Social media flattening makes the self easier to confuse with someone else’s

Evidence

Zadie Smith saw all this coming more than a decade ago. Writing about the rise of Facebook, and by extension all the other social media platforms, she observed, “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.” But we aren’t transcending to something higher, just less ourselves. And a flattened, reduced version of ourselves is easier to confuse with a flattened, reduced version of someone else. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 129

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core methodological hinge of the whole book: the doubling confusion as analytic instrument. Directly relevant to the reader’s stated purpose of tracking how being confused with another woman becomes analytic method. — connects to: Social media makes others’ identities partly uncontrollable through third-party disclosure — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 637; Disconnection from social media can impair students’ sense of self-identity — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1424; Friendster marketed itself as social augmentation rather than anonymous escape — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 990 (+1 more)