Fake authenticity
So wrote Blaise Pascal in Thoughts in the mid-1600s. The words are now, of course, difficult to read without thinking of the situation that has been created by social media.
Rarely has it been possible for so many of us, to this degree, to fine-tune the public image of ourselves. Twitter and Facebook offer opportunities to reach our fellow human beings into their lives. Suddenly, we can share in the Aftonbladet chronicler’s immediate emotional reactions: how her tears ran down her cheeks when it became clear that the Sweden Democrats had got into the Swedish Riksdag, or The Express writer’s tears of joy when AIK made it to the semifinals in ice hockey’s top division. Not to mention the possibilities of Twitter feeds in following the North African revolutions, which were even said to have been organised through social media.
Therefore, one wonders to what extent that Pascal quote is relevant to social media. Do not Facebook and Twitter, therefore, offer an opportunity to take part in social and political reality and in the lives of our fellow human beings, rather than, as Pascal says, neglecting real life?
However, I believe that there is reason to take a cautiously skeptical attitude towards these ideas about the positive impact of the Internet and social media. As Søren Ulrik Thomsen and Frederik Stjernfeldt point out in their thoughtful book, Critique of the Negative Edification (2006), there has been in Western culture throughout the 1900s, a quest for higher and higher degree of authenticity. We find it everywhere: in high culture, but also in popular culture, and in religious development during the century.
Efforts to refine and strip away elements of the Christian liturgy have characterised the history of Christianity in recent centuries. Within the Free Church Movement during the 1900s, a further step towards an individual’s personal encounter with God. Revivalist meetings meant a relief from the state church’s in many ways rigid order of service; allowing the God of speaking in tongues to take over one’s body; getting everyone to come up on stage and rock with the music and, in the most immediate way possible, experience Jesus’ presence.
This break away from a rigid regulatory environment is leading us closer to an authentic, and thus more truthful, approach to life. That’s why John Lennon has been perceived as superior to Paul McCartney, who in turn has been regarded as more refined than Burt Bacharach. Each of them has taken a step beyond the other in a direction away from a formalised musical creation.
The Western world’s strong desire for authenticity and veracity can, however, say two things. First, it meets a need. In such a strongly duty-oriented and work-oriented culture like that of northern Europe, there is a need for breathing space and free zones. One cannot ignore the fact that, as many 50 years ago, it was more appealing to sit on cushions in colourful clothes and smoke pot than to climb onto the treadmill where they saw their parents’ strenuous persistance.
The second observation is that one should be careful not to buy too easily into the notion that a condition that encourages strong, personal emotional expression also promotes truth and sincerity. Do we come any closer to a person if we read the personal blogs or Twitter feeds than when we read a skilfully constructed novel of, say, Marcel Proust? Is the person speaking in tongues necessarily reflecting a more authentic and powerful religious experience than those powerfully singing hymns in an ordinary church service in the Swedish state church?
No. The truth is, of course, that speaking in tongues, blogging and twittering are at risk of being done in a no less formalised and molded way than a state-church liturgy or Marcel Proust’s writing. The advantage of the latter is that they are more honest in that they never claim to be anything other than strictly formalised.
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To get a picture of the man Proust, we know that we must look behind the words, beyond the plot. All the while the emotionally candid blogger’s honesty is often driven by a never-formulated desire to market themselves. My point is that the latter process is usually no different from Proust’s attitude but that, in both cases, they are engaged in the concealment of those sides of themselves they do not want exposed to the public.
These conditions mean that social media is gefundenes fressen for the kind of rulers who are interested in manipulating the truth. The marketed person who takes form in the present, and who is addressed in this issue of Axess, has his dark side in the manipulated man. As shown by Evgeny Morozov’s new book The Net Delusion (2011), the Internet’s development has in many ways come to mean a threat to democratic forces. This, through the dumbed-down culture as promoted by the Internet, but also through the web and social media as their supposedly honest, authentic and true character emerges as an extremely effective propaganda tool for anti-democratic regimes.