The Mirrorball Self - by Nicholas Carr - New Cartographies

My new book, Superbloom, won’t be out for a few more weeks (January 28), but I’m pleased to share a preview here at New Cartographies . This excerpt comes from the seventh chapter, “The Dislocated I.” It opens the third and final section of the book, where I shift from examining how digital media has reshaped personal relations and social dynamics to looking at the fate of the self in a world where everything is mediated.

It happened quickly. Twenty-five years ago, at the century’s turn, we still talked about “going online” the way we talked about going to the movies or going out to eat. It was an experience outside ordinary experience, a special event bounded in time and, as wifi networks were scarce, space. You logged on, then you logged off. Now we’re never not online. The climate of social media, a clammy hothouse through which blows, as the writer Patricia Lockwood says, “the blizzard of everything,” is the general climate. The digital information flow, incessant and efflorescent, almost pornographic in its blurring of the intimate and the public, has invaded our consciousness and, even more so, subconsciousness.

Social media is, to use the psychological jargon, a priming mechanism of unprecedented intensity. It keeps us in a permanent state of anticipation, awaiting the next stimulus, craving the next glance at the screen. However banal the revelations that come through our apps, they’re always novel and they usually tell us something about ourselves. We know that, behind the screen, our social life continues to unfold around the clock, with or without our active participation. People are looking at us and talking to us or about us. We’re being sized up — envied, celebrated, shamed, shunned. We exist today in the liminal space between the material and the mediated, present when absent, absent when present.

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