtual lives have colonised our real ones; we behave as though we are rehearsing for the highlight reel we will produce for that evening’s show. We’ve become the actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera, star of the TV programme of our life.
* We are, of course, also being observed in ways that are involuntary (or, at the least, that we are indifferent to). Through Google, through our smart phones, through those of us stupid enough to have a listening device planted in our own homes under the inoffensive name of Alexa (so much more palatable than Big Brother), we are being observed, measured, categorised, and profiled in a way that the totalitarians of Orwell’s 1984 could not have imagined in their wildest fever dreams.