Lately, the opening scene of The Matrix has been invading
my thoughts whenever I gaze into the newsfeed of social media: A dazzling web
of slow and endless data streams uninterruptedly filling the glowing screen.
They come in all sizes, colors, shapes and genres, and because of their novelty
and appeal to our emotions and desires in some fashion or another, we find
ourselves gazing into them, shallowly more than deeply, and carrying them with
us wherever we go. We seem to find the appropriate gazing gadget for each
occasion: from computers to laptops to tablets and smartphones. We gaze and
gaze. And the more we gaze, the more we find ourselves entrapped in the
laboratory of authority—or better yet, in a virtual self-imposed Panopticon
Gaze that ushers us into a hypnotic mode of self-propagated, institutionalized
subjugation of freedom.
In his ‘Discipline and Punish’, the French philosopher
Michel Foucault (1926- 1984) tried to build on the British utilitarian
philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s (1748- 1832) conceptualization of a surveillance
mechanism which he called the Panopticon. In Bentham’s prison system the panopticon
functioned as a round-the-clock surveillance machine that enables a single
watchman, or an inspector, to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an
institution from a privileged central location within the radial configuration
of the tower. All the while the inmates are denied the privilege of knowing
with certainty when they were being watched. Once extended to the rest of
society, this lack of certainty, within the paradigm, of not knowing when and
where one is being watched, the panopticon is automatically transformed into a
system of self-surveillance and self-discipline.
Neither of the philosophers envisaged a day when the
subjects of the Panopticon system would become a coalition of willing
participants in a virtual prison en masse. Or better yet, a time when we would become
the source and the target of the Panopticon Gaze- which Michel Foucault defined
as “a multiple, automatic, continuous, hierarchical, and anonymous power
functioning in a network of relations from top to bottom, from bottom to top,
as well as laterally, to hold an enterprise together.” In other words, it is “an
idea of a silent, unknown overseer in the society such as the government that
subconsciously controlled all aspects of life.” Add to that the fact that we do
it at the expense of our mental health and social interaction. We inherently do
this either oblivious or dismissive of the opportunity cost, which, at times,
could be extremely high.
Fast-forward to the 21st century and marvel at the
self-imposed slavery that has become us. The digital age has set before us a
boundless, virtual ocean of unlimited possibilities, of which, reciprocal
panopticon gazing, social media's primary hook, is integral. This self-imposed
slavery is an addictive drug that comes with debilitating physical and mental
side effects. Possible side effects (may) include deteriorating eyesight, muskoskeletal
problems, premature crouching, notwithstanding impairing one's ability to
drive, stay focused and carry on a normal conversation. Based on psychological
studies, severe side effects may include narcissistic tendencies, anti-social
behavior and failed relationships. Other studies found that daily use of
Facebook can make people more prone to depression, anxiety and other
psychological disorders. Social media is, in its very essence, enmeshed in an
invitation to make oneself visible. Indeed, man, as Aristotle stated, “is by
nature a social animal" and the primary incentive to partake in the
discourse of social media is a social one, with visibility as its precondition.
The more whitewashed, photoshopped, hyperrealistic, self-censored and
idealized our projected image is, the more disfigured and violated this
representation of reality becomes. Within the panopticon, the matrix of social
media, (mis)representation and mental processes take precedence over
reality and the physical world.
The mesmerizing lure of social media follows us everywhere
and the constant beeps, vibrations and notifications keep our screens lit like
a Christmas tree. People often interrupt whatever they’re doing to answer to
the calling of the almighty, powerful revelation appearing on their smartphone
screens. There was a time when people used to excuse themselves and do it
discreetly- but no longer! It has now become an epidemic; everyone is expected
to understand the ‘need’ and ‘urge’ of the ‘infected’ receiver to attend to the
calling. We do it everywhere: in living rooms and bedrooms; in our offices and
conference rooms; on dinner tables and at social gatherings; while walking or
driving. We even do it in the middle of the night. We wake up, blindly tap our
bedside tables like zombies, with our fingers seeking the smartphones in the
darkness, check for notifications and then go back to sleep. And because our
connection to the virtual world has become the Pepto-Bismol solution for our
diarrhea and the fiber supplement for our constipation, we no longer indulge
our bathroom experience without a connected digital device in our hands. Many
people know what I am talking about and realize that the time has come to face
and admit it! A transmutation is happening to us through our addiction to
Online Social Networking. It’s too early to tell exactly what form this mutant
will take since it's still in its stage of incubation, but what we do know is
that it has relentlessly been trying to consume us, redefine us, shape and mold
us into something new that resembles Foucault's panoptical subjugation.
The prevailing truth, which we adamantly ignore in order
to fit into social media’s molded society, is that we have exchanged many of
the free pleasures of life and nature for an artificial high profile status in
the virtual world. We are no longer defined by how many friends, medals, or
degrees we have. Or by how many places we’ve visited or books we’ve read.
Rather, we are now judged or evaluated on the basis of our online visibility
and the number of virtual friends or followers we have. So privileged is our
virtual existence that a website and mobile app called Klout was
especially created to "rank its users according to online social influence
via the 'Klout Score.' In determining the user
score, Klout measures the size of a user's social media network and
correlates the content created to measure how other users interact with that
content." Our value, in essence, is now being algorithmically determined
on the basis of our virtual existence and how much time and energy we pour into
social media. The irony of Klout is the large cover picture on its
website, which depicts a woman carrying a guitar on her back and walking by the
seashore. The woman is obviously in good physical shape; she enjoys the
kinesthetic experience of playing a guitar and digging her heels into the
malleable, wet sand; she can hear the sound of the waves and the sea breeze;
she is evidently too busy enjoying the world with her senses to gaze at a screen
in an effort to attain a high Klout score!
Some of the new 'realities' that are being shoved down our
throats are inverting our priorities; instead of channeling our energies into
worthy causes or being creative and productive in the real world as we humans
have always done, we now compete for a virtual social status behind the screen and
wrestle to acquire more 'visibility.' And when we run out of innovative ideas
or creative posts that invoke the number of ‘re-tweets,’ ‘likes,’ 'shares’ or
‘comments’ that satisfy our appetites, we resolve to do what we do best—gaze
into that endless stream of newsfeeds: Recycled YouTube videos; funny
and lame cartoons shared ad nauseum; tragic events reminding us of our
helplessness and uselessness; wise, philosophical quotes that our shortened
attention span cannot fathom; photoshopped selfies strategically
designed to evoke envy; trivial, egotistical status updates that validate our
misanthropy; self representations that put the mythological Greek hunter
Narcissus to shame.
Digital Narcissism is killing us. That's the truth. We are
in love with the persona we have created of ourselves. That's why
we unfriend/unfollow people who differ from us or never 'like' or ‘comment’
on our posts. We tailor our newsfeed to echo, like the nymph, our interests and
beliefs, and filter any antithesis, creating a matrix of distorted images of
self and world in a digital pool, our contemporary specter of Narcissus. In
Greek mythology, Narcissus was a hunter who fell in love with his own
reflection in a spring pool, not realizing it was merely an image. Unable to
leave or touch the perceived beauty of his own reflection, legend has it that
he kept gazing at himself until he died and was transformed into a flower. What
was Narcissus’s opportunity cost while he gazed into his own reflection? The
legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish had a most poignant response
in his epic poem 'The Dice Player':
Narcissus wasn't as beautiful as he thought himself to be
But his makers entangled him in his own reflection
thus he prolonged his meditation into the
water-distilled air..
had he been able to see otherness,
He would have loved a maiden gazing at him
forgetting the deer running among the lilies and
daisies..
had he been a little more shrewd
He would have destroyed his mirror and seen himself as
otherness!
Are we the neo-Narcissus? Is social media our maker?
Should destroying the mirror be an option or should we perpetuate the ritual of
gazing into our own reflection? Mind you, we do this with the full
knowledge that we are being surveyed and ultimately, surveying ourselves; our
internalized Panopticon Gaze of ‘friends’ is staring right back at us through
the screen, assessing and judging every move we make. The panopticon of social
media has evolved in such way that, in order to free ourselves from constant
surveillance and self-surveillance, we need to shun the technology altogether.
However, shunning technology in the age of the information revolution (as
distinct from knowledge) is tantamount to sentencing ourselves to solitary
confinement and consequently committing social suicide and oblivion. There is
no point in trying to escape the future and the forces that will eventually
play a pivotal role in shaping it. It is utterly futile.
This is not about reversing our destiny, escaping the
inevitable or putting sticks in the wheels of the runaway train of online
social networking. On the contrary, we need to embrace it and strategically and
consciously utilize all the riches that it offers- and these are many.
But, here comes the crux of the matter, enriching our
knowledge and expanding our virtual network of friends through online
networking sites should not be in lieu of our social relationships in the real
world, or at the expense of our mental health. In addition, our power of
creativity and imagination, as well as the ability to enjoy and marvel at the
beauty of our surroundings—from people to animals, oceans to
mountains—should not suffer as a result. If social media distracts us from
enjoying a child's smile or noticing a flower or a weed emerging, against all
odds, through a crack in concrete, and maybe taking the time to write a poem
about it, (and social media does this to us) then our antennas should go up and
we need to start asking questions.
Those infected with the networking virus know this too
well. People around them often rant about the number of missed opportunities or
sabotaged relationships that plague their existence in the real, physical world—the
world that transcends representation—due to their privileging of and entrapment
in the virtual one. They also experience depression and social withdrawal.
Victims of this networking syndrome are all too familiar with these
debilitating symptoms. While some acknowledge and admit their addiction, others
refute it and continue to live in denial.
I've had my share of this disorderly disorder myself!
Although it never reached alarming levels (some friends might argue otherwise),
it still needed attention and some treatment with anti-digital-networking-dotes
before it spun out of control. And because these antidotes are not yet
available at the local pharmacy, I decided to take it upon myself to put my
house in order by winding a leash around that looming monster. The objective
was to consciously decide the ‘whens’ and ‘wheres’ of my rendezvous with this
indiscreet, vulgar creature by confining it to one laptop in an effort to stop
it from stalking me and creeping up during my private times with self, nature
or others. Consequently, I embarked on this mission recently by deleting all
social media apps from my iPhone (I ended up deleting more than half of the
apps in the process). The next day, I uninstalled these beeping apps from
my iPad, which I am using to write this article on the beach right
now with zero interruptions. Weeks have now passed, and, not surprisingly, I am
doing well without them. Very well, actually! I now take the time to listen to
conversations and look people in the eye instead of gaze into that hypnotic
screen. And when on my own, well, I do what I love most: marvel at the abundant
beauty that life has granted us, but which is not vulgar in the way it thrashes
its variety, gaudiness and novelty. The real world is far more discreet than
its virtual counterpart. It reminds us of our abilities and challenges us to
expand them, and of our limitations and prepares us to embrace them. It also teaches
us to see beauty in simplicity.
Harriet Tubman once said, "I freed
a thousand slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if only they knew
they were slaves." This is about the realization that we are being
imprisoned and that we have become complacent in our own imprisonment; we have
gone so far as to become our prisons' watchful wardens. We must reclaim our
time, shape our own destinies, shake off the chains of hi-tech slavery and
re-embrace long forgotten primitive freedoms. We must redefine our relationship
with online social networks rather than have them define, determine and
regulate our relationships with each other. We must return to the time when we
learned to walk erect, with our heads held high, envision possibilities in the
horizon, drive with our eyes on the road and listen with our ears tuned to the
speaker. We must feel the world with all our senses and heed the wisdom of
experience.
Back to the
Matrix—which is “a massive artificial intelligence system that has tapped into
people's minds and created the illusion of a real world, while using their
brains and bodies for energy, tossing them away like spent batteries when
they're through.” In a turning point of the film, Agent Smith, one of the
Matrix’s sentinel machines, had one of the Matrix’s human victims, Mr. Anderson,
pinned beneath him while a whistling train was barreling down on them. It is at
that moment that the Matrix tries to manipulate Mr. Anderson’s perception by
convincing him that the approaching whistle was ‘the sound of inevitability’. Our predicament is not unlike that of Mr.
Anderson and all other humans in the Matrix, where the perceived reality is an
illusion, and the real world is of those entrapped in tubes and whose energy is
drained from them. However, unlike the neo-narcissus who enjoys gazing into the
distorted image of him/herself, Mr. Anderson was a rebel who wasn’t going to
allow the Matrix to distort his vision, fix his attention in a hypnotic gaze
and determine his fate. So he chose to resist, for preserving his free will was
paramount. ‘My name is Neo’, was Mr. Anderson’s first proclamation, an act of
agency, defining him through resistance. Only once he was able to free his mind,
was Neo ready to free his body. Consequently, he smashed Agent Smith into the
ceiling—changing, in the process, his destiny and shattering the one-way glass
of the panopticon prison.
It is, at the end, our responsibility to ensure that technology and scientific breakthroughs do not become oppressive, controlling mechanisms that alienate us from the physical world. Contrary to what the Matrix would have us believe, we have the will and the power to tame technology and use it in a way that augments our understanding, respect and appreciation of the world and its magic. Ultimately, it is the choice of each individual whether to allow Agent Smith to determine his/her simulated identity, remain a Mr/Ms Anderson, an easily driven and manipulated digital gazer, or to fire up the Neo inside. It is also our decision to whether remain Neo-narcissists and allow the specter of Narcissus to continue to haunt us, or to shatter the mirror with which the gods have burdened us.
