In the 1950s, the playwright and composer Noel Coward was asked by an acquaintance whether he’d seen a certain TV broadcast, to which Coward responded tartly, “Television is for appearing on — not for looking at.” Today millions of would-be Kylie Jenners and Joe Rogans emphatically agree with him, although CBS, NBC, and ABC have been replaced by Instagram, X, Snapchat, and fusty Facebook, which insists upon staying at the party too long.
The most significant revolution in the 21st century has been the omnipresence of smartphones and the social media platforms that demonically inhabit our lives, seemingly coveting the souls of users of these devices. As recent Senate hearings confirmed, social media has become a bazaar for the world’s evils. But solely focusing on pedophilia, cyberbullying, political radicalism, and other pathologies misses a more concealed harm: The ordinary, intended use of these platforms is crippling our lives.
I was born in 1999. I’m a member of the generation that takes photos of everything. The scraps on our finished plate. A sign we passed. Our dead grandmother’s hands clasped in ours, captioned “Miss you already, Nana.” (Yes, really.) We are the generation that agonizes over casual captions (that we spent 45 minutes composing) and candid pictures (that are carefully planned and meticulously staged). We track our friends by likes and comments on our posts while spending hours a day tapping through Instagram stories of what people we haven’t seen since high school are eating for lunch.
We joke about these idiosyncrasies — and intuit that they are unhealthy — but we do not understand our own true motives and intentions in over-using social media platforms.
By reducing us to a profile picture, 150-character bio, and a limited number of pictures or videos to be approved (or not) by an audience of followers, social media pressures its users to think and behave as an individual brand to be marketed. Many of us try to showcase who we are before we may actually know who we are, trying on “personalities” and “aesthetics” like they are new hairstyles or clothing items.
Instead of facing our fears that we may not be the kind of people we want to be, we get satisfaction that at least we appear that way. We want to seem like other people’s image of an impressive person in the cool cyber-ether, but we don’t want to face the risks and dangers of forging, shaping, drawing, and finishing that person in the hot, sooty blacksmithy of the real world.
During one of former President Bill Clinton‘s numerous self-inflicted disasters, a well-intentioned but clueless acolyte sent him a copy of David McCullough’s magisterial biography of former President Harry S. Truman. This completely missed the source of both Truman’s principled greatness and Clinton’s louche mediocrity. Harry Truman wasn’t pretending to be Harry Truman, and he wasn’t manifesting Harry Truman; he was Harry Truman. In order to live as Harry Truman, he had to first imagine himself as the original he was, not the pallid, poor man’s Kennedy that was Clinton’s loftiest ambition.
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Social media has so distorted our understanding of living that many of us are more comfortable with the fake than the real. If someone offered us two choices — either a mediocre vacation that we could post photos from or a spectacular vacation that we could never talk or post about — many of us would choose the former. This is because we have never really experienced the joy of an internal life. We cannot conceive of the value of having an experience alone — just ours to appreciate and treasure. In the supermarket of life, many of us consign ourselves to the baked and canned goods sections instead of the fresh produce and zesty spices.
Salman Rushdie once wrote: “Our lives tell us who we are.” But today, our social media presences only tell us which costume and persona of ours others respond to. It’s a guarantee of alienation, confusion, and inauthenticity.
Julie Hartman is a broadcast host for the Salem Media Group.
