Feed vs. Visual Record
Cheese and Crackers and Waiting for Godot
VLADIMIR: What do they say?
ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives.
VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.
Social media is not rice and beans with a side of chicken but cheese and crackers — it’s not a meal, but hey, it delays the experience of hunger, and to top it off, it’s deliriously good.
They’re a snack, like chips and guacamole, like biscotti and coffee, like double-tapping someone’s post on Instagram.
We can think (and almost rightly) of social media scrolling as the equivalent of snacking: it delays the ache for real human interaction but is not necessarily a means for it. It offers unlimited bites, unlimited windows into other people’s lives, some more limpid than others, some more enhanced and prettified, of course, for whenever we feel the urge to socialize and look at what everyone else is doing. And more recently for whenever we feel the urge to do anything at all. This is hard to compete with, we’re talking an unending panoply of visual stimuli and optical satisfaction, alas, a one of a kind experience of digital glee…
But that doesn’t sound quite right, does it?
Social media isn’t exactly top-notch entertainment, and we certainly don’t use them for actually communicating or texting only. Hell, a Netflix movie is lucky if we keep watching it after 10 minutes of not feeling it. So what exactly is the reason we’re so active on them? The same reason why Godot is being waited on — we swipe through novelty after novelty, waiting for that feeling of satisfaction we feel brewing somewhere in our bowels or retinas…but it just never really comes, does it?
To the dismay of all minutiae participants, they will also experience a Godotian wait — sort of. But in a world where everything is at the movement of our fingertips, where anything we want or wish to know is at the mercy of a Google search, isn’t everything that we don’t get immediately felt as a Godotian wait? We have fallen in love with the pleasure of getting what we want exactly when we want it, only because we’ve forgotten the incidental ecstasy of waiting for what we fancy. But don’t even count on us for the distinct pleasure of waiting, or entertainment, or connecting with friends, or even nostalgia.
We’re just a diary.
About That “Visual Archive” You Heard About
So, yes, we’re a kind of memoir, a kind of pictorial biography, and that’s the “personal” slice of the project. But we also want to build a collective memoir(we’re talking long long-term here) devoid of the intentionality and performance that beset regular social media platforms: not only as a testament to our unmediated lives but as a resource to future generations who, perhaps, may not have the luxury of a less than fully digital world. A visual document composed of hundreds of thousands of participants' everyday moments paying tribute to how we truly lived, and not as our movies, online profiles, and altered photos make us out to be or have lived.
Naturally, you wonder what’s the use? Or, more simply, why?
Sure, future generations run the risk of misinterpreting how we lived, how we really lived, but anyone who’s fairly alert can tell that our generation, too, already faces difficulties separating the wheat from the chaff — the real from the fake, the authentic from the enhanced, the actual from the appearance.
We all know that social media is one thing and reality another, and most of us don’t really care — I mean, what can we even do, really? Doesn’t seem like that big of a problem as far as we’re concerned. If you’re reading this, you probably got the best of both worlds, the world before and after these diverse technologies became an integral part of ourselves and the world. But keep in mind that this is no longer possible for anyone being born in an advanced technological society today. So, in the spirit of keeping things interesting, let’s complicate all this.
Baudrillard Has Requested To Follow You
The age-old metaphysical problem that began with Plato encounters a new foe. The very start of Western philosophy is predicated on the idea that what we perceive as real is little more than a dancing, almost laughing shadow: a copy of the real thing. Plato went so far as to ridicule poetry because, as he saw it, it describes a copy of a copy…but let’s not go that far.
At any rate, the problem today isn’t looking at a chair and going, is this chair real or a copy of the idea “chair” somewhere in the domain of forms? We’re past that, we don’t care. The problem has evolved, thanks to the remarkable influence of the internet, social media, and contemporary advertising techniques, to figuring out where exactly the line between reality as it is lived and reality as it is perceived digitally actually is. We could even go further and muse on whether what people appear to be is what they actually are regardless of the internet’s various playhouses — but let’s just…not?
As the notable psychologist and philosopher William James has said, “For the moment, what we attend to is reality”; but what happens when all we’re attending to is an idealized version of reality via our phones and laptop screens, all day everyday? We lose grip of not only what matters, but on reality itself.
Philosopher Jean Baudrillard entered the metaphysical arena with a crazy idea back in 1981, outlined in his notoriously convoluted book Simulacra and Simulation. What Baudrillard tries to do in this headache of a book is convince you that the representation of reality precedes reality. Does that make sense? Doubt it. Well, let’s put it this way: think about how we represent reality, and consider if this “representation” is a direct result of reality itself, a consequence of how we “take ‘it’ in” so to speak, or if our representations inform reality rather than the other way around?
In other words, we want the world to mean what we want it to mean so badly, that what happens is that the artifacts themselves end up being realer than the real thing. The movie ends up being more accurate than the reality, our Instagram accounts more authentic than ourselves, the video of the concert more interesting than the live performance.
Let’s take a short dive into Baudrillard’s mind and consider that girl from Ukraine who had plastic surgery to look like a bona fide Barbie Doll or that uncanny town named “Celebration” built by Disney, which is supposed to represent a “real” American town where people live “real” American lives, or all the Instagram photos that are so filtered and toyed with that they no longer pretend to be authentic (while simultaneously passing as “real”). What these have in common is that these are copies of things that never actually existed.
Some of us want to look like nobody else actually looks, live lives no one is really living, and attain a level of comfort and peace that no one really has — but we are made to think that these unattainable ideals are indeed attainable because we do see them; we see them on movies and shows and on Instagram posts and Youtube videos, while we’re sitting on a crowded bus on our way to work or while having microwaved pancakes at the dinner table very early in the morning.
The problem seems to be that this idealized vision of things, this “dream” we indulge in at any given moment, is almost impossible to separate from what we take for reality, and so reality and unreality merge in an almost total, indistinguishable blend.
The “real” has gone bankrupt. (Okay, maybe we’re exaggerating just a tiny bit.)
But still, that doesn’t take away from the urgency of the issue. And maybe our visual archive won’t do much in the grand scheme of things, though we hope that personally it does; collectively, on the other hand, perhaps it will pave the way for other projects of the same kind, perhaps many will join and make it a long-lasting document that will have future use — for ourselves and the generations that follow.