This reminds me a lot of when I was trying to understand state-dependent memory.
We can intuit it quite easily in regards to being intoxicated, but when you look really closely, you'll see that the boundaries between different "states" for state-dependent memory are considerably more numerous than we might realize.
Like walking through a doorway, or getting up from sitting/lying down after doing so for a long time. There's lots of location-based ways to make our short-term memory do a soft reset, and I feel like maybe that's an important factor in these different selves you're talking about!
So when you talk about slipping into our "algorithmic selves", I wonder what state-dependent properties of our minds are changing?
great article as always but definitely freaks me out a little bit. I don’t like the idea of people’s perception of world being altered by corporations running social media without people realizing it’s happening to them. I’m seeing more pushback against social media in general that I’m happy about, seeing people recognizing that.
Part of a ritual can be interpreted as someone(s) giving up a piece of their soul for something greater than themselves, and an acknowledgment that something happened and it was important. The time we spend online is real time, the conversations we have over social media are real conversations even if they’re through a screen. Rituals are supposed to be fulfilling in some aspect. I think another leg of the conversation is that we collectively are trying to fulfil a particular type of disturbance within ourselves through doomscrolling — we have a fear of the future that previous generations did not have. The algorithm both soothes (dissociates the viewer) and perpetuates (gives the viewer something else to be anxious about) this disturbance. We’re giving up little pieces of our souls because we’re scared and don’t know what to do… the rest of the world isn’t for you so it makes sense we find comfort and importance in the algorithm that’s “for you”.
love this, especially in the context of your previous piece on algorithmic gaze! i’m reminded of virginia woolf’s reflections on cinema (“they have become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life?”) & our concerted efforts to actualize ourselves through the ritual of social media, framing our instagram-innies as (hyper)real & striving for validation thru curated expressions of these specific, filtered facets of ourselves. excited for the book!
I’m not sure when we go on tiktok or other social media app, we assume an algorithmic self. I see it more as entering another reality, constrained by an algorithm. Of course, this reality could influence the way we perceive reality, but I don't think there's a dissociation between the real self.
I think about the importance of rituals a lot – and what inspired that in the first place was the disruption of ritual in 2020. I graduated with my MFA and got married that year, in ways wildly different than I had imagined and planned. The events still happened, and we ritualized them in a way (over zoom, in small groups outdoors, etc.), but did not feel "complete". A part of those rituals was missing. And your focus here on how social media has become ritualized made me think about how that year, 2020, when so many of us had rituals disrupted, we were all turning to social media as our (sometimes only) means of connection with friends and the outside world. So it makes sense that social media became such a beacon/haven of our needs – for time passing, for processing, etc. And so now social media, perhaps more than school or work or even going to the movies, has become how we organize our time. I'm not sure I have a thesis here, but your writing inspired me and I wanted to share my thoughts.
Great article! I've noticed there's a ritual with buying homes too. There's a longer period of this mental change, likely 60 days for most buyers and sellers. Within those days are major stressors and emotions of high-highs and low-lows. Rituals are everywhere
Thinking about life in the context of rituals, it's actually crazy to understand how many rituals we have even day to day- hell work would be the longest one!
I really liked seeing that chart l- I'm more a visual learner- about how the content comes to us and how we perceived it, and looking at it, there's an element of, like, mob psychology to the algorithm too? Or our handling of that info?
This is powerful and I'll be silently digesting this for a few days yet. Initially, I'm stuck by the notion that our sense of selves are somehow continuously being constructed through an endless stream of ritual processes - but then who/what is performing the ritual...?
Thank you for writing this and making it available online.
I often think of rituals in the context of language, or in my area of interest and expertise, raising multilingual children and the ritual of its continuity day after day. But such an important message to think about how we consider our online representations, what we are exposed to versus reality. Thank you.
I was just reading the first chapter of his book today and remembered this post. I feel as though Han and Aleksic are deeply at odds when it comes to this subject. Under Han's conception of ritual, the smartphone and especially algorithmic content cannot be ritual due to the lack of self-sameness. I do find myself wondering if repetitive templates for posts and the use of identical music would qualify as a weak self-sameness, but the lack of explicitly presenting again the same content seems to disqualify scrolling from ritual contexts. Do you see the views as harmonized?
I love the graphic— can’t stop staring at the filters. I feel like I also have a context filter that changes my perception of any piece of social media depending on external factors that influence my state of mind from moment to moment, like what is going on in the world at large as filtered through other media.
I wasn’t sure — I studied that vibe filter definition for a while— the word vibe communicates what I mean, but I think was thrown off by “of what it means” phrase in the “the cultural context of what it means to communicate on social media”— I might have been reading too closely.
This reminds me a lot of when I was trying to understand state-dependent memory.
We can intuit it quite easily in regards to being intoxicated, but when you look really closely, you'll see that the boundaries between different "states" for state-dependent memory are considerably more numerous than we might realize.
Like walking through a doorway, or getting up from sitting/lying down after doing so for a long time. There's lots of location-based ways to make our short-term memory do a soft reset, and I feel like maybe that's an important factor in these different selves you're talking about!
So when you talk about slipping into our "algorithmic selves", I wonder what state-dependent properties of our minds are changing?
great article as always but definitely freaks me out a little bit. I don’t like the idea of people’s perception of world being altered by corporations running social media without people realizing it’s happening to them. I’m seeing more pushback against social media in general that I’m happy about, seeing people recognizing that.
Love the filter visual. A totally apt reimagining of the "funnel" of messaging. Book preordered!
Part of a ritual can be interpreted as someone(s) giving up a piece of their soul for something greater than themselves, and an acknowledgment that something happened and it was important. The time we spend online is real time, the conversations we have over social media are real conversations even if they’re through a screen. Rituals are supposed to be fulfilling in some aspect. I think another leg of the conversation is that we collectively are trying to fulfil a particular type of disturbance within ourselves through doomscrolling — we have a fear of the future that previous generations did not have. The algorithm both soothes (dissociates the viewer) and perpetuates (gives the viewer something else to be anxious about) this disturbance. We’re giving up little pieces of our souls because we’re scared and don’t know what to do… the rest of the world isn’t for you so it makes sense we find comfort and importance in the algorithm that’s “for you”.
love this, especially in the context of your previous piece on algorithmic gaze! i’m reminded of virginia woolf’s reflections on cinema (“they have become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life?”) & our concerted efforts to actualize ourselves through the ritual of social media, framing our instagram-innies as (hyper)real & striving for validation thru curated expressions of these specific, filtered facets of ourselves. excited for the book!
I’m not sure when we go on tiktok or other social media app, we assume an algorithmic self. I see it more as entering another reality, constrained by an algorithm. Of course, this reality could influence the way we perceive reality, but I don't think there's a dissociation between the real self.
hmm
I think about the importance of rituals a lot – and what inspired that in the first place was the disruption of ritual in 2020. I graduated with my MFA and got married that year, in ways wildly different than I had imagined and planned. The events still happened, and we ritualized them in a way (over zoom, in small groups outdoors, etc.), but did not feel "complete". A part of those rituals was missing. And your focus here on how social media has become ritualized made me think about how that year, 2020, when so many of us had rituals disrupted, we were all turning to social media as our (sometimes only) means of connection with friends and the outside world. So it makes sense that social media became such a beacon/haven of our needs – for time passing, for processing, etc. And so now social media, perhaps more than school or work or even going to the movies, has become how we organize our time. I'm not sure I have a thesis here, but your writing inspired me and I wanted to share my thoughts.
Great article! I've noticed there's a ritual with buying homes too. There's a longer period of this mental change, likely 60 days for most buyers and sellers. Within those days are major stressors and emotions of high-highs and low-lows. Rituals are everywhere
Thinking about life in the context of rituals, it's actually crazy to understand how many rituals we have even day to day- hell work would be the longest one!
I really liked seeing that chart l- I'm more a visual learner- about how the content comes to us and how we perceived it, and looking at it, there's an element of, like, mob psychology to the algorithm too? Or our handling of that info?
This is powerful and I'll be silently digesting this for a few days yet. Initially, I'm stuck by the notion that our sense of selves are somehow continuously being constructed through an endless stream of ritual processes - but then who/what is performing the ritual...?
Thank you for writing this and making it available online.
I often think of rituals in the context of language, or in my area of interest and expertise, raising multilingual children and the ritual of its continuity day after day. But such an important message to think about how we consider our online representations, what we are exposed to versus reality. Thank you.
I am always begging people to read some Byung Chul Han. The disappearance of rituals.
I was just reading the first chapter of his book today and remembered this post. I feel as though Han and Aleksic are deeply at odds when it comes to this subject. Under Han's conception of ritual, the smartphone and especially algorithmic content cannot be ritual due to the lack of self-sameness. I do find myself wondering if repetitive templates for posts and the use of identical music would qualify as a weak self-sameness, but the lack of explicitly presenting again the same content seems to disqualify scrolling from ritual contexts. Do you see the views as harmonized?
I love the graphic— can’t stop staring at the filters. I feel like I also have a context filter that changes my perception of any piece of social media depending on external factors that influence my state of mind from moment to moment, like what is going on in the world at large as filtered through other media.
yes this is what I was trying to capture with the final "vibe filter"!
I wasn’t sure — I studied that vibe filter definition for a while— the word vibe communicates what I mean, but I think was thrown off by “of what it means” phrase in the “the cultural context of what it means to communicate on social media”— I might have been reading too closely.
perhaps I could've clarified better - it is an important distinction, thank you!!