Ludwig Feuerbach proposed that through religion (specifically, Christianity), people undergo a self-imposed alienation by ascribing characteristics of personal identity to an external power (God, for example). We might be a manifestation of such alienation in another form: Turning our personal identities into broadcast bytes and pieces through social media. We are, in a sense, nonlocalizing ourselves, removing our identities from within and placing them “out there” to be reinterpreted, re-invented, and generalized by anonymous sources that, in their turn, subject themselves to the same self-alienation.
In this current milieu each person in social media gets multiple other identities derived from comments and discussions, tweets and retweets, and vines. Someone shows up in the media, drives interest and speculation, acquires friends and enemies, and becomes an “averaged identity” on the basis of responses. Almost any personal representation, from photo to comment, becomes impersonal. It’s more than gossip. It’s manipulation by an all-encompassing cybergod that is a multiheaded hydra.
Social media can alienate people from themselves, changing the meaning of being in a single place with a single identity. Once in cyberplace, a personality belongs to the whims of a sometimes indifferent, a sometimes elevating, and a sometimes angry cybergod. Regardless of the whims, the person becomes self-alienated.
In this current milieu each person in social media gets multiple other identities derived from comments and discussions, tweets and retweets, and vines. Someone shows up in the media, drives interest and speculation, acquires friends and enemies, and becomes an “averaged identity” on the basis of responses. Almost any personal representation, from photo to comment, becomes impersonal. It’s more than gossip. It’s manipulation by an all-encompassing cybergod that is a multiheaded hydra.
Social media can alienate people from themselves, changing the meaning of being in a single place with a single identity. Once in cyberplace, a personality belongs to the whims of a sometimes indifferent, a sometimes elevating, and a sometimes angry cybergod. Regardless of the whims, the person becomes self-alienated.
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