Pixel Affection
In an age of instant accessibility, the modem has become our primary node for knowledge acquisition. Through the mind’s eye of modernity, Google dons a mortarboard for its prodigiousness, X assumes the print media’s mantle of highly filtered, attention-grabbing, and bias-fulfilling bursts of speculative information, and Instagram becomes a playing ground for the sequestration of our composite realities—all coded to fulfill their user-ascribed functions with finesse.
yeule via YouTube
This digital dialect, of a unified cyberfront, itself is markedly culpable for the continued cross-pollination of culture across international territories; delivering the feel of proximity where once waters were non-navigable, our farthest reaches are now adorned with the consciousness of a melded experience (much as the advent of television once achieved, long ago).
It is no wonder then that everything embedded in the online realm just carries that much more weight behind the protective layer of a glass screen. With the added ingredient of real-time interactivity, our fondness for the avatars we self-circumscribe especially burgeons, skirting hyperbole to know no bounds—and yet, often, also to no romantic avail.
This phenomenon is first physically realized in the very act of giving someone a follow, substantiating notions that online domains possess some sort of wanton power to transform the average user into the stuff of scripture. Whether this endeavor is mutually reciprocated or left to air, unreturned, once their content becomes synthesized with the hivemind of our hyper-curated feeds, we find ourselves projecting psychographic information in perpetuity onto traits of the ushered-in other, based upon the scant—or even replete—abundance of material affixed to their page. Their capacity for self-determination is thus warped in the warmth of our hands.
I find this train of thought, of predetermining an imagined other’s identity, particularly intriguing to unravel. You see, the trace of a fingertip in the outside world is our typical, go-to metric for identifiability, found all over the external hardware of our devices. Yet, when our actions are situated in or equate to those in the digital realms we construct, the footprints we stamp via software may go plausibly unnoticed or remain anonymous at our behest, depending on both our intended and desired levels of perceptibility. Regardless, uploading any form of content inherently confers the possibility—sometimes the inevitability—of being encountered, and, when this does arise, what are separable, distinguished moments for us in time otherwise become threads subsumed under the holistic umbrella of a distinctive, decided persona. It means the boundaries we demarcate in our posting not only go ignored, but worse, undergo homogenization—forged, compartmentalized, and ascribed by friend, foe, and stranger alike—for us to be made sense of.
Björk via YouTube
The result of this may seem individualized, and it is not always unfounded (it’s not like we don’t collate our feeds to reflect us; we willingly share the information we wish to construe). However, much of it is derived largely from categorization, placing people into the archetypes we overwhelmingly encounter. For instance, upon brief surveillance, others can appear to us as edgy low-exposure or digicam tryhard types, with an unadulterated passion for incessant posting—and from that vague assertion alone, you can see how instantaneous and easy it is to draw further connotations. Tropes as such, therefore, evidently do not arrive in our collective (un)consciousness detached from the context from which we come, and our schemas are not merely folded into the recesses of our mind readily for appraisal. Their benignity can go on to breathe malignant life, carrying weight and meaning in the ether in the form of aesthetic valuation, which harms the idyll we so diligently hamper down in conceiving, and pride ourselves verily in maintaining. It breeds a space where lay analytical skills run amok; we believe we can glean insight from the contours of a photo or subtext of a caption, yet this only really culminates in characters painted with the broadest of strokes, overblown, and a resounding lack of neutrality in opinion seemingly ensues.
Thus, essentially meaningless, yet frightfully full of it, whatever we do on social media nowadays seems a declaration. I think that this is partly why we are seeing the rise of archiving posts, sitting on them, and unarchiving them on Instagram, so as to not contribute to this falsity of being known in the wrong way or fear of being misperceived. Likes are not so easily assured as they once were, and so to post really feels like being held up on a pedestal for judgment in the void, rendering ourselves prominent in the fold of a continuous data stream. Instead, relegating a post to be found in the midst of our profiles, rather than in the performative grip of the feed, we can feel like we are at our most fully formed if anyone does follow through to visit.
However, by anticipating such a call-to-action, we exacerbate the idea of an imaginary audience, regressing to a vestige of adolescent thought by anxiously envisioning a fourth wall and rising to preemptively defy it. In reality, we probably aren’t as avidly watched as we make believe—like a needle in a haystack or a drop in the sea within the framework of all that has been and is still yet to come in the vastness of our technological Anthropocene. Nonetheless, this personal fable is more statistically likely in the online world than reality, because we can make our innermost selves manifest as observable facets, and the nature of the space is innately voyeuristic. No one is truly at fault for how these modes of thought go either; the symphony of reconstructions that our content invites is largely a by-product of the automaticity of the perceptive human mind and its constant need to impose narrativity, and the rush of the homepage capitalizes upon these for good reason, algorithmically. It is we who are not irrational to take ego-protective measures.
Realistically, though, only if someone takes a particular interest in us will they go that step further to create nuance, attending to the slightest details to re-evaluate their bias. It is here that we may slip into the dangerous zone of attraction, as people come more proximally into the orbit of our selfhood. Who we feel we are and who we infer the other to be, in relation to us and our inbuilt associations, begins to mean more, and so we parse more carefully. Yet, skewed by our preference for their content, we can overlook flaws and structurally augment an idealized version of someone without ever having met them, because it is fundamentally a transposition of them that lies before us—not the real thing.
Without blemish, it is hard, however, to ascertain what “the real thing” is. When things heat up and we go giddy at the prospect of progressing to the next stage—attaching feeling to the logarithmic, unfeeling bytes of data that arrange themselves in our image, even developing the gall to reach out—attachment has clearly blossomed. Yet, we do not know if we are settling for fantasy; once the messages come pouring in, it could truly be anyone behind that screen so long as they are enshrouded in a cloud of our delusions, and the constancy of their presence persists to feed them. Any tone can be projected onto each and every message, hollowing out its own voice internally, as we essentially begin to idolize and embellish upon binary code.
Lulled by this false sense of security, we upload embraces as emoticons, siphon self-fulfilling, sanctimonious agendas from the idol’s activity, and create core memories that are really just extensions of ourselves—speaking more to what we desire more than finding any grounding in actuality. Each maneuver we make, driven by the surge of a dopaminergic release, thus results in an archive that will fundamentally outlast us as something non-physical, stored indefinitely in the cloud. However long that may be, we cannot deny that it happened. Ultimately, though, it will surpass the longevity of these relationships with certainty; they are destined to fade due to their unstable foundations—contingent upon the simulation of a façade that will never live up to expectations.
