Do your friends sometimes text you asking if you want to hang out? If so, you may be sitting on viral gold, as one lucky poster recently found out!
“My friend Adam has never texted me for a normal reason”, the tweet says, before providing us with four screenshotted examples of…extremely normal reasons for texting your friend. These range from “do you want to play bowling?” to a simple request for help with a Halloween costume. Astoundingly, this utterly banal tweet has gotten over half a million likes. A selection of responses include “I cant believe Im not friends with Adam or his parents”; “I need an adam”, and “Give your friend Adam my number”. Now, Adam seems like a great guy, and I don’t want to dunk on him or his friend Tyler here. But these texts seem perfectly normal, and the response it got made me feel nothing but sadness for those of us without an Adam in our lives. Personally my friends ask me to do things all the time – I just wish someone would have told me that I was sitting on a mountain of untapped potential for online clout, a few button presses away from doing absolute numbers with a tweet like “So I asked Cormac to invite me the next time he was going to the cinema.. he actually did it the absolute madman hahahaha!”
This “she’s crrrazzyyyyyyy”, random XD, “I-admit-it-my-life-is-incredibly-dull-and-boring” type of tweet is, to me, the lowest form of comedy around. Personally I prefer to engage in a much more distinguished form of posting, that of “discourse”. So, obviously, my first thought when I saw the inexplicable and maddening success of the above tweet was “what is my Take going to be?”. I quickly came to the (genuine) conclusion that the viral success of the My Friend Adam tweet reveals to us the true nature of the alienated human condition in the 21st century. Is simply asking your friend to hang out really such an alien, crazy concept? If so, then we have a serious problem. No, a snarky quote-tweet was never going to suffice here. I had to write an article.
This exact type of thing has taken over Twitter in recent years; surprise, distrust, bewilderment, or even outright disgust at the idea of being extroverted, of having friends, of enjoying oneself in the company of others is the order of the day. The tweet in question can be thought of as an even more boring and less cruel version of the “I love cancelling plans!” genre of tweet, where people revel in the small joy of standing their friends up at the last minute. Perhaps this tendency is an import from Tumblr, popularised by moody teens who never grew up. Another possibility is that we are collectively becoming more socially anxious and thus more prone to cancelling plans and staying at home, but is that really something to celebrate? Rather than focusing solely on openness and being “able to talk” about these anxieties, shouldn’t we also be interrogating their source? What is it about modern society that has us all so permanently anxious to the point of asociality?
Indeed, despite hearing regularly about a marked increase in loneliness, introversion seems to be lionised online. The onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the calls to social distance have only served to provide this attitude with an extra air of nobility, vindicating asocial people and providing them with further reason to feel superior to others. The below tweet is a particularly revealing case.
At first, this tweet seems completely reasonable, and at the end of the day who the hell am I to judge others for how they live their lives? But there is something desperately sad about the apparent prevalence of this attitude. Humans are fundamentally social creatures, and a lot of the time this talk of being an “introvert” is really just about being an individualist, intrinsically linked as it is with the world of self-help books and the seemingly interminable rise in “growth mindset”, girl-boss, “nobody-owes-you-anything” thinking. You only have to read the follow-up tweet to see what I mean:
Some people revel in their introversion, but the reality that the My Friend Adam tweet reveals to us is that, because of the social role played by social media, most people don’t realise just how lonely they really are. In a recent podcast, Benjamin Fong, Honours Faculty Fellow at Arizona State University and editor of Damage Magazine, noted that social media is “a remarkable salve for late capitalist alienation”2. It offers connectivity without connection. We can reach out to millions of people at once, giving us the impression of companionship without actually providing any. How else do you explain the apparent contradiction of thousands of people rushing to the internet to relate to each other’s loneliness? If social media disappeared overnight, would we immediately realise just how alienated we are?
We live in a truly lonely society. We’re largely alienated not just from the products of our labour, but from other people, and this has only worsened as more of us have started working from home. We are atomised, sitting in our overpriced pods, ordering food to the door that’s delivered mostly by overworked, underpaid immigrants while we eagerly consume whatever cultural output Netflix is feeding us this month. At the same time, we are told by technology CEOs that we are more connected and social than ever. Mark Zuckerberg loves to talk about the power of “connection”, and is eager to use the Metaverse to “connect” even more people. It is far from clear what that even means.
Sherry Turkle is a social scientist specialising in psychoanalysis and human-technology interaction. She talks about a collective “flight from conversation”3 in our move to digital spaces, which she says makes us more literally connected while at the same time killing real conversation. She recognises that this “real conversation” comes with a myriad of awkward moments and anxieties, but argues that it is all the more rewarding for it. This is partly because, despite lots of talk about the toxicity of digital interaction, there is also a clear safety in it. Matt Christman often observes how digital communication is “frictionless”: you can reply to who you want, when you want, and with time to think of what you are going to say next. Real conversation doesn’t work that way.
People nowadays often prefer to have difficult conversations over text than face-to-face. They choose to fight, argue, and apologise digitally, where the confrontation seems safer and less likely to result in real drama. Tensions are resolved more easily here, at least on a surface level. Those of us who have shared a house or apartment with others will understand this intimately – we all know those dreaded passive aggressive texts that you only receive just after you’ve left the flat: “Guys, someone has used my Disney mug without asking me, again.” Take a look at this example from a Vice article from 2018 entitled ‘We Analyzed Passive-Aggressive Roommate Group Chats’4:
A reminder that these people live with each other. It is telling that the texter here thinks that blocking their roommate’s number will stop the aggression, and let’s be real – it probably will. We are increasingly terrified of simply speaking to each other, completely unable to deal with the possibility of actual face-to-face conflict. Yet many of us – present company included – revel in conflict with strangers online. What does that tell us about the nature of online interaction?
Turkle claims that students in schools nowadays are not developing empathy at the same rate as children used to. A 2010 study by Sara H. Konrath found that markers for empathy among college students had declined by 40% between the 1970s and the 2000s, and that the majority of that decline occurred after 20005. This might come as a surprise to those on the Left who are optimistic that the youth will be our saviours; young people today are well versed in social-justice and “woke” language, but does this necessarily translate into more real-world empathy? Additionally, employers say new employees come to work with “unexpected phobias and anxieties”, the most notable of which is an aversion to speaking on the phone. This aversion is so widespread among young people, in fact, that a preference for a phone call over a direct message has become a key signifier of being a “boomer”.
According to Turkle, digital interaction satisfies a “desire for distraction, comfort, and efficiency”, which begs the question: distraction and comfort from what? This article is not intended to read like some tedious dirge about “the elites” from some high guy in 1999 who has been to the cinema to see The Matrix three times since it has come out, but to more specifically question the social role of digital technology in the 21st century. Turkle notes that social media allows us to always be heard and to never be bored, but how would we feel if that was taken away from us, if we didn’t feel like we were being heard, if we truly succumbed to the boredom of modern day living? I suspect the first thing to dawn on us would be the realisation that, in the grand scheme of things, we are all truly, deeply alone.
It has become much more common in recent years to talk about just how much we hate social media. Twitter is regularly called a “hellsite”, and people frequently take “social media breaks”. But the focus here is generally on the content: the toxic nature of Twitter discourse or the unattainable and unrealistic lifestyles and bodies plastered all over Instagram. It is likely, however, that the most insidious and dangerous effects of social media are the psychological and behavioural. Benjamin Fong, mentioned earlier, has an upcoming book that focuses on drugs and capitalism, and social media is one of the drugs analysed. The addiction here lies not in social media’s content, but in its feedback loop, the patterns of behaviour, the “quick fix”, the infinite scroll. None of these observations are new or groundbreaking – parents and teachers have long been concerned that digital technology was too compelling and that their kids were going to get addicted to it – but this behavioural point is one worth stressing. It is in these patterns of behaviour that Fong sees social media as a “salve” for alienation, and this is exactly why it is potentially so dangerous.
When it comes to information technology, we have long been fed two compelling lies. Firstly, we were told that information technology would be liberating, and we were presented with a vision of a world free from the oppressive oversight of corporate and state power. This, as has long been established, never materialised. Secondly, we are still given the impression that the world of technology is constantly innovating and will continue to do so. Science fiction movies envisioned a world of technology that would help us infinitely in our day-to-day lives. However, there has been little to no innovation or investment in infrastructure (Dublin being a prime example, a major European capital that will likely be without a solution to its housing and transport crises until at least the 2040s6). All technological innovation is now embodied almost exclusively – with the possible exception of innovations in medical science – in the smartphone, a device we didn’t even know or care about until this century. The phone is now the only frontier for improvements in our lives, but has little capacity for it. Content and engagement are not material things. Has social media improved or enriched our lives in any meaningful or material way at all?
Smartphones and social media are both quite good at satisfying superficial and immediate desires. What they are useless at is satisfying any collective desire for a different political future. When Christman refers to the “frictionlessness” of social media, he is not only referring to a lack of friction on a personal level. He is also talking about the inability of social media discourse to actually cause friction in the real world. This ties in with what David Swift has called the “Hobbyist Left”7. Social media allows us to post a tweet or share an Instagram post that provides us with the feeling of being an activist without ever actually having any material impact on the world. Social media here is not only masking our alienation from other people, but also our alienation from the democratic process. We are being denied the chance to shape the future of society, content with posting instead.
This may seem like a lot to read into the original tweet, in which someone asked their friend if they wanted to go bowling with them. But the fact that we are increasingly “bowling alone” (come on, you knew it was coming8) does have real and scary implications for the future of society. So, what should we do about it? Is it really as simple as logging off and joining a local organisation? The true tragedy of it all is that it may be too late. I doubt that there is much individual emancipation to be found from logging off or going off-grid. This would surely only serve to isolate and alienate you even more. In reality, we would somehow need everyone to log off at the same time, and maybe then we would have our red-pill moment. Maybe then we could change the world.
In the meantime, maybe we can settle for going bowling with our friends.
Special thanks for contributions and edits go to Fiona Lynch.
References
- Greig, J. (2020), ‘The pain of cinema closures isn’t just economic’, in The Guardian, 8th October 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/08/pain-cinema-closures-isn-t-just-economic-respite-social-function.
- Aufhebunga Bunga (2021), ‘Psychoanalysis Against Adaptation ft. Benjamin Fong’, on Aufhebunga Bunga episode 175, https://www.patreon.com/posts/175-against-ft-47285029?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copy_to_clipboard&utm_campaign=postshare.
- Turkle, S. (2015), Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin Press.
- Sharma, R. (2018), ‘We Analyzed Passive-Aggressive Roommate Group Chats’, in Vice, 13th June 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/pavvpk/we-analyzed-passive-aggressive-roommate-group-chats.
- Konrath, S. H., O’Brien, E. and H., Hsing, C. (2011), ‘Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis’, in Personality and Social Psychology Review 15(2), pp. 180-198.
- Kelly, O. (2021), ‘Revised Dublin transport plan sees costs double to €25bn and rail projects delayed’, in The Irish Times, 9th November 2021, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/revised-dublin-transport-plan-sees-costs-double-to-25bn-and-rail-projects-delayed-1.4723491.
- Swift, D. (2019), A Left for Itself: Left-wing Hobbyists and Performative Radicalism, Zero Books.
- Putnam, R. D. (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon & Schuster.
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