Facebook and Subjectivity

"The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to 'know thyself'," Clive Thompson comments near the end of his article. The concept he is hitting on is interesting: that somehow we can understand ourselves better when we are looking at ourselves objectivity, rather than when we are alone with the whirlwind of our thoughts.

We are all subjects, and we all have an innate desire to understand who exactly we are--to look at our subjective selves through an objective lens. In creating a Facebook profile, we put down to writing a ghost of our identity. Our list of favorite movies, our periodic status updates, the photos that we upload, even what our friends write on our wall--all serve to create a picture of who we are. It's a picture that we have almost complete control over, true, but even what we choose to display as our identity shows something about our identity. Maybe this is what is so appealing about Facebook and similar websites: that in some small way we are able to condense who we are and project it out to others in a way that we can all understand. Thompson suggests that by filling out and updating these kinds of sites, we are able to transition into looking at ourselves objectively.

One woman that Thompson interviewed claimed that posting daily to Twitter had made her happier and calmer because "the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively." This, however, only works as far as you are able to accurately describe how you are feeling at a given moment. It's as though we are viewing our feelings and opinions second-hand; while it is easier to comprehend than the first-hand version straight from our heads, consideration must be given to how accurate the condensed information can possibly be.

If he lived in the twenty-first century, Kierkegaard would argue that the idea of trying to look at yourself through the lens of the outsider is ridiculous. Even in his own time, Kierkegaard disagreed with the Western tradition of trying to think objectively. He believed that the less we employ our own subjectivity, the more we become objects, merely observing the world around us. His thoughts on Christianity--that it has to be accepted subjectively, and cannot be thought about rationally--run parallel to the question of identity on Facebook. We cannot know every detail of our identity; it is too complicated and always in a state of change. The attempt to rationalize it by condensing it to words and media on a website, while tempting, requires oversimplifying ourselves and thus can never portray an accurate picture of who we are. Ultimately, as Kierkegaard would say, we just have to be.