You’ve Been Obsessing Over Your Likes and Retweets Way Too Much
Evan Selinger
2014-06-10 00:00:00

The first step is to acknowledge a problem exists. Too many people are desperate for attention and build their self-esteem with bricks made of external recognition. Take Rameet Chawla, founder of the mobile app company Fueled. Feeling spurned by friends who didn’t appreciate that he simply was too busy to like their pics on Instagram, Chawla became desperate and resorted to a depressing measure: outsourcing faux sentiment to technology. He actually designed a program that automatically liked the photos other people posted, and then, voilà, his “popularity soared.”
  

Although this isn’t a new malady, the latest instance is a sign of the times. Explanations of the current selfie-obsessed guise typically point to a constellation of contemporary behavior-shaping forces: social media platforms like Facebook being designed to suck maximum self-centered content out of us; Klout scores overlaying Twitter with a celebrity ethos, where the goal of acquiring followers becomes an end-in-itself; self-branding and personae management becoming ubiquitous and eroding the boundaries between public and private correspondence; companies pushing their products and services through promotional schemes that turn consumers into marketers; and, reality TV and viral YouTube clips inspiring folks to desire becoming famous….simply for doing extreme things and being talked about. Even PBS’s Frontline couldn’t resist ending the televised version of media theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s excellent critical discussion of these issues, “Generation Like,” with an appeal for viewers to like it on social media.

The second step is to embrace a view long championed by philosophers, theologians, and psychologists: constantly looking to other people to affirm that your pursuits are worthy and your efforts admirable is a surefire way to veer off the path of the good life. Or, as Friedrich Nietzsche aptly put the positive version of this thesis: “The noble soul has reverence for itself.”  For without a healthy dose of self-determination and intrinsic motivation, self-development gets stymied and tasks rich with possibilities lose their potential for meaning.

Consider the existential spin on damnation that French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre  provided in a play about hell being other people. The despair Sartre’s characters attest to in “No Exit” emerges because of intense co-dependence.

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