Atomization and Identity

FEBRUARY 6, 2020

Social media, in its earliest incarnations, encouraged coherence. Building a profile meant collapsing the myriad facets of one's identity into a single page, interpretable to both advertisers and one's peers. Instead of assuming different identities in different contexts, users were encouraged to present themselves whole. "Whenever you posted a message or a photograph or a video," Nicholas Carr writes, "it could be seen by your friends, your parents, your coworkers, your bosses, and your teachers, not to mention the amorphous mass known as the general public." The clichéd admonition to "be yourself" suddenly posed pressing questions. Which self? For whom? Carr quotes from a 2010 interview with a decidedly unsympathetic Mark Zuckerberg:

“You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

Implicit here is the idea that some unitary true self lurks behind our various social self-presentations. As the various contexts of social interaction collapse online, the theory goes, this true self will emerge. But, as the psychologist Roy Baumeister argues, "the idea of a true self different from one's actual actions, roles, and experiences is probably indefensible." Indeed, the very concept of a true self may emerge, according to Baumeister, from a desire to distance oneself from one's undesirable actions. Thus, the harder one tries to shore up an authentic, true self online, the more homogenized and inauthentic one's performance becomes. Without a definite audience to perform for, we perform for the algorithm. Salience trumps substance.

In this way, context collapse gives way to what Carr calls "content collapse...the tendency of social media to blur traditional distinctions among once distinct types of information — distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance." Because information of all kinds -- from the latest terror attack to the latest meal eaten by an influencer -- is delivered in a single stream, we lose our ability to distinguish the tragic from the trivial. Media then conforms to our stunted sensibilities, blurring news and opinion, insight and influence, sacred and profane. Culture soon follows. The writer and computer scientist David Chapman calls this new order "the atomized mode." He explains:

"In atomized culture, intensity—shock, novelty, extremes—substitutes for structure. There are no systematic principles for comparing value, so immediate emotional appeal trumps formal qualities... [T]he problem is that without structures and boundaries, shards of meaning do not relate to each other, so it’s impossible to compare them. There is no standard of value, so everything seems equally trivial—or equally earth-shaking, or equally threatening. Our lives are so full of so many tiny tasty things, and so many crises and outrages, that it may all fail to add up to much. The loss of coherence, of “therefore,” gives a misimpression of nihilism, of meaninglessness. In the atomized mode, though, there’s overwhelming quantities of meaning. We suffer from FOMO, browser tab explosions, and Facebook trance. Projects, creativity, and fundamental values suffer when they are challenged by cacophonous internet alerts a million times a day. Meanings no longer fit together to point anywhere."

We depend on coherent patterns of culture to build coherent selves. Ironically, the environment that social media created prevents the development of the unitary identities that were its initial ideal. But individuals are coping. For one thing, users have begun limiting their more personal expressions to more intimate media (like Snapchat) or sub-communities (like Facebook groups). Carr calls this trend "context restoration," an effort to restore coherent culture. Facebook, which is dependent on personal expressions for tailored advertisement, is planning to invest in the functionality of groups to meet this demand.

But a younger and more online generation has also been learning to accommodate their fragmented identities. The writer and designer Aaron Lewis documents how Twitter "alts" (alternate, often anonymous accounts) are being used to workshop interests and ideas that aren't yet suitable for one's primary audience -- or primary identity. These users are embracing their disparate interests, roles, and experiences, while still acknowledging a hierarchy of importance among them. They are learning, in Chapman's terms, to "surf [their] own incoherence." If the true self was always illusory, perhaps this isn't so bad.