Digital deindividuation
Max Fisher writes about this phenomenon relative to social media quoting a paper by William Brady and Molly Crockett which argues that one of the effects of social media is that we don’t just become more tribal we lose our sense of self. It’s an environment they wrote ripe for the psychological state of deindividuation, this means that when we’re furiously scrolling and clicking through our poisonous social platform of choice, we slowly lose our selfhood and get caught up in the chaotic flows of opinions content information and advertising. It’s like the line from the radio head song Karma police.
Status threat
according to Fisher the problem hits home when digital deindividuation mixes with another phenomenon known as status threat. Fisher explains that when members of a dominant social group feel at risk of losing their position it can spark a ferocious reaction, they grow nostalgic for a past real or imagined, when they felt secure in their dominance and they grow obsessed with playing up minorities as dangerous, manifesting stories and rumors to confirm the belief.
Status Threat + Mis/Dis Information = Mass Individuation In other words feeling at risk of losing your position in society magnifies Humanity’s innate tendency to decline into mob mentality.
Self interrogation
I think this overlaps with the philosophical emphasis on self interrogation that’s been present for just the entire history of the field. you know it’s like Socrates knew that he knew nothing, Descartes mistrusted everything and started from scratch. the idea is that to be a lover of wisdom means to not take one’s own beliefs of their value and instead to critically evaluate the basis of these beliefs. the idea is that if we’re not turning our critical faculties inward, we’re pretty easy to get caught up in ideological bullshit.
Leveling
when the concept of deindividuation wasn’t around yet Kierkegaard wrote about leveling, which is what he called the loss of individual subjectivity that happens when everyone becomes part of one big crowd. The process made far Easier by the mass media and in this process our individuality gets sucked into one big social mass, and the trends of the media matter more than thinking for ourselves. Kierkegaard worried that this process could be devastating on both an individual and societal level.
One of the roles of philosophy is to play the fool or idiot. From its Inception philosophy has been closely tied to idiotism. every philosopher who has brought forth a new idiom has necessarily been an idiot. (Byung-Chul Han)
Today it seems the type of the outsider -the idiot, the fool - has all but vanished from society. thoroughgoing digital networking and communication have massively amplified the compulsion to conform. The attendant violence of consensus is suppressing idiotism. (Byung-Chul Han)