In this post-modern cultural society we can’t seem to get away from this idea of everything happening all of the time everywhere. Paired with neoliberal market capitalism, culture has been liberated from the rulebook of modernism. We are now inundated with a free-for-all, anything goes cultural landscape.
One of the key symbols of post-modern culture is social media. There is already a lot of critique about social media mores from the addictive nature of the software, to the false freedom it provides us to give up our privacy in order to create an ideal “I.” In order to construct ourselves and make us into things, we can becoming addicting to displaying or taking in the ideal life, trying our best to portray what we want people to think we are, and to understand who it is we should become.
I feel these issues deeply as an occasional poster on Instagram. Every time I want to communicate a milestone, or a happy moment, that shows the ideal parts of me to friends, I feel the psychoanalyses of Freud through Lacan calling me out for chasing my desire to be fulfilled by the creation of this ideal “I” online. To post feels gross but also like it is somewhat necessary—it draws me in. It’s not an easy thing to discard a desire to post, nor to ignore the accounts I follow and log off, despite my strong personal feeling that unfettered social media damages our society in more ways than it helps. I feel a pull to display a lifestyle or way of being without thought or decision.
With this constant existential reflection on my own usage, and the regular witnessing of the social impact of Instagram and TikTok, I can’t help but wonder if social media has become the tool of post-modernism to organize our current cultural style. Not just style as in a distinctive appearance or design, but a much deeper style in the sense that it focuses our understanding of who we are.
The ideal “I” I try to reflect and the the ideal way of being I am fed as I scroll has become part of a cultural style in which I, sort of, understand how to be in the world. When I post, I feel as though I’m feeding a cultural style of how I live my life and what my background practices are into a cyberspace that is itself beaming back into my brain what my background practices should be in the first place. I’m taking in those ways of being passively as they are not made evident in a tyrannical way forcing me to comply, but instead are withdrawn and just display for me a unity of practice I start to comply with. It’s a loop of displaying ideal being while the system organizes my practices to understand how I should be for my lifestyle, or simply my next post.
Imagine trying to make sense of how to live without understanding a style of cultural practices. Within our cultures we learn “notions in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.”1 In pre-modern times we had gods to open up this world for us, to set these practices for us. It was the temple and the cathedral that enclosed our gods and set to work organizing our practices and creating a unity around them. We were delivered our way of being via an entity.
Around the time Nietzsche declared the death of God in the latter half of the 19th century, our refocus toward science, technology, art, and poetry as the gathering cultural elements crystalized from their beginnings in the late-17th/early-18th centuries. We became the first epoch that doesn’t understand our being as given to us from an entity. But we are not necessarily in control. The background practices, or culture, that has been organized for us withdraw from our perception yet we act in the ways it dictates to us. Through this we get a sense of what’s good and bad, avoided or embraced, what our possibilities are in order to make decisions about what we should be doing in our lives. These works in the modern West have evolved over time, but they have always worked to gather and organize our cultural practices.
But today, in our post-modern society, the rulebook has been thrown out. Since neoliberal capitalism heated up in the late-70s into the 80s, the cultural realm has been full of random collections of signs existing side by side only momentarily, ready to change at any moment into another random collection. These signs refer only to themselves and there is no other reality beyond them to which they could refer.2 Through this critique of the post-modern world it is revealed that we have recently lost the traditional works that open up a world and keep up an abiding force. Since then traditional media has likely played this role, but without a unifying source I'm not sure we have had the same level of being drawn toward something unifying enough to be a culture.3
But our need to understand how to be, how to live, how to focus our practices remains. Our burden of decision making has only been heavier in the post-modern world, our freedom only more exaggerated. Without these unifying principles withdrawn and helping us to make sense of anything at all, we have splintered into a thousand cultures and sub-cultures seeking a way of being. And we’re seeking it virtually through social media.
TikTok videos and Instagram Reels tell us to avoid a certain ingredient in processed foods, conjure up inner strengths to keep up the hustle, buy this workout supplement to become fit, order these looks to be the ideal specimens, decorate and live a lifestyle—all within seconds of one another, all at once. Of course advertising has tried to influence us throughout our post-modern world, but not with the same power, worldwide reach, and real-life humans that social media does. Traditional advertisements alone do not orient anyone toward any meaning or represent any reality outside themselves. In contrast, in the hyper-advertising of social media, the influence of personalities create the real-life ideal version of ourselves that can be achieved if only we gather our practices around the sub-cultures they create or reflect.
Social media is working, gathering the practices of the people (us) in the culture that live in its life, so we can preserve the truth that is revealed by the respective influencers and sub-cultural leaders. Its brokers organize our desires in such a way that our cultures are changed, creating a background understanding of human being that we do not perceive but instead simply manifest. The imagery is in our face but it is the influence of them that is withdrawn.
It is not the application of the servers or software that create the world, as this “material” of social media immediately withdraws. And it’s not the items that are being hocked by influencers and marketers that create our practices, these are simply equipment of the platform users. When consuming there is no real trace of the equipment used in social media to shape our culture, these are simply tools.
Instead the shaping elements are the entrepreneurialisation of the self represented by the influencer when we see ourselves as potential resources, the creation of an ethic and culture by the style of life that is pushed, and the shaping of our desire to become the symbol we see in the posts and videos in body and spirit. They influence our practices in such a way that they become the ultimate center for culture—whichever culture we desire the most.
Our ethics are centered no longer around the practices of the temple, and the people we see also being in the world under its shadow, but instead center around the prospective culture social media has brought to us to influence our desires. In the modern world perhaps it was science, technology, or art as God’s replacement, in the post-modern it is marketing departments and social media influencers, corporate PR budgets, hashtags, and “lifestyles.” Through social media, culture and being, language and aesthetic, violence and fitness, come to appear as what they are.
For anything to be intelligible as any thing, we look to social media now. It has become the guiding force that gives organization to the practices and structures of society—it gives people a unity in practice so that the people in a culture, or sub-culture, can make sense of what it is to do, and see that others are making sense of it too. There’s a unity to them, and we’re stuck in it.4
Without a truth guiding us we are free, but look at where we’ve arrived. In a state where Capital holds the keys to our desires and therefore, through social media, our cultures. Where marketing department PMCs set the PR agenda and we center our practices around it. This already has a devastating impact on our way of being and our ability to truly connect in the world. I feel it myself.
I believe that human being via the practices we are gathered around by social media can only lead to a nihilism and eventual dispare. That we will never reach the ideal “I” we are nudged to seek, and will never find real meaning in it. The practices will shift too radically and therefore mean nothing at all. Cultures will continue to splinter into a million more pieces and basic unity will be even more elusive. We will not be able to ground ourselves if we cannot shrug off this social media understanding of being.
I do not have the answer for myself or others who may feel this way too, beyond seeking something that can lead us to a flow state in real actual life. To cope with life out in the world. History has not lead us here to some pinnacle we’ve been waiting for, it’s not inevitable, we can leave it behind. The world looks more meaningful as we explore, as we pursue passions in the world, as we rebel against the unreasonable silence of the world in the face of meaninglessness. Let’s experience the freedom we have been given without an entity controlling our destiny. Let’s let a dinner gathering, or catchup with friends, create worlds for us. Perhaps these types of world-designing practices create our moods and thrive without the enforcement of the social media influencer gaze. I guess I’m not sure what the real work of art should be instead of social media, but if we lift our heads up and explore, maybe we’ll rediscover a new work creating a world for us, whatever or wherever in the real world that may be.
Martin Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art sets this piece’s philosophical foundation.
Ideas based on Frederic Jameson’s critique in Post-Modernism, The Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism
I’m not sure I’ve worked this out…
There’s more to be said here using Heidegger about the World as something that all things gain their scope and limits, and the Earth of which is present as a sheltering agent, and how these ideas are translated now through social media, but I don’t have the brain big enough to articulate it. In reality, I’m just working through my thoughts here.