- Link:: https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://www.bookforum.com/print/2703/a-psychoanalytic-reading-of-social-media-and-the-death-drive-24171
- Tags:: Rrss, Sociology, Infoxication
- Date: 2020-09-21
Highlights
Nos da por escribir, porque hay algo en nosotros que quiere escribir. Es decir, no es solo una cuestiĂłn quĂmica cerebral y estamos presos de algoritmia.
We have, in the world of the social industry, become “scripturient—possessed by a violent desire to write, incessantly.” Our addiction to social media is, at its core, a compulsion to write.
Puede ser… un impulso autodestructivo. Esto me recuerda a lo que dice Nir Eyal en Indistractable, sobre que hay algo en nosotros que busca la distracción.
Seymour’s insistence that we’re not “trapped” at all (…) ^^If we are compelled to write, it is because of “something in us that is waiting to be addicted”^^ (…)Is it a longing for connection? A yearning for fame? If so, ^^posting is a poor strategy: you are as likely to lose friends as you are to make them”^^. What if we post self-sabotaging things because we want to sabotage ourselves? What if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead? What the Twittering Machine offers is not death, precisely, but oblivion—an escape from consciousness into numb atemporality, a trance-like “dead zone” of indistinguishably urgent stimuly.
Por otro lado, puede ser también que estábamos reprimidos in the past:
Our urge to write demostrates “how much was waiting to be expressed” under the previous regime, during which access to large audiences was sharply limited by powerful gatekeepers, and the vast majority of ordinary people were relegated to the letters-to the-editor page, if they were given a voice in print at all.
Pero lo cierto es que hemos pasado claramente de 1984 a Brave New World. Lo que quieren es que sigamos escribiendo. Incluso hay Adanismo:
Each new byte of information adds confusion and entropy, and takes us further away from meaning and consequence. The Twittering Machine “reduces information to meaningless stimuli which it jet-sprays at us”; it “habituates us to being the manipulable conduits of informational power.” In this, Seymour grimly concludes, there is “a fascist potential.”
The social industry doesn’t just eat our time with endless stimulus and algorithmic scrolling; it eats our time by creating and promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation.