Social Media and the End of Solitude

William Deresiewicz in the Chronicle of Higher Eduction on The End of Solitude:

What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge---broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider---the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves---by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone.......we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. Urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated---we could live farther and farther apart---technologies of communication redressed---we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or at least, so we have imagined. The first of these technologies, the first simulacrum of proximity, was the telephone. "Reach out and touch someone." But through the 70s and 80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs, sprawling ever farther, became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart, mothers left the home to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were each trapped inside our own cocoon. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, has now become unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive---though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone.

I admire Deresiewicz's perceptiveness, and appreciate his warning, but am not as pessimistic. In this long essay on the loss of solitude, he spends only a paragraph explaining why he regrets the loss: "You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you, and the divine word, their pretensions notwithstanding, demurs at descending on the monarch and the priest....Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism, a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom." (While not religious myself, I think I have experienced something like what he describes, as when I touched a redwood last fall.)Deresiewicz is disturbed at young people sending 100 text messages a day. Perhaps I will feel the same if my sons do that. Yes, most of the online conversation is inane. But so is most of the offline conversation. So has it ever been. So shall it ever be. The elders have long bemoaned what the youth have come to, and somehow the species carries on. Through social media, I have become a small star in my professional circle. Sometimes that makes me feel ugly: even in modest doses, fame is, as Deresiewicz says, a hollow source of self-esteem. But I have also found a new channel for sharing what I learn and wonder in my moments of reflection, which my audience seems to appreciate. Once, roughly speaking, only Walter Cronkite could do that; now everyone can. Reflective writing and reading are acts of solitude---yet also of connection, democratized by the Internet. Even for Deresiewicz, the end of solitude, as it were, is connecting with others: "The seer returns with new tablets or new dances, his face bright with the old truth."(Hat tip to Rabbi Daniel Zemel.)