When young children go to their bedrooms at night, they should go without their phones or tablets. Recall Erikson’s thought that children need “stillness” to find their identity. The social critic William Deresiewicz argues that these days, online, we rob ourselves of the conditions to think independently. Leadership, he says, “means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input.” You don’t have to move to a cabin in the woods to get these benefits, but even a short amount of solitude lets people hear their own thoughts. It opens up the space for self-reflection.
Self-Reflection
I Tweet, Therefore I Am
As long as I have my phone, I would never just sit alone and think. . . . When I have a quiet moment, I never just think. My phone is my safety mechanism from having to talk to new people or letting my mind wander. I know that this is very bad . . . but texting to pass the time is my way of life.
—VANESSA, A COLLEGE JUNIOR
One of the rewards of solitude is an increased capacity for self-reflection—the conversations we have with ourselves in the hope of greater insight about who we are and want to be. Professionally, what is our vocation? Personally, what gives us purpose and meaning? Can we forgive our transgressions and those of others? In self-reflection, we come to understand ourselves better and we nurture our capacity for relationship.
Different traditions—philosophical, religious, spiritual, and psychological—have made claims on these high-stakes conversations. In the West, since the early twentieth century, the psychoanalytic tradition made its own claim. At its core, psychoanalysis is a therapeutic technique, but it proposed itself as a sensibility for thinking about the self that went beyond the professional boundaries of psychoanalysts and their patients. The psychoanalytic movement became a psychoanalytic culture whose core assumptions were popularized in novels, films, and the press.
So, whether or not you had ever been in treatment with an analyst or read a word of Freud, a certain set of ideas became familiar to you as you thought about your past, your present, and your possibilities for change. This tradition of self-reflection stresses history, the meaning of language, and the power of the unconscious. It teaches that our lives are “peopled” by those who have mattered most to us. They live within us for better and worse. We learn to recognize their influence in our strengths and vulnerabilities. If your parents were aggressive, you may be on the defensive whether or not it is warranted. If your parents were withdrawn, you may feel orphaned even if surrounded by loved ones.
The psychoanalytic tradition makes us aware of our human tendency to see the world through the prism of what our most significant relationships have told us about ourselves. It teaches that self-reflection can help us make our way past this cacophony of internalized voices to a place that feels more authentically “ours.” In that place, we can see how we are shaped by our histories but achieve a certain distance from them.
Understanding our capacity for projection helps us see what is around us rather than use our present to work out unresolved conflicts from our past. So, the psychoanalytic tradition sees self-reflection as a path toward realism. If jealousy and danger threaten, you don’t paper it over. If love is offered, you can see it.
These rewards of self-reflection take time to achieve—and of course, we don’t give ourselves much time these days. And they take discipline. In every case, they depend on developing the capacity to pause and think through the knotty thought, the tangled relationship. If I am afraid, is there danger or inhibition? If I feel bold, am I well prepared or reckless? If I want to leave a relationship, have I been treated badly or am I afraid of commitment?
And Then: The Algorithmic Self
The psychoanalytic tradition asks us to cultivate both the capacity for solitude and the capacity for disciplined self-reflection. There are many things that discourage us. Sometimes it is just the hope for a simpler way to understand ourselves. It would be nice if troubles could be cured by the right pill or the right mantra or the right behavioral adjustment.
And now, there is the hope that self-reflection could perhaps be made more efficient by technological intervention. The list of candidate technologies is already long: a computer programmed to behave in the manner of a therapist; devices that help you track your physiology for patterns that will help you understand your psychology; programs that analyze the words in your diary and come up with a diagnosis of your mental state. These last are certified as the “real you” because they are based on what is measurable about your behavior, your “output.” They are served up as your quantified or algorithmic self.
Never underestimate the power of a new evocative object. The story of how we use technologies of self-report and quantified self-report to think about ourselves is just beginning. Used with intention, they may provoke reflection that brings us closer to ourselves. But they can’t do it alone. Apps can give you a number; only people can provide a narrative. Technology can expose mechanism; people have to find meaning.
It is striking that some of our most-used applications—such as Facebook—seem set up to inspire narration. After all, on Facebook, the basic protocol is to record and illustrate the events of one’s life. Of course, we’ve seen that the story is not so simple. Social media can also inhibit inner dialogue, shifting our focus from reflection to self-presentation.
From a Journal to a Newsfeed
Melissa’s home life is turbulent. She’s a high school senior and for years, her parents, threatening divorce, have turned every meal into a quarrel. In the past, Melissa found refuge in modern dance, photography, and, most of all, in her handwritten journal. She says that sometimes she rereads it just to see the changes in her penmanship, entry by entry. They offer clues to her state of mind.
I wrote in it every night. In a book. I like writing. And it’s funny to go back and see—you can tell if I’m angry. Sometimes, the letters look angry. That means I’m angry and I’m writing angry. And . . . then—if something was really bothering me—I can go back and read what I wrote down, how I felt, how I dealt with it.
These days, Melissa’s journaling is hasty; she usually skips it and turns instead to social media. I meet her just as Facebook is becoming the emotional center of her life. She has been rejected from the four colleges that were her “first choice” schools. She is leaving home to attend a small rural college in upstate New York. She says that her increased involvement with Facebook began when she found a Facebook page that perfectly suits her situation. It’s called “I GOT REJECTED FROM MY FIRST CHOICE SCHOOL.” There, Melissa corresponds with other people who share her disappointments about college. Among them are people who survived going to their “fourth choice school” and had successful careers afterward. Now, Melissa says, she spends almost all her free time on Facebook. And then she adds, softly, “I wish I wasn’t but I am.”
Why the conflict? Melissa needs social support. Her college plans disappoint her; her home life offers no comfort. Life on Facebook (with its tailor-made “I GOT REJECTED” page) is a place to tell her story. But Melissa says that even with all of these positive things, it’s “hard to find balance” when she goes on Facebook, because once she gets there, it’s “consuming” and very hard to put away. More disturbing, Melissa says that she now finds it “almost impossible to do the things I actually think I need to do—to sit by myself, write in my journal, talk to my brother, call my best friend.” Instead she feels “stuck” on Facebook, posting about food, reading profiles, and “stalking” people in her class. “I get lost in reading other people’s messages or profiles or talking to them. And it’s always stuff that is so pointless and it’s just a waste of time, and I hate wasting time, but I get lost in it. I’ll look at the clock and it’ll say 7:14, and I’ll look back and it’ll seem like a minute later and it’ll be 8:30 p.m.” Facebook wasn’t designed to stall self-reflection. But it often d
oes.
Melissa thinks that part of what keeps her stuck on Facebook is anxiety about being left out. In middle school, she felt excluded, and “that fear just creeps up. Yeah. So wanting to be in the know, always online, is a way of saying, ‘OK, if it’s happening, I want to be on top of it.’” So, she checks Facebook. “I always have to check it. . . . One of my fears is being left out or missing something.” Facebook assuages that fear.
Although Melissa uses Facebook as a substitute for her journal (she says, “It’s easier”), she is less honest on the digital page. She says that when she wrote in her journal, she felt as if she was writing for herself. When she switched to Facebook, she went into “performance” mode. She shares her thoughts, but she also thinks about how they will “play.” Melissa says that sometimes when she wrote in her journal, she had fantasies of other people finding or reading it someday, but her fantasies put that day far in the future—they really didn’t influence what she wrote. What she writes on Facebook, however, is designed to make her popular now.
So Melissa wrote a pleasing profile for Facebook, one that reflected the person she wanted to be, her aspirational self. She said things that would draw people toward her. And when she does her daily sharing, she is selective. For example, she doesn’t write about the arguments in her family. All of this had made it onto the pages of her journal, but now, on Facebook, Melissa only wants to publish good news.
I have found that when people use the aspirational self as an object for self-reflection, it can make them feel curiously envious—of themselves. It can be helpful, of course, to know your aspirations. That’s useful information for reflecting on who you want to become. But on Facebook, you can get busy performing that self, pretending it is who you already are.
Our performances of self on Facebook are very different from how people use game avatars for self-reflection. I have long studied how digital objects inform how we think about ourselves, including many years of work on the psychology of role-playing games. The avatars we create for online gaming (in most games we choose their bodies, their faces, and their personality traits) were not designed to facilitate self-reflection. And yet they can do just that. When people construct an avatar, they often give it qualities that allow them to express aspects of themselves they would like to explore. This means that a game world can become a place to experiment with identity. In his mid-thirties, a software engineer found himself frustrated by his difficulties being assertive. In his mind, assertive men came across as bullies while assertive women seemed like attractive “Katharine Hepburn types.” He decided to experiment with being more assertive by playing strong women in online games. His virtual practice served him well. After years online as a strong woman, he became comfortable as a more assertive man.
I’ve found that, surprisingly, using avatars to experiment with identity can be more straightforward than using a Facebook profile for this purpose. In the case of the avatar, you begin with clarity that you are “playing” a character that is someone other than you. That’s the game. On Facebook, you are, ostensibly, representing yourself and talking about your own life. That’s why people friend you. They want to know what you are doing and thinking.
In theory, you know the difference between yourself and your Facebook self. But lines blur and it can be hard to keep them straight. It’s like telling very small lies over time. You forget the truth because it is so close to the lies.
And these days, using the web for self-reflection poses the very real question of how truthful to be. For we know that it is not a private space, not a journal or a diary locked away. It is a new thing: a public space that we may nevertheless experience as the most private place in the world.
The Only Two People in the World
Self-reflection makes us vulnerable. That’s why its traditions so often include ways of protecting one’s privacy (we lock and hide our diaries) and confidentiality (as in relationships with a therapist or a clergyman). Social media encourage us to play by another set of rules. You share as you reflect; you reflect as you share. And the companies that provide the platforms for all of this get to see and keep it all. Privacy, loosely defined as freedom from being observed, is gone. At what cost?
In the mid-1990s, when the web was new, I spoke to Alan, a history graduate student, twenty-seven, about Netscape, one of the first web browsers. He said, “I search what interests me and I learn what interests me by what I search.” Alan did those early searches believing that they left no trace. He talked about the freedom to “look at things I would be embarrassed to take out of the library. Somebody might see the book.” This kind of exploration is compromised if we don’t feel in a private space. And now we know that online, we are not in a private space. Yet people still tell me they behave as Alan did, as though their activities were private.
So now consider David, forty-seven, a television producer who shares Alan’s sensibility. He, too, discovers his interests as he searches the web. But I meet David in 2013, two decades after I spoke with Alan. David is eager to elaborate on the “giant upside” of the time he spends online: “Putting on my earbuds and getting into my iPhone world is my Zen. That’s my retreat.” David says that cycling through his apps is his time for self-reflection: “You flip between your music, your news, your entertainment, your people. You control it. You own it. That’s my zone.” Here, the definition of self-reflection has narrowed: It means control over your connections. We’ve seen this before, solitude defined as time with a managed crowd.
Like Alan, David says that he likes to look back on his online history. David has email, Tweets, Facebook, and texts. He calls them his “tracks.” Like Alan, he knows himself through where he’s been. He says that for him, wandering the web “is like thinking aloud.” But unlike Alan, the way he uses the net to explore his interests is starting to make him anxious. He knows that when he “thinks aloud” online, other people are in a position to listen.
For David, being plugged in provides a sense of identity, but he knows that it also creates him as a data product to be bought and sold. And as an object for potential government surveillance. So as David follows his “tracks,” he is in a setting for self-reflection where if he does not self-censor, he feels he is being foolish, naive, or even transgressive. And yet this potential transgression has become such an everyday thing that he chooses to forget it might be transgression at all.
The gap between the reality of online life and how we experience it stalls our discussion of Internet privacy. Consider email. People “know” email is not private. And yet many will use email, at least sometimes, for intimate correspondence. Over decades, I have asked why. The answer is always the same: When you stare at a screen, you feel completely alone. That sense of being alone with the person to whom you are writing—as though you were the only two people in the world—often as not blocks out what you know to be true. Email can be seen; it will be stored; and then it can be seen again. The seeming ephemerality of what is on the screen masks the truth: What you write is indelible. More generally, the experience of the net undermines the reality of the net. So David continues to wander online, reflect on his tracks, and think of what he does as a kind of meditation. Until he thinks of it as a more public disclosure—and chides himself for doing something he can’t quite condone.
When people are in conflict, they don’t do what they advise. The wise begin to say such things as, “Only say online what you wouldn’t mind having posted on a company bulletin board.” But then, the wise go on Facebook and Instagram and don’t follow their own rules.
This conflict limits the possibilities of digital space as a place for self-reflection. Over time and with more knowledge of who sees it, you may want to say less on it. At the same time, every time you try a new app, you put more of yourself into it. And onto a system you no longer control. And in a new twist, your apps start to talk back to you, telling you who you are based on what you have told and shown them.
To celebrate its tenth birthday, Facebook used an algorithm to create a “highlights collage” that organized its members’ “biggest moments” since they joined Facebook. The algorithm that created the collage took account of which posts and photos had received the most “likes” and comments. In this instance, self-reflection by algorithm struck most people as harmless fun. The author of one article about the collage notes that according to Facebook, one of his past year’s “top moments” came when he posted: “Who wants to watch the football?”
But there was a more serious side to Facebook’s curation: It got some people thinking about what was really important to them. The highlights collage became a scaffolding for a narrative and they didn’t mind that Facebook had authored the first draft. Then they had a chance to revise it. One father of three printed out the “highlights reel” and talked about it with his family at breakfast. He tells me how happy he is to have that printout: “I would never have made a scrapbook that elegant! It was awesome!”
Shortly after the publication of that highlights collage, I received a letter from Sid, a man in his forties, who suffers from ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. He told me of his complicated reaction to being offered a “highlights reel” of 2013. That was the year of his diagnosis.
Reclaiming Conversation Page 9
