The notion of curating one’s Facebook page brought up in one of the Facebook promotional videos particularly struck me. Not only are we (intentionally or unintentionally) curating what is shown on our newsfeed by a logarithm of what we click most, as discussed in Parier’s “filter bubbles” video, but we are curating ourselves as an explicit entity. In essence, we are curating an identity or an “individual” self. However, this is primarily a Western concept. As Lévi-Strauss puts it:

solidity of the self, the major preoccupation of the whole of Western philosophy, imbues itself with an experiential awareness of its own unreality

Thus, we have created the cult of the individual. Individuality and identity are a social construct and Facebook is now sacrosanct to this creation. Anthropologist, Daniel Miller’s ethnography on the internet states that Facebook is used to “help people to deliver on pledges that they have already made to themselves about themselves” (Miller 11). 

However, does this really “solidify the self”? Or is the solidity of self just an illusion, as Lévi-Strauss would say? It is an illusion such that it is an intangible social phenomenon. It induces “expansive realization” of “the self” such that “one can become what one really thinks one is” (Miller 10). I argue that it also builds and informs what one thinks one really is over time.

A great video that explicates this circumstance is called The Innovation of Loneliness. It talks about how the aphorism we live by now is “I share therefore I am.” Individuation in our current era is dominated by the notion of “self actualization” which has come to mean “wealth, career, self-image, and consumerism.” In this type of pursuit, Facebook sharing becomes the crucible where we are meant to create this perfect individual portrait to fit those values. We curate everything to look like we are a distinct “self” to other “selves.” We can literally “edit” ourselves.

The ontology of the individual identity versus the “other” is now deeply entrenched in the social consciousness. My question is, how does Facebook change the way we see or relate to others now that the idea of the self has become more palpable?

– Callie Hitchcock

Cited Works:

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Naked Man. London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1981. 625-695. Print.

Miller, Daniel. The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Oxford International Publishers Ltd., 2000. 10-11. Print.