socrates and social media: the benefits of an unexamined life
Saturday night sees housemates communicating virtually through their latest favourite app, ‘Draw Something’. It involves drawing a misshapen picture on your smart phone before sending it into cyberspace for a person who is similarly engaged to decipher. Is that portly figure Bert Newton’s head or an eggplant? How do you represent ‘navy’ to an absent stranger at the other end of a digital line? Deep questions for a Saturday night in on the couch sporting matching bathrobes. A friend pops over to join the handheld fun—onanistic pun unintended—as electronic beeps syncopate with the tongue clicking of geckos mating on the roof. So much for inner city living.
After living in the outer of Brisbane for twenty years at the family home (technically not even Brisbane but a neighbouring shire), the prospect of moving to the sacred inner circle meant a lifeline out of Saturday nights spent on the couch due to non-existent public transport and $70 cab fares. And yet, come the end of the week, we inevitably find ourselves exhausted, content to drink cheap wine and watch Ed Westwick aka Chuck Bass in the cinematic aberration that is Chalet Girl. At times like these, social media can be a source of comfort or extreme guilt.
There’s little worse than logging onto Facebook at a particularly low moment only to find your newsfeed a rolling exhibition of parties attended, new clothes bought, successful job applications, besotted couples and itinerant friends. Add to that instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and a host of smartphone apps and it’s hard not to feel the pressure of maintaining an online presence.
In a society that glorifies openness and accessibility to all formerly private aspects of life, connectedness is seen as vital to survival. With everyone’s private lives blasted across the digital playing field twenty-four seven, from irritating pictures of what they’re eating for lunch (you used basil…how gourmet!) to desperate pleas for help on insignificant life decisions, the whole venture is often little more than an exhibition of everyday banality. Due to the current ‘photography’ craze (I use the term loosely so as to not offend those real photographers who can make magic happen using something other than a vintage camera), not only are the lives of those in front of the lens increasingly accessible, but they cause the more visually recluse of us to re-examine our formerly acceptable quotidian activities in light of the apparent highlife of our online acquaintances.
It’s easy to forget that our digital avatars are mere constructions and the relationships we form between them little more than role-playing of the Dungeons and Dragons variety. Our online selves battle for the greatest number of followers, the pithiest tweet and a comment-worthy profile picture. While the Socratic maxim of ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ holds true when applied inwardly, the exhibitionism of this digital age reveals its limitations when we take self-scrutiny public, exploring our identity through fragmented electronic persons.
So here’s a tip for those suffering from social media guilt. Turn off the computer, put down the phone and enjoy the novelty of an unexamined life.
