(I)?dentity

I am sure there is no scarcity of digital awareness in regard to the perils of doomscrolling and social media — but I would like to accentuate our perception of undeniably one of the most complex and multifaceted problems we encounter in our modern lives further. I am not arguing that social media is intrinsically bad by character, but rather illuminate how much control is conquering the identities that give us that human quality to the extent that the word itself becomes devoid of meaning. Previously I would’ve brought up a Greek reference but now I have realised that I can use the same system of exposing the modern world with a simple parallel to something written centuries ago in a much broader way. Now I won’t get too rigorous or pious, but John Locke might be raising an insightful question of the digital age all the way back in 1689. Essentially, he argued that the mind could be thought of as a blank sheet of paper at birth and written by experiences — now I would like to make the very imperative distinction to avoid being strictly empiricist; I use tabula rasa, in this context, as a representation of what our modern identities are transitioning into in lieu of the traditional debatable stance of experience being the means to attain wisdom or reason. Think about it in the way that the sheet of paper is titled “identity” and not “knowledge”. This arouses the question — how are we writing our sheets of paper today? The answer is disappointingly simple — we aren’t. The blunt but nevertheless terrifying reality is that we are drowning inside a feed where we are mindlessly consuming content filled with creators who do not know us, videos that do not include us, and an algorithm that is invisible to us, watching everything we are. If our weekend is bed rotting with a sheet of metal and glass in our palm — we should consider asking ourself, who is writing our blank slate? Maybe that’s why being young feels so awfully disorientating — being pulled in every way, being misdirected, and creating a humongous chasm between who we are and who we think we are. Unfortunately, the “who we are” end of the ever-widening gap only seems to get lost in the fog because we never get to know who we are — we are fed who the algorithm thinks we are. In existentialism, the purpose of life is to find your purpose; but how must one do that? This is where I believe social media truly obscures our vision. In Plato’s Cave, the people tied their entire lives facing a wall with shadows of objects would never know the truth behind those objects because their perception of life is too slender; in social media, we are not experiencing our life, we are experiencing a narrow fragment of someone else’s, and therefore, it is impossible to discover the truth of our identities in that. How can we find purpose in a life we refuse to participate in, and thus how do we find ourselves? The slang insult “larper” used in social media to criticise inauthenticity in people is not because trying to be someone is bad, but rather being someone for the pursuit of the title or label it may give you is a repulsive trait. However, this is the core of our very discussion! People are fed content that makes them feel like a “nerd” or somebody “iconic” that it makes a very cogent case that they are whatever their feed shows them and thus it stretches the rift between identity and delusion even more. We are all born with voids inside us and instead of looking deep in that void to find something that fills it, we are pushing things the scroll is feeding inside it. The answer is not fighting the inevitable dominance of the digital world but choosing how much we sacrifice ourselves to it — how much we are willing to suffocate who we are to who we think we are because of a computer program. I guess it never really stopped with Narcissus, the genius of simplicity. I must truly commend the prophets disguised as scholars — perhaps they warned us.