Geran JonesThe windmills of the mind

Fulfilling potential The windmills of the mind Geran Jones warns that on social media what goes round comes round

It is clear that when passions dominate the mind, these can torment people and prevent them from living in harmony, as Spinoza observed. These past two years and more, the country seems to have been living in a parallel world, one in which reality appears to have been sidelined by quixotic behaviour. It is not only that the referendum has fissured the country and that the failure of political leadership has led to a constitutional crisis. What is also deeply worrying is the cancer of the irrational, the outrageous and the counter-factual which has come to exercise a pernicious influence on vectors of information and on people’s way of thinking.

In search of an explanation to establish why centuries of rational discussion and British pragmatism have been summarily jettisoned, commentators point to the effects of globalisation. The economic benefits of a shrinking world are broadly welcomed, but the social and cultural changes have given a rise to identity discourse. These processes have farreaching effects on identity formation on the individual level, as well as to the new forms that liberal ideas on individualism have acquired in the modern age.

This state of affairs has, in part, been promoted through two contradictory features of social media platforms: the centrifugal effect of enabling individual comment to reach a global audience via internet is in tension with the centripetal effect of the uniformisation of messaging through channelled ‘likes’, re-tweeting and forwarding, underpinned by commercial considerations. We live in a world of excess information which leaves us feeling overwhelmed. The consequence of round the clock news feeds and 24-hour messaging is boredom - or a numbness - for reality, and an acceptance of, and preference for, emotional rhetoric. This, in turn, has led to a sudden growth of interest in fake news and conspiracy theories, re-tweeted far more often than real news. Walter Benjamin was concerned that as information spread ever more quickly and further, the deeper became the perplexity of living. There is not simply an indifference to truth or facts. Honesty and Truth have been

banished. Eliot makes a similar point: Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

For many younger users of Instagram, Snapchat etc, the view of society is a horizontal one. Hierarchy is not necessarily recognised at all. Self-esteem is refracted through social media interchange, recognition through volume of messaging, numbers of ‘friends’ etc. Well-being and confidence depend on the comments and approbation of electronic peers. This dependency on unseen ‘others’ is fuelling a crisis of identity. Many might see themselves in Alice’s interchange with the hookah-smoking caterpillar:

‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I — I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’

Identity has traditionally been bound up with culture, common history, tribal groups and religious belief. It is what one feels in common with one’s community and heritage and also what differentiates one from ‘others’. It refers also to social categories and to the sources of an individual’s self-respect or dignity. In the digital age, identity expression, exploration and experimentation are being facilitated and developed online.

Online users may have several ‘identities’. One’s inner self is not simply examined from within; it is projected into the virtual world, and in being so, becomes a simulation of one’s real self. New and changed characteristics become the order of the day as teenagers seek to develop a persona on line that seeks recognition and a sense of belonging in relation to a group. It presents the opportunity to be an author, a creator of fictional characters, though these images are of oneself, part wish fulfilment, part sincerity. But it is not just an outlet to overcome teenager timidity. Participation in messaging promotes dependency on these various platforms and becomes forced. What was once private has now become public. Moreover, individuality may be in conflict with pressures to conform to the groupthink of the forum.

Making one’s personal life and thoughts accessible on screen is an inherently risky business. Reactions to posts and texts are not always positive; bullying, insults and harassment are also the hallmarks of online interaction, particularly for those who do not share the values or social codes of groups in work, school or politics. Such open manifestations of disapproval and insult online are, however, endured privately, with potentially catastrophic effects on mental health and physical wellbeing.

Users express themselves freely in virtual environments in the expectation that online activity will provide a form of happiness, while their reflections move away from their realities. Identity has become bound up with image. Where young people compare the images and lives of others online with themselves, it is easy for them to get the impression that they do not measure up to someone else’s photoshopped beauty, coolness or vigour. Critical engagement melts away with the immediacy of the message, its clamouring for a response and the solitude of on-line screen activity.

The obsession with social media risks producing young adults who confuse participation in an online community with having a social life in the real world. Today, a number do not react to the language and codes of the real world and demonstrate an inability to catch nuance, a blindness to body language, an inability to question peddled nostrums. Let us hope that we can continue to educate robust, well-rounded individuals, who can think for themselves and decide not to tilt at windmills. Geran Jones teaches at Westminster School