1. Say it three times
I misuse idioms, quotes, and those kind of sayings. It’s generally funny, so I guess I don’t try that hard to correct myself. In fact, since it’s my “thing” with certain friends, I often do it on purpose. Repetition, I’ve found, is the secret sauce of comedy. Repeat an idiotic statement three times in unlikely contexts and it becomes hilarious.
One idiom I misuse a lot is “She doth protest too much.” It’s a crystallized psychological truth and using it makes identifying something that could be difficult to convey really simple. I like to use it specifically when it doesn’t apply because I think it’s funny. But that’s not because I think it’s rubbish.
2. The lonely crowd
Online I feel an odd kind of loneliness, especially when using social media. What we all see: A crowd of people looking at their phones or a lonely straggler, like some zombie lost from the herd, wondering around an empty parking lot. The view from the inside: little words, videos starting up then sucked up into the air; signals of tragedies, vanities, desires; things that piss me off; things that turn me on; stupidities; hatred and cruelties; the rise and fall of debates that occupied entire civilizations occurring in hours to no satisfying end. Both images are the view of a lonely person, a lonely me.
Christopher Lasch argues in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) that this position of the lonely observer is the subjective condition of the narcissist. The frantic individualism that is a general feature of popular social media platforms encourages, nourishes an extreme form of me-myself-and-I thinking. But, also as Lasch points out, the growing prevalence of individualism as such doesn’t mean that there are more unique individuals flourishing. To the contrary, he sees the ideology of individualism, as such, as a means for flattening any actual variation between people. This is a careful distinction, because the nuance Lasch is making has more in common with Guy Debord than classical liberalism. The flattening of our individual differences isn’t so much a crushing of our innate political essence (as a libertarian might hold), but a mapping out of what might otherwise be unchartered territory. Of course, our inner lives are always eventually mapped out—our likes and dislikes, our ways of explaining ourselves to others, our friends and enemies—by life. Lasch is protective of this undirected formation that people experience as part of society, and I feel he understands it as an organic process. Imagine the difference between wild woods and a vegetable garden. The Society of the Spectacle (Debord), then, is a colonizing force for Lasch, building an architecture for subjective experience to an extent that isn’t possible without the technology of the Internet.
The way information is organized through the Internet is known as information architecture and it shapes how our own negotiation of information is organized. The individual, in this view, is nothing more than a set of information communicated in a certain way.
So much of what we experience and feel as uniquely our own are things that we eventually learn many others also experience and feel. (Is that ageing?) The Internet has made the case better than any philosopher—how many times a day do I search something to confirm if something I’m thinking, feeling, or seeing matches up with anyone else?
The Internet is a tool that makes it so easy to see how similar we all are. It’s no wonder that it’s growth as part of our everyday lives coincides with the rise of what might be called “frantic individualism,” a form of me-myself-and-I thinking so extreme that it can only signal a desperate struggle for legitimacy in the face of what is clearly evidence to the contrary. Even the practice of frantic individualism proves a tendency so general that the exceptional quality of each display of unique identity only confirms a larger trend. This analysis is nothing new, of course, and critics like Christopher Lasch have eloquently described how a rise in narcissistic behavior, expressed as individualism, has the effect of colonizing whatever undefined territory that may exist within a subject. It is an exercise of the Spectacle, drawing on our tendency to enjoy praise or recognition to create an experience of fame that, ultimately, flattens our inner worlds into spaces that are increasingly structured in identical ways.
We’re living within information architecture and it shapes our inner and outer lives in ways not dissimilar from the actual architecture of the buildings and cities we live in.