8 Observations About Solipsism

Some interesting thought about myself

1. Therapy

It’s unreasonable to expect that using social media will fix us. Yet users tend to mistake them as therapeutic media, because they simulate interaction with other people, offering the illusion of control over our relations with them.

2. Who "Controls" Social Media?

But social-media use establishes control only in that it allows us to see our psyche as the only one that matters, the only one that is real. Social media serve as tools to rearticulate the stories about ourselves we’ve already constructed under the guise of communication with others.

3. Scaffolding

We approach social media not as conversation that will potentially dismantle our illusions, but as a game in which we manipulate opaque others into providing the scaffolding for the self-concept we’ve brought in.

4. Are you protected?

We turn to social media to confirm our worries, not to resolve and dismiss them. The self doesn’t “develop” in these media; the interactions with others are contained in the interface, limiting the sort of intersubjectivity that produces psychical change, if not preventing it altogether. Social media are powerful means for protecting the self as it already exists, with all its psychic defenses in tact.

5. Symbiosis...

This sort of subject — at odds with itself; always seeking but not quite achieving a tenuous balance of security and autonomy — has a symbiotic relation with consumerism, which provides a steady stream of products and experiences that allow us to repeat the momentary accomplishment of that balance in a purchase, in a seemingly circumscribed decision.

6. Escaping The "Paradigm"

Social media also sustain that sort of subject for the same reasons, though with more elaborate means. Social media, in fact, subsume much more of the sort of experience that once escaped the consumerist paradigm (or at least seemed to).

7. All About The Process

We can process interactions with others in terms of their convenience and utility to strictly ourselves, and our bottom-line social-media metrics.

8. F-r-i-c-t-i-o-n

One can imagine a different sort of social media, one much like sociality itself, in which virtually nothing is “frictionless” — in which friction is actually the whole point. This sort of social media continually confronts users with the inadequacy of their defenses rather than providing a way to re-enact them on a larger scale.