Saying no to the ‘say everything’ culture as Facebook turns 10

by Lakshmi Chaudhury

Back in 2007, when MySpace was king, blogs were considered revolutionary, and YouTube was the hot new kid on the block, I wrote a cover story for The Nation, titled, “ Mirror, Mirror on the Web .” Web 2.0’s greatest success, I argued (at great length), capitalizes on our need to feel significant, admired and, above all, seen. Contrary to the media hype at the time, this digital revolution was not about fostering community and collaboration or even ushering in a new form of democracy. It had instead ushered in the era of micro-celebrity, which offers endless opportunities to celebrate that most special person in your life, i.e., you.

The argument was not well received in some quarters. Emily Nussbaum in a New York magazine counter-cover story  – “Say Everything: The Future Belongs to the Uninhibited” –  accused me of being, well, old.

But in the past ten years, a new set of values has sneaked in to take its place, erecting another barrier between young and old. And as it did in the fifties, the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk…. “When it is more important to be seen than to be talented, it is hardly surprising that the less gifted among us are willing to fart our way into the spotlight,” sneers Lakshmi Chaudhry in the current issue of The Nation. “Without any meaningful standard by which to measure our worth, we turn to the public eye for affirmation.”

Clay Shirky, a 42-year-old professor of new media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who has studied these phenomena since 1993, has a theory about that response. “Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter.”

Extreme self-revelation was cool, new, and oh-so liberating. Anyone who didn’t get it was a cranky old grandma yelling, “Cover up your bra strap!” Ouch!

Today, on the 10th anniversary of Facebook, however, I feel mostly vindicated. I wasn’t old, as it turns out, just slightly wise beyond my years when I wrote back in 2007:

Fame is now reduced to its most basic ingredient: public attention. And the attention doesn’t have to be positive either, as in the case of the man in Belfast who bit the head off a mouse for a YouTube video. “In our own time merely being looked at carries all the necessary ennoblement,” [author Leo> Braudy wrote twenty years ago, words that ring truer than ever today.

The era of micro-celebrity has since turned spawned a culture of cringe-inducing, sordid self-revelation. From appalling reality shows on television to drunken rants on social media to and tumblrs dedicated to funeral photos , everyone constantly lets it all hang out. We can’t even experience the loss of a parent without live-tweeting the experience. Careers have been ruined, childhoods and marriages destroyed, privacy invaded and exploited, all in the name of “sharing”.

But that’s the really bad stuff, extreme examples which, to be fair, hardly represent the norm, and can, in fact, be misguiding.

The more insidious and long-term effects of constant sharing are now being felt by – oh the irony! – the younger generation that came of age in that first thrall of digital disinhibition. Writing in The Guardian , twenty-something Hannah Slapper marks the moment when “it suddenly dawned on me that sharing my life on this particular social media platform was an unquestioned and essential part of my life, just like breathing and eating… When I realised that, for me, Facebook was socially intravenous..”

What’s more, this culture of self-revelation did not usher in true disinhibition, as Nussbaum predicted, but led instead to a new, crippling kind of self-consciousness that comes from constantly performing in the public eye. The future of Web 2.0 belonged not to the inhibited but the carefully edited, as Slapper observes:

Facebook has created a new thing: lifestyleism. I’m guilty of it, as are all of you. I want people to think I’m a cool London writer, going out and being “in my 20s”. I don’t want people to know I sit on my bedroom floor on a Friday night and order two pizzas while watching Nothing To Declare and scrolling through Tinder. So I update my profile picture regularly, I choose a cover image that will make people laugh. I think carefully about my status updates and ensure they’ll garner a few likes, maybe even a few comments.

Or as anthropologist Razvan Nicolescu puts it , “Most individuals try to present themselves online the way they think society is expecting them to. It seems that social media works not towards change – of society, notions of individuality and connectedness, and so on – but rather as a conservative force that tends to strengthen the conventional social relations…” This inherent conservatism likely explains why millions of young people today are leaving Facebook in droves. Better the interactive intimacy of a SnapChat or WhatsApp than the stifling performative of a status update.

This isn’t to say that my 2007 self had it entirely right. I over-estimated the power of technology and underrated that of the individual user. Having finally found my way to Facebook and more recently Twitter, I find most members of my social media community disinclined to over-share, at least in the intimate sense of the word. Innumerable holiday photos, yes, unwonted confessions, not so much.  Social media does indeed bring out the worst attention seekers out of the woodwork, but thanks to the “unsubscribe” button, I no longer have to endure the torrent unleashed by the more forthcoming. Performers may remain glued to the virtual stage, but the audience is happily free to click ‘off’.

It remains, however, a matter of pride for my inner grandma that the vast majority of the important moments and events of my life are not recorded on any update or tweet. That includes everything from vacations to break-ups to what I had for dinner last night. I do not ‘say everything’, and everyone on my FB network is happier for it. As am I.