Social Media Addiction
by Kane X Faucher
[ opinion - july 10 ]
In an age when most pathologies have long since been romanticized and commodified, when all our myths have become t-shirt slogans or embodied in gadgets, pathological excess is still the winning equation for consumer behaviour. We could appeal to the insipid breast-beating jargon of psychotherapy to explain just why our dependency on social media qualifies as de facto neurosis. Are we neurotics? And, if so, will there one day be a lucrative market for soc-med addicts? Our most distressing issues, lurking in the gelid depths of our subconscious in the epic battle between Id and superego is now rather commonly reflected back by the spoon-mirror of therapeutic profit-to-be-had. The deeper the plunge of our issues, the higher the profits for those who claim to be capable of bringing us to the surface. For the charlatan psychotherapists, there is this one belief: that lodged there in the murky, gelid crepuscular depths of ourselves is an electric nugget that, with the right combination of money and affirmative psychobabble incantations, can be seized and extracted like some magically locked cyst.
Schopenhauer once said that we are reading ourselves stupid. Perhaps amended for the current manic fashion, we may in fact be networking ourselves and our brains so raw that our newish fad would be ripe for inclusion in the DSM-IV, named Social Media Addiction (SMA). Once that happens, there will be no shortage of therapists at the ready to receive the desperate, the hypochondriac, or those compelled by parents who will gladly open up their wallets and give their credit cards to cure us of our morbid electronic obsession. In fact, if you consult the literature on what defines neurosis and generalized anxiety disorder, the image of the social networking addict would snuggle comfortably within such clinical parameters. Neurosis is one of those "everything in a bag" terms, and stock definitions seem to be as vaguely applicable to all our behaviour just as horoscopes seem to appeal to our narcissism. The gallimaufry of symptoms are all precipitated by extreme fear and anxiety which include hyperventilation, tingling, irritability, muscle soreness, numbness, palpitations, abdominal pain, and just about anything that may suggest you are either experiencing a stroke or visiting your in-laws. What is key to identifying neurosis are some of the less visceral symptoms such as dependency and obsession. Although this may suitably explain most romantic relationships, the clinical nuance here is that the behaviour is considered unhealthy. But, perhaps if modern therapy had its way, romance would also be treatable.
It is not the sensations we feel while we are trawling around and "power-friending" with our devices across the many social networks that have us in their expanding bubbles, but rather what we experience when we are for whatever reason blocked access to them. The symptoms are similar to withdrawal (which is why alcoholism is carefully threaded within a definition of neurosis), and we begin to feel our disconnection with an almost painful acuity. Nested comfortably within this mix of social networks would be email - a function that most social network sites include as their way of preventing you from having any reason from navigating away. It is the scene of a twisted joke played upon us all: by adding email as a function, it is akin to throwing open a bar at the entrance of an opium den. If this was not such a serious concern for so many of us, then there would be no explanation for why so many companies continue hawking hardware promising wireless access with preloaded "favourites", hailed for their portability and enabling total connection at all times.
As an informal case study with a limited sample, I canvassed my own students at the end of my history of social networking course with a rigged set of questions to produce the result I was looking for. I asked them if they felt a kind of disconnection anxiety when they could not access their many social networking accounts for any length of time, and the answer came up overwhelmingly in agreement. Those who did not conform to the dependency model were seen as being archaic or in bad faith with the technological mores of the day. There is in this a decanted Freudian issue where social connection is supposedly our perduring fixation on reconnecting with the mother ship to experience total oceanic bliss. Yet here ware flailing away in the icy waters while the phantom barge is perched on the sunset horizon. Disconnection is double jeopardy: exile from the surrogate techno-mama, and all the patter concerning castration anxiety. The shibboleths espoused by the soc-net generation are indeed ironclad, yet despite the fact that we have become social omnivores, all our social ventures seem to take a sharp detour to the mirror. This is usually manifest in behaviours specific to the medium, including "profile-preening" and the need to have someone comment, "like", or in any way acknowledge the existence of the user as the chief source of personal validation. This is, I know, to take the dim and limited view of social media, but it is worth stating as a matter of record for those future generations that will be absolutely puzzled by our ravenous desire to obsessively trace the banal minutiae of each other's lives, and to participate in turn by broadcasting our personal trivia and frivolous quotidian events of little consequence to a passive crowd of peeping toms. As devoted vanity-machines, tending obsessively to the virtual representations and images of ourselves, there is little time else to develop the offline life that would serve as a source for further modification and enhancement. Like vertical propaganda, it must be constantly refreshed with new material, but that material becomes scarce when online life occupies most of our time. And so a horizontal model has to develop to function as the new source of fresh type. In a recursive loop, and with a lack of actual engagement in the offline, we turn to constructing adventures online by transforming our machines into primary social venues. We comment on each other's status updates and share content through a comic redundancy since much of the linking we do is easily located by a ten second Googling. When we attend parties, it is our digital cameras and cell phones in attendance, snapping pictures of each other snapping pictures and sending these across the wireless beyond to our network profiles. What fun! A social simulation of the simulation. Baudrillard would be in stitches. Social life reduced to an infinitely regressive Las Meninas image of ourselves.
What I have found as interesting as well as potentially alarming is just how willing we are to engage in a personality blow-off at every opportunity. If a stranger on the bus asked us such personal questions as our political and religious views, hometown, our marital status, or what we are currently reading, most of us would take this as an act of impropriety and an uncouth invasion of privacy. Yet, one trip to places like Facebook present us with a clearinghouse of personal data voluntarily given. We are also info-poachers, theft-machines of the click-cut-paste variety. We are chronic cribbers of each other's cribs, witty remarks and pictures we brazenly take possession of and make our own. To say that there are just a series of social copies presupposes that there is a social form from which these are derived. Plato would search in vain for proof of his philosophy on Facebook or Twitter since the idea of the form-copy relationship is simply not supported in this medium. Not only is the very idea of the very sanctity and structural genesis of the author dead, as rah-rah'd by Foucauldians, but we have forgotten where we buried him. Instead, we are faced with a curious soc-net dimorphism: we are both the consumers and producers of our own content, and half the time we are terribly unsure if what we are reiterating is marketing to ourselves or to one another. We are sometimes unsure what the origin of our production is, and just a little fuzzy to whom we are blasting it out to. In essence, the soc-net world is a vast bazaar where no one has anything to sell to everyone who doesn't want it. Of course, it could be argued that we are selling ourselves, our personae with all its impedimenta and discards. Perhaps we are, but the product is incomplete and not very desirable. The closest analogy one can come to would be that of operating systems hastily thrown together to meet an impossible market deadline and then giving free updates to fix all the bugs that would have been fixed had there been time to test the programming. The chief difference here to be voiced would be that there is no coherent operation, and simply no working system.
The inscrutable soc-med decree demands, it seems, total submission to it which places it on par with most world religions. We continue stumbling about trying to find a method by which we can tolerate one another, to socially interact in a way where we can communicate peaceably and seamlessly between our egos. Yet, in this process, many of our methods actually enable our default setting of infantilizing ourselves and the world around us. Transforming the image of the world into some kind of social sandbox where we can play show and tell (with little to show or tell of much value, I might add) is to make the world an enormous kindergarten of infantile neurotics. We have successfully - and I use this term pejoratively - managed to take all our status anxieties, cravings for attention, and the rest of our messy selves with the motley of problems and give them a vast enclosure we can access at any opportunity. Our gadgets see to it that whenever we feel like we want our mummies or hate our daddies, we can broadcast it to the world using one of our many expressions to relate this. At the same time, we can read all about our "friends" who also miss their mummies and hate their daddies, or who attempt to become mummies and daddies themselves to their network connections in these low-boil role-changing games that make for drama on the web. Not to be entirely sour on the issue, but if we could barely tolerate face-to-face interaction, why have we mobbed these social network sites and repeat the pabulum slogans of all the benefits of being social? Look, I can barely tolerate most people as it is, and usually will be drifting off into my own personal world when on a crowded bus with the aid of my MP3 player, yet there I am in one of the largest crowds of strangers and "friends", called upon in my non-social leisure time to participate in the social fracas. These soc-net diversions are no longer diverting: it is on par with the eternal office party, attendance mandatory. Within a few minutes, someone is sharing some psychologically embarrassing tidbit for all to see, another is apprising the world of some banal personal detail, while streams of "information" are scrolling like ticker tape from the halfwit mass mind blithering on with recycled opinions and other nonsense bilge usually reflex-uttered by the most imbecilic drunks. And, the worst part is that I feel compelled to add to this wretched online exquisite corpse, adding my piece of banality to the worldwide collage of utter irrelevance. Then, when I least expect it, some strange figure is messaging me with a trite comment or trying to shill something completely of no interest to me. All the while, I am fending off people attempting to poke, prod, pinch, or otherwise stick a hot poker up the ass of my profile. But I know I am to blame. I must thrive on this kind of violating social interaction if I continue to come back again and again to indulge my obsession for otiose social minutiae, posting ever more kick-me targets around my most vulnerable and sensitive of my psychological nether regions. It is a voyeurism of the sick, by and for the sick. The ruse is this: every moment I am not locked into an ocular tractor beam with my soc-net obsessions, I feel like I am missing something even if it is at bottom nothing at all. There is a physical relief in logging on and discovering that I didn't miss out on anything in my absence. I come to despise all the things that make me absent that I perceive to have precipitated it: work, the outdoors, a dead battery, sleep, the rapture. In this bizarre global carousel of soc-net, there seems to be this draw to become all things to all people, the social force majeur. Such Napoleon-esque desires are textbook unhealthy. However, there is this curious sensation that begins immediately from the moment I log off, almost as though I may spontaneously combust or leap out of my skin, that first tingling of losing sensation in one's limbs. We don't as much fear the unknown as we want the comfort of knowing nothing worth knowing is happening in our absence. Ideally, all social activity should stop at the moment I log off. Perhaps even that would not stop the surge of cravings. My antennae have become oversensitized, and they clamber to lock back into that buzzing signal of the hive, even if that signal only brings me the reassurance of the dull chatter - the susurration of a boredom-womb.
I have a difficult time separating the "look me" of soc-med profiles and the activity upon them as anything different than a cry for validation. Look me is euphemistic shorthand for "complete me." This demand is as ridiculous as it is impossible, affording the user only temporary substitutes in a medium that can only flatten the ego into its prefab formula for equivalent representation. There is no possibility of ego-mending completion any more than there is any depth to a profile: just a flat projection where something is warped between the source and the target. As well, the very criteria for justifying any truth of our existence takes thinking right out of the equation. It is no longer a matter of thinking therefore I am, but I network so therefore I shall be. Note here that it is always the deferred process of becoming something, a feeling that anything might happen as we hurry up and wait for it to transpire. The tyranny of sameness haunts our profiles as much as they are "individualized", for it is not actual difference, but variation on a theme.
Ease of use and other soft arguments for the delights of a massively interconnected world of social convenience aside, what, in the end, is the real purpose of a place like Facebook? It's a crude numbers game for both the producer and the consumer: the producer generates ever higher numbers of users to entice a corresponding higher number of ad sponsors who love the smell of victims who buy their way into the completion of the self, and the consumer may aim to generate ever higher numbers of contacts to increase social cachet. In places like Twitter, the "friend or follow" scenario takes precedence where the ideal is to have more followers than one is following. However, there is the one absurd hypothesis with all of these social media sites, and that is the dream of hyperbolic unity. We cannot rest until we have "connected" each of our little node-like selves to every other node-like self in the world. Not because we lack other means of acquiring social capital, and not because we need 6 billion "friends", but only that we should have them, sitting there, at our behest, just in case we might need them. It is a form of collection fetishism for those bored of collecting baseball cards or hoarding food supplies. Yet, as we know whenever we may look at our bookshelves or wander into a library, to have is not to know. If having were knowing, well, the internet itself as the alleged and hyped repository of all knowledge would have long ago ensured that we are all walking encyclopedias rather than as a place to pump-and-dump "information" in its lowest sense, or as a convenient corner-cutting discount bazaar for first year students grabbing what they can from Wikipedia to finish a term paper.
But the ultimate agenda seems to be a quantitative situation where numbers alone are king and bring about all the delights of validation and status. It may be absolutely imbecilic to be resource-gatherers for a resource we most likely will never use, but as node-egos, or "nodegos", perhaps the real purpose beyond psychological satisfaction is a collective marshaling to a single task in producing a vast quasi-social text, a clickable impression of our tortured, disfigured, and techno-schizo human condition. The result is a hideous beast composed of redundantly recycled opinions and metastasizing banalities. Flashing across its pitted flesh are the rapidly variegating chameleon hues of what is trending now. This Gestalt social text is perhaps as meaningful as previous attempts to summarize all people such as whatever alien species encounters the mad cacophony nested inside Voyager 2.
Naysaying technological advances is nothing new, alloyed as these declarations are with a mix of half-digested facts, selective anecdotes, and the auspicious end is nigh patter that merely strengthens the opinion of the small-L Luddite who lives in a world of comfortable suspicion and perhaps knows all there is to know about fabricating explosive devices out of household products. But I am a committed pessimist (hence the occasion of quoting Schopenhauer above). However, in a contradiction I embrace, I am just as guilty of being labeled the neurotic soc-med habitue. I have been able to scale back my participation, or a hectic set of circumstances has managed to do this for me, but I am still a somewhat active node in a vast cluster of networks with no clear agenda by its makers or users. I have heard far too much of the optimistic potential for soc-med, how it will usher in a return to an age of the Renaissance; I have been pelted with declarations of just how revolutionary and unprecedented the medium is for a whole new era of sharing; I have lurked round the virtual soapboxes while doctrinaire preachers of the public good have touted the propensity for sociopolitical change through online activism and slacktivism. Yet, I remain unconvinced. Rather than hearing the great aria of a new enlightenment and the explosive puissance of an active marketplace of ideas, instead I have been witness to further efforts to standardize ideas, homogenize forms of expression, and merely extend the power of rallying around the same stale opinions until they become social law. Edward Bernays's assessment of universal literacy and its failure to achieve the great ideal is worthy ofapplication to our predicament: "universal literacy has given [the common person] rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others." This wholesale opinion racket has indeed granted the illusion of individuality, snuggling this phantasy quite comfortably within a mass mind whose function is almost purely bureaucratic. The belly-aching, not without being warranted, that major media conglomerates fabricate, disseminate, and control mass public opinion can only yield up half the blame; the other squarely on our shoulders for that one and only human universal: laziness. We passively participate in these spectacles and reinforce each other's notions almost as quickly as they are cleverly packaged and distributed. An idea, not matter how morally or logically bankrupt, will invariably always get a good hearing and redistribution via soc-med if it is served as an amusing and memorable epigram.
This is a gross and insulting generalization, and doubtless there is a strong and millions-strong force of critical free-thinking individuals taking aim against the ossification of public opinion, our valiant watchdogs of all things internet. But the internet and soc-media in particular is ruled by the vulgar elite, and one need only to cast an eye on the chatter to see that Hannah Montana is trending while some spot-on political analysis of the current state of the administration in the Balkans is not. But I am not here to bemoan the tastes and preferences of the popular mass.
Psychology in general is more a drama than a science, and Freud was the best dramatist of all. When speaking of seeking gratification from external sources to make up the deficit we are hobbled with at a young age, Freud advances some possible solutions, but the last resort is a "flight into neurotic illness" brought about through substitute-gratifications.
To return to our central point about SMA and the therapies to come, there is a booming market to corner here, and it may only be another ten years or less before shrewd therapists will be able to capitalize on all those wrecks on the social media fast lane who stagger about in a media-drunk haze, their identities a series of broken profiles in a place largely bereft of any meaning or coherence. We will soon see the hordes of the disaffected, the disillusioned, and - hopefully - still moneyed individuals who have sundered themselves from the perks of club soc-med. They will be in a desperate search for those who can deliver as fast a treatment as Dr Google has given them for all of their other ailments.
It won't prove easy for the new soc-med therapist. The Freud-Bernays scenario simply won't apply. We are speaking of a violently unplugged mob of people who are in need of a serious hard reboot. They no longer know what they fear or what they desire, halfway between addicts and Buddhists, and entirely neurotic. However, it will be absolutely essential for the new soc-med therapist to capture them with enticing slogans and high promises before the Buddhists get them. That is not the only competition in town: Luddite memberships have declined in the last while, and they will no doubt be hungry to repopulate their rolls.
The first wave of the unplugged will not be the unplugged at all, but "concerned others" like parents, friends, or those who have cleaved to the idea with nearly religious zeal that their internet addiction was a problem. They should be used as unwitting agents to drum up practice, and it is imperative to ratchet up their fear factor to magically transform concern into panic. "Yes, your son/spouse/friend/co-worker is in great psychological peril! Imminent insanity or death awaits the untreated!" That tactic will at least create a fabulously effective and unpaid group of PR people to bring the first round of patients into the office by way of familial or peer pressure. Eventually, when the phenomenon takes off or is finessed by shrewd commercial minds, it will be considered chic to be clinically labeled as SMA just as it is fashionable to share intimate details of one's depression and chat about different prescriptions for it at a party. Clinical labels are, of course, just another mechanism to substitute for actual ego-completion since the diagnostic certainty it provides the afflicted is granted by an authority-papa who, with the rubber stamp, gives us the illusory completion we so desire. The more Latinate and complex the label, the more at peace we are with our suffering.
I do wonder what kind of therapeutic practices will be attempted in this largely experimental affair. I can envision all sorts of Pseudo-Freudian psychoanalysis retreads emerging in the self-help book market and practices indexed on same, as well as more extreme treatment programs such as the use of ECT, plucky soc-med detox and rehab centres in secluded settings, AA-style tack-a-god rhetoric to manufacture the eternal defeatist, "offline therapy" which would undertake to reintegrate the afflicted with the offline world via forced shamble-marches through the public park, and so forth. And then there is the deliciously unthinkable. In a February 22, 2007 article in The Washington Post by Ariana Eunjung Cha, we are apprised of China's bootcamp cure for internet addiction. The opening shock salvo is Chinese resolution at its best: "Sun Jiting spends his days locked behind metal bars in this military-run installation, put there by his parents. The 17-year-old high school student is not allowed to communicate with friends back home, and his only companions are psychologists, nurses and other patients. Each morning at 6:30, he is jolted awake by a soldier in fatigues shouting, 'This is for your own good!'" The article goes on to say that the facility in the suburb of Beijing, Daxing, plays harsh therapeutic host to an average of 60 patients per diem, upwards to 280 on, I would suppose, one of those busy Communist Youth League roundup days. The price tag for treatment is a whopping US$1,300 a month, which is about ten times the average salary of your regular working Chinese. Beyond some of the usual techniques such as administering motivational low-voltage shock treatment, rigid military discipline, and hypnosis, they are reluctant to push medication on their patients as is more common practice at other clinics that draw a big red connecting line between internet addiction and all other forms (making addictions equivalent is medical science's way of covering for the fact that they don't entirely understand particular addictions, and so find it handy to use an all-purpose pharmaceutical bazooka). Every mental health institution in the movies needs to have their unspeakable section that contains all the quarantined horror, and the Daxing clinic is no exception. The spooky third floor has the makings for a gripping psychodrama thriller, a ward for the recalcitrant and hopeless who, as head of the clinic Tao Ran poetically muses, houses those whose "souls have been lost to the online world." China has regularly been at the forefront of devising "therapeutic" strategies that need not bother with the procedural concerns for the patient's rights. We've only to gawk in awe at their re-education facilities in the time of Mao as well as such wide-scale forced therapy solutions as the Cultural Revolution to understand what is truly meant by "aggressive" therapy. It is hardly the stuff for the puff-pieces that serve the self-help genre. But, if Chinese sources are to be believed, they do produce results even if the cured patients come out of these programs scarred in new and different ways. Perhaps the most effective therapies in the tough love category ought to be lead-sapped rather than done with mittens. The dependency ziggurat is a mighty edifice, but then we would have to square with the obvious question of whether such barbarity or cruelty ought to be condoned as the "ends justify the means" argument. It is more likely in our polite and genteel therapeutical methods that a therapist cribbing from the Chinese model would be pilloried and brought up on nasty charges of malpractice. We have to keep in mind that, here, the vast majority of our therapies are voluntary and we'll only abide by getting slapped around by some gruff therapist if we beg them to and have the dollars to make it worthwhile.
Internet addiction is big business. For example, you - yes, you - can get certified by the Zur Institute for internet addiction and the psychology of the web for just US$139. The head of the institute, Dr Ofer Zur belongs to that camp of psychotherapy which does not assume pathology is at the source of all our problems, and that sometimes we should seek help simply on the basis of feeling a bit awry. Likening his consultations to a dental checkup or changing the oil in a car is a curious way of explaining one's practice (especially since the first sounds painful, and the latter a bit mechanistic). There is also a great deal of palaver on those virtue words like family, love, and community that are pretty stock-in-trade expressions to woo those for whom heavy jargon is a bit too daunting.
The would-be soc-med addiction therapist would do well to get a hand in before the market is picked clean by "psychopportunism". But, again, we must return to our question of "are we neurotic?" The short answer is yes. The long answer is also yes, but with added qualifiers that also lead to yes by the circumspect route of intellectual good manners. We may see nothing strange and neurotic as we text each other across the room, or think twice of the mounting panic we feel when the internet is down or the batteries in our devices are dead, but our connection anxiety is always there, compelling us to face the Gorgon of our soc-med responsibilities. Responsibility? Duty? Obligation? More and more our "leisure" activities online seem to resemble work as we tend to the perpetually shabby gardens of our online selves. But that is the real trick, is it not? Filling our time with endless work that has no productive value, keeping us occupied with our now amplified virtual selves to prevent the parlous acts of thinking or, gasp and soc-med forfend, make trouble for the state.
I am a neurotic soc-med addict in search of my label-maker. I am a broken ego in search of some clinical saviour to mend me whole. I freely acknowledge all of these things, and so must now take my leave to broadcast my affliction upon all soc-media profiles.
