The Instagram Panopticon, at Quillette, discusses the way in which social media has encouraged people to carefully curate their self-presentations and to judge the self-presentations of others.
I think it is certainly true that new kinds of media can affect how people think, feel, and interact…and this effect is nothing new. Joseph Roth, who lived in Berlin in the 1920s, wrote about the impact of radio:
There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.
He didn’t like photography very much, either:
There are no more secrets in the world. The whispered confessions of a despondent sinner are available to all the curious ears of a community, which thanks to the wireless telephone has become a pack…No one listened any longer to the song of the nightingale and the chirp of conscience. No one followed the voice of reason and each allowed himself to be drowned out by the cry of instinct.
But the focus on self-presentation and on evaluating the presentations of other goes back much further. Consider, for example Russia’s ‘paper Facebook’ of the 19th century. No computers and no telephones, but, among aristocrats and the well-off, visiting cards were very important…and:
The cards, decorated with vignettes and lettering, were usually piled somewhere in the entrance hall of a rich house – either on a coffee table or tucked behind the mirror; so when a guest was coming, while he waited for the servants to tell the host he’s got a visitor, the guest could assess the popularity and social ties of his host by looking at the cards.
The fashion mongers of the era flaunted each other with a set of business cards from famous and popular people, just as some people now flaunt how many Facebook stars they are friends with!
There were even bot-equivalents to increase one’s count of Likes:
Some people even paid the doormen in rich people’s houses for visiting cards of famous persons – princes, counts, rich businessmen – to tuck these cards behind their mirrors and make their guests believe they are sometimes visited by such ‘posh’ persons.
Going back even further, in one of Fielding’s novels a woman takes great pleasure in going through the visiting cards of people who called on her. Again, similar to like-collecting on Instagram or Facebook, probably exactly the same dopamine hit.
So yes, changes in media do influence human perception and behavior…but we must be careful not to ascribe things to new media which are really human constants.
The very elaborate ritual and etiquette of paying and receiving social calls was followed on both sides of the Atlantic, far beyond Russia. I hadn’t heard of the public display of calling cards before so that might have been peculiar to Russia.
The essence was exactly who could call and expect to be received and who risked giving offense by presumption. This may have been especially acute in Russia, where, seemingly, every third person in polite society was a prince or princess. Everywhere, who was “at home” to whom, who’s card was accepted, who’s was, gasp, returned, was the currency of gossip. As far as displaying a card procured by bribing the help, I expect there would be a very real probability of an icy and very public request for the return of property mistakenly in the climber’s possession. The 400 took the matter of social precedence very seriously indeed and many would have relished the opportunity to put a parvenu in their proper place.
Beyond the difference that throwing a like or follow at the wrong person could result in a request to name your seconds back then, totally like Facebook.
The newest contretemps in social mediastan is that Twitter is preventing anyone without an account from seeing anything. Musk claims this is a temporary measure to fix the problem of various organizations scrapping content which he may even believe. I doubt it will make much difference to the scrapers but he just cut away a big part of Tucker’s audience. Tucker may start to look into hedging his bets if he hasn’t already. This brings to fore the problem of these “platforms”. They rarely care enough about any one content creator to answer an email but collectively, those creators have gifted them with billions of dollars and they need that steady stream if they want to survive.
As the saga of Musk and Twitter goes on, I’m at a loss to understand how he could have committed 42 billion without apparently considering all the easily foreseeable problems. Everything from trying to reconcile an American sensibility of free expression with having to do business in the very and increasingly non-free rest of the world to a platform that was profiting from millions of bots at the expense of advertisers and what eliminating those bots would do to the bottom line. Note that the excrement is heading toward the fan at Google as we speak.
Unverified Twitter accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts per day.
Verified accounts can read up to 6000.
For new unverified accounts it is 300/day.
Do these limits really seem unreasonable to *human* users?
To a datavore, 300/day would be one meager saltine. To the Secret Squirrels, who want to declare weather as Burn-Before-Reading-Top-Secret, even one would be too many.
So you figure out how to open 10,000 accounts, or 100,000 or 1,000,000. I wish them luck but to be attractive to someone like Carlson, they have to accommodate all the people like me that just aren’t going to bother with an account. Not that I’ve spent more than a total of ten minutes listening to him, but with numbers in the hundreds of millions, he probably won’t miss me. He will miss everyone that doesn’t have a Twitter account and all the people like me that look in when there seems to be something special to see. I’m sure his die hard fans are safe. They can’t be a mass platform and a walled garden at the same time.
If Carlson (or anybody) is running video programs that are basically ad-supported, the advertisers are going to want to know how many people are watching…doesn’t have to be precise, but an estimate with some connection to reality…and, very preferably, something about the demographics of those viewers.
It’s an interesting question how you do this without requiring accounts.
In the cable-tv world, of course, you sign up for *one* account and have a choice of a lot of shows…other ones available for additional charge.
Remember the old tag line; “You can’t handle the truth.”? What they want is a “number” that “proves” to the share holders and management that they are spending the advertising budget “effectively”. They’re in a bind, the Super Bowl is only once a year, the rest of the time they have to parcel out their money in a million different places. The places that will deliver more than a couple of million eyeballs at any time are few and far between. That’s why someone at Anheuser-Busch was even aware of a whack like Mulvaney. They just can’t spend tens of millions on a big buy of the “Thursday Lineup” anymore.
The present brouhaha at Google about YouTube ads that are “skippable” is part of this. Has anyone ever not skipped one. Maybe one in a thousand or it played when they weren’t paying attention or away from their computer. I had started to notice ads that were designed to only last the five seconds, then I installed a Firefox extension that does something to hide them, all of them. I’ve been waiting a couple of months for YouTube to wise up and for it to stop working, so far still not seeing ads. I’m convinced that it is fooling YouTube into thinking I’m seeing those ads, YouTube is happy to be fooled. We’ll see but if anyone really believed that any significant number of people were really watching their ads all the way through because they were so great, I have a slightly used bridge in New York for sale cheap.
With a VPN, I can open a dozen browser windows that seem to be in a dozen different countries. I hope anybody that believes the demos is in the market for a bridge too. The whole Internet advertising scam is based on a willful suspension of disbelief. I suppose Google can fall back on click farms, Amazon too.
The whole advertising enterprise is only about 300 years old, starting feom the first newspapers. It may be reduced to hiring people to walk around with sandwich boards. While I dislike most ads at least as much as the next guy, I see where this might be a problem.
Hi David,
Author of the Quillette piece here. Being younger, I found your examples of radio and the Russian ‘paper Facebook’ quite interesting. I agree that self-representation and self-curation via media is nothing new. It seems people have always wanted to find ways to increase their interestingness and gain attention and status in the eye of the public.
I also think that with the rapid acceleration of technology, Instagram provides a much more intensely efficient version of self-presentation on a scale which the likes of we have never seen before in history. While the impulse to create a representation of self is the same as it ever was (human nature has not changed), the self is curated in more depth than before with radio and calling cards, as on Instagram much more content about a person can be provided in a much quicker way. Judgement is similarly more efficient because more people can be judged instantaneously via scrolling rather than having to visit each individual’s house to see their cards, for instance. It is more intense because the increased efficiency means a greater magnitude of judgement can be felt and expressed.
Hi Ed, good to see you here.
“the self is curated in more depth than before with radio and calling cards, as on Instagram much more content about a person can be provided in a much quicker way.” Perhaps social media is kind of like residency in a royal Court, where everyone is endlessly watching and evaluating everyone else.
Familarity breeds contempt.