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POSTADO POR: Kmy Qulity

CATEGORIAS: Bionergia, Espiritualidade, Vida e Sade, Vidas Passadas,
A fuga de si mesmo
possvel algum fugir de si mesmo?
uma pergunta estranha, e quero comentar o que tenho observado ultimamente nos at
endimentos na clnica, no Centro Espiritualista que trabalho e em conversas com as
pessoas.
Vejo pessoas acometidas pela depresso, pela sndrome do pnico, pelo transtorno de an
siedade, doentes de diversas enfermidades, angustiadas. Consumindo drogas lcitas,
de tarja preta.
Outras tantas pessoas, mergulhadas nos jogos virtuais pelo celular, pelo vdeo ou
pela internet, deixando de pensar, de viver, de sentir, de ser quem veio ser, de
ixando sua existncia transcorrer, perdendo a grande oportunidade que a vida.
Tem os fanticos pelos inteis programas de TV, pelos jogos de futebol que deveria s
er uma distrao e passou a ser um campo de energias densas e ruins, pela m influncia
das novelas, pela lamentvel repercusso dos reality shows, com energias vibracionai
s baixssima, penetrando nos lares e nos campos energticos das pessoas.
Com tantas ms informaes sendo despejadas, percebo que muitas pessoas aproveitam e m
ergulham nessa onda, por diversos motivos: alguns querem ser esquecidos, quando
focam sua ateno no mundo virtual e ilusrio, outros querem chamar a ateno para si, mas
percebo que h algo em comum em todos elas, pois emitem mensagem subliminar: pedi
ndo socorro.
Alguns querem ser vistos, notados, amados ou chamar a ateno para as suas carncias,
frustraes e at esquecerem-se do que viveram ou vivem. Outros querem estar na moda p
ara serem aceitos. Entretanto, o fazem da pior maneira, se autodestruindo, se de
sconectando com a realidade e se afundando cada vez mais nas iluses.
Com tantas atividades autodestrutivas sendo praticadas pelas pessoas e emanadas
pelos meios de comunicao, percebe-se que elas querem fugir de alguma coisa que nem
mesmo sabem o que .
Querem se esquecer de algo, se esconder, no pensar nos fatos, nem falar das suas
aflies, nem querem pensar nisso.
melhor no encarar a sua verdade, o seu mundo.
Parecem que tais pessoas, gritam, pedem de uma maneira ou de outra, por ajuda, m
as no diretamente, pois no sabem faz-lo, por isso agridem, aterrorizam, fogem, afas
tam-se, iludem-se, escondem-se de si mesmas...
impossvel esconder-se de si mesmo, por isso abafam suas aflies, escondem suas emoes,
tentam calar seus pensamentos e as lembranas de fatos ruins.
Para sair disso, a nica via enfrentar a si mesmo e no fugir. encarar sua verdade,
jogar o lixo emocional fora, rever suas posies. Buscar at se necessrio as respostas
em vidas passadas, rever sua infncia, os dissabores e colocar tudo em ordem.
Sair do meio da multido, afastar-se do jogo consumista, fugir dos desejos do ego
que nunca se satisfar. Deve ouvir-se, sentir-se, olhar-se, agir e pedir ajuda, se
m orgulho, sem vaidade, sem medo de ser feliz.
Pedir auxlio, falando e no gritando, nem se escondendo nos jogos eletrnicos, intern
et e celulares. Olhando nos olhos de outra pessoa e interagindo com ela, sentind
o a energia da vida, da natureza, do amor, da harmonia, dar um sentido maior par
a a sua existncia.
As oportunidades se abrem, o Universo envia ajuda, basta estarmos atentos e busc
armos pela libertao das angstias, das aflies, da ansiedade, do sofrimento, buscar a
si mesmo e descobrir o mundo maravilhoso que existe dentro de cada um.
Pare de fugir de si mesmo, ame-se, viva, encontre a verdadeira alegria dentro de
si e no fora, antes que seja tarde demais.
No deveria envelhecer antes de ficar sbio...
disse o bobo da corte ao Rei Lear, Will
iam Shakespeare.
Crmen Mrio
Psicoterapeuta Reencarnacionista
carmen@kamyclinique.com.br

www.kamyquality.com.br
Lido: 2343 vezes

==================
Life in a bubble
Adolescents and young adults are escaping the real world and taking refuge in so
cial networking. And that has serious consequences, warn Prasun Chaudhuri and Ka
vitha Shanmugam
Donna Antoo doesn't talk to her parents much. The 20-year-old from Kerala would
rather chat with her friends on Facebook (FB). And, yes, she prefers to be on th
e social media site than actually meet her pals. "Then I don't have to worry abo
ut facial expressions," she says.
Sugandha, from Mumbai, too found a life on FB that she liked. In her neighbourho
od and school, the painfully shy girl was mostly ignored. On FB, on the other ha
nd, she was much feted. The 16-year-old schoolgirl put up a profile picture that
was not hers. She warmed up to a boy who said he was attracted to her, till he
saw her in real life.
Ronald Michael wonders which way his friends are heading. Some of them are so ob
sessed with social media sites that they check them out on their phones even whe
n riding their motorbikes. "I have friends who cling to their phones instead of
interacting with friends even when they are out together," the 21-year-old netwo
rk engineer at Dell computers in Bangalore laments. "Maybe, their real lives are
boring."
***
Their real lives may be boring, but their virtual worlds are certainly not a yaw
n. These are young people who have grown up with the social media and cannot ima
gine a life without them, so much so that they are finding it increasingly diffi
cult to cope with the real world.
"In real life, they are awkward and uncomfortable interacting with people. But t
hey can form and maintain relationships online," New Delhi-based psychiatrist Sa
njay Chugh stresses.
Parents, counsellors and teachers have been noticing this trend for a while. You
ngsters are moving away from real people. Their worlds on the Internet
honest or
make-believe
are turning them into recluses. They will reach out to strangers o
n the Internet, but keep a distance from their parents and other adults.
"They post comments such as 'feeling sad' or 'getting the blues' and seek solace
from people they've never met," says Calcutta psychiatrist Jai Ranjan Ram. "But
they won't trust their parents."
Sometimes there is animosity as well. A 13-year-old Mumbai teenager who was pull
ed up by her mother for spending too much time on these sites says she hates her
. She sees her mother's criticism as just the opposite of all the appreciation s
he has been garnering on FB. When she started skipping school and her grades fel
l, her parents took her to a psychiatrist.
Sneha's parents also woke up when she failed in her term exams, and was asked by
the school authorities to consult a counsellor. It transpired that the 18-year-

old Barrackpore student was living another life on FB. She saw herself as plain
and chubby
which was why she uploaded a photograph of a beautiful young girl as
her profile picture.
"I am sexy Sneha," she said on her page
and became so obsessed with her virtual
life that she could hardly speak with friends and relatives. Even now, she can't
make eye contact with others while speaking.
Something similar happened to Sugandha, though in her case the ramifications wer
e scarier. When her so-called boyfriend broke off with her because her photograp
h on the site was fake, she attempted suicide. Her secret world unfurled when he
r parents rushed her to a hospital. "It was not surprising that she became frust
rated, depressed and angry," says Dr Shefali Batra, founder of Mind Frames, a ps
ychiatric clinic in Mumbai.
That adolescents and young adults are escaping the real world and taking refuge
in the world of social networking was revealed in a survey conducted among 100 s
tudents (between 14 and 17) in English-medium schools in Bangalore between 2010
and 2012. Many of the students told Ankur Madan
a psychologist and an associate
professor at the Azim Premji University that sites such as Facebook gave them th
e affection and support that they missed out on in real life.
"I still remember how a 15-year-old boy nonchalantly said that after being on FB
, he didn't need affection from anywhere else," Madan says.
Another survey Secret Lives of Teens
by McAfee, the
evealed a digital divide between Indian teens and their
e survey of over 1,500 parents and teens, the divide is
hat the teens are growing up as "digital natives". They
online lives but lack parental assistance.

security software company, r

parents. According to th
attributed to the fact t
have increasingly active

There is certainly a divide there, for parents seemingly know little about this
world. The survey found that 70 per cent of the parents polled believed their te
enage children would tell them everything they did online. But 58 per cent teens
surveyed said they knew how to hide their online activities from their parents.
"Parents should be more conscious of the fact that teens in their formative year
s are meandering into an unrestricted virtual world befriending strangers, getti
ng into relationships and accessing provocative content," says Anindita Mishra,
an advocate of child safety in the virtual world. Some believe that parents are
sometimes themselves to be blamed. While they are too busy at work, the virtual
world provides their children with appreciative company. "Parents nowadays rarel
y share any interests
say, a TV programme, music or a literary pursuit with thei
r children. Many of them are unfamiliar with social media and others have their
own virtual worlds. These deepen the divide," Anjana Saha, principal, Mahadevi B
irla School, stresses.
Parents usually notice their children's isolation only when grades begin to fall
or they start to skip classes to stay online. Pavan Sonar, a Mumbai-based psych
iatrist, recalls a 13-year-old girl who spent 11-12 hours on the Internet using
her PC and smartphone. "Proud of her 1,600 virtual friends, most of whom were st
rangers, she bunked school to stay in this parallel virtual world," he says. Whe
n her parents tried to check her, she suffered severe "withdrawal symptoms".
Ali Khwaja, head of the Banjara Academy, a Bangalore-based counselling centre, m
eets 15-20 such adolescents every week. "They usually lack self-discipline, are
lonely and have low self-esteem," he says. He explains that adolescents often cr
eate "fake" or "wishful" profiles to attract more friends. But this leads to tro
uble when the profiles are exposed as fakes.

Last week, a 16-year-old boy told Khwaja about a girl he had come across on a ne
tworking site. "The two grew intimate and decided to meet. But when they met, th
e boy found that he had nothing to say to his virtual lover," Khwaja says.
Antoo, too, would rather communicate on Facebook than talk to people. "Somehow I
am more comfortable online and choose messaging over talking on the phone," she
says, adding that she checks her account on her phone at least 20 times a day.
Many of these youngsters are addicted to the freedom and anonymity that the virt
ual world offers. They can hide themselves and emerge as the kind of people they
want to be (but aren't), and be appreciated by a vast circle of unknown friends
.
So Calcutta teen Paroma wasn't bothered when her parents took her to task for an
"odd" haircut. "The girl didn't care because she'd received 569 'likes' the ulti
mate certificate of appreciation within hours of posting her new look on a socia
l networking site," says Jadavpur University counsellor Subhrangshu Aditya.
The signs are worrisome, but counsellers warn parents not to panic if they find
their children hooked on to the Internet. In the first place, they are probably
not addicted, as Deepak Goel, a Mumbai-based psychiatrist, has discovered. He re
cently concluded a study to track Internet addiction in 1,000 adolescents (mean
age 16.82 years) and found only 0.7 per cent were addicts. "It's too early to sa
y if children are getting disconnected from the real world. But, yes, it has bec
ome an integral part of their life," he says.
The
ill
r's
and

experts stress that parents have to understand that the social media sites w
gradually become a part of their culture. Only in rare cases does a youngste
behaviour turn into a compulsive disorder, leading to depression or anxiety
requiring medication, says Zena Deb, a Calcutta-based clinical psychologist.

Trusting friends real or virtual

rather than parents is a normal trait of adoles
cent behaviour, they add. Since adolescents are by nature rebellious and hate cr
iticism, they love the freedom and the ability to hide their identity offered in
the virtual world.
"Branding it as an addiction or a disease will only force children to hide their
habits, suffer silently and even turn to impulsive behaviour (like self harm),"
Aditya says.
But Ronald continues to worry about his friends. A college mate is going out wit
h a girl he met online and neither is really aware of the other's true self. The
friend, an introvert, has given himself the image of an outgoing, fun-loving bo
y. "I don't know how long it will last. You cannot lie about yourself," he says.
How do you know if you are or your child is a social media addict?
Ask the same questions that help define other addictions:
Does it get in the way of normal activities?
Do you experience a 'feeling of having missed out' when you are not logged on to
social media?
Has it had a negative impact on your job, studies or relationships?
Have you tried to cut down on the hours on the Internet and failed?
If the answer is yes:
Set a time limit for social media use.
Disconnect completely, when you're on vacation.
Learn to accept yourself as you are.

=====================

Hiding behind the screen - Roger Scruton

Human relations, and the self-image of the human being, have been profoundly aff
ected by the Internet and by the ease with which images of other people can be s
ummoned to the computer screen to become the objects of emotional attention. How
should we conceptualize this change, and what is its effect on the psychic cond
ition of those most given to constructing their world of interests and relations
hips through the screen? Is this change as damaging as many would have us believ
e, undermining our capacity for real relationships and placing a mere fantasy of
relatedness in their stead? Or is it relatively harmless, as unproblematic as s
peaking to a friend on the telephone?
First, we should make some distinctions. We all now use the computer to send mes
sages to our friends and to others with whom we have dealings. This sort of comm
unication is not different in any fundamental respect from the old practice of l
etter writing, except for its speed. Of course, we should not regard speed as a
trivial feature. The rapidity of modern communications does not merely accelerat
e the process whereby relationships are formed and severed; it inevitably change
s how those relationships are conducted and understood. Absence is less painful
with the Internet and the telephone, but it also loses some of its poignancy; mo
reover, e-mails are seldom composed as carefully as letters, since the very slow
ness with which a letter makes its way to its destination prompts us to put more
of our feelings into the words. Still, e-mail is reality, not virtual reality,
and the changes it has brought about are changes in real communication between r
eal people.
Nor does the existence of social networks like Facebook, which are also for the
most part real communication between real people, involve any attempt simply to
substitute a virtual reality for the actual one. On the contrary, they are paras
itic on the real relationships they foster, and which they alter in large part b
y encouraging people to put themselves on display, and in turn to become voyeurs
of the displays of others. Some might claim that the existence of these network
ing sites provides a social and psychological benefit, helping those who shy awa
y from presenting themselves directly to the world to gain a public place and id
entity. These sites also enable people to keep in touch with a wide circle of fr
iends and colleagues, thereby increasing the range of their affections, and fill
ing the world with goodwill and happy feelings.
Yet already something new is entering the world of human relations with these in
nocent-seeming sites. There is a novel ease with which people can make contact w
ith each other through the screen. No more need to get up from your desk and mak
e the journey to your friend s house. No more need for weekly meetings, or the cir
cle of friends in the downtown restaurant or bar. All those effortful ways of ma
king contact can be dispensed with: a touch of the keyboard and you are there, w
here you wanted to be, on the site that defines your friends. But can this be re
al friendship, when it is pursued and developed in such facile and costless ways
?
Friendship and Control
Real friendship shows itself in action and affection. The real friend is the one
who comes to the rescue in your hour of need; who is there with comfort in adve
rsity and who shares with you his own success. This is hard to do on the screen
the screen, after all, is primarily a locus of information, and is only a place
of action insofar as communication is a form of action. Only words, and not hand
s or the things they carry, can reach from it to comfort the sufferer, to ward o
ff an enemy s blows, or to provide any of the tangible assets of friendship in a t
ime of need. It is arguable that the more people satisfy their need for companio
nship through relationships carried out on the screen, the less will they develo

p friendships of that other kind, the kind that offers help and comfort in the r
eal trials of human life. Friendships that are carried out primarily on the scre
en cannot easily be lifted off it, and when they are so lifted, there is no guar
antee that they will take any strain. Indeed, it is precisely their cost-free, s
creen-friendly character that attracts many people to them
so much so, students
of mine tell me, that they fear addiction, and often have to forbid themselves t
o go to their Facebook account for days on end, in order to get on with their re
al lives and their real relationships.
What we are witnessing is a change in the attention that mediates and gives rise
to friendship. In the once normal conditions of human contact, people became fr
iends by being in each other s presence, understanding all the many subtle signals
, verbal and bodily, whereby another testifies to his character, emotions, and i
ntentions, and building affection and trust in tandem. Attention was fixed on th
e other on his face, words, and gestures. And his nature as an embodied person w
as the focus of the friendly feelings that he inspired. People building friendsh
ip in this way are strongly aware that they appear to the other as the other app
ears to them. The other s face is a mirror in which they see their own. Precisely
because attention is fixed on the other there is an opportunity for self-knowled
ge and self-discovery, for that expanding freedom in the presence of the other w
hich is one of the joys of human life. The object of friendly feelings looks bac
k at you, and freely responds to your free activity, amplifying both your awaren
ess and his own. As traditionally conceived, friendship was ruled by the maxim kn
ow thyself.
When attention is fixed on the other as mediated by the screen, however, there i
s a marked shift in emphasis. For a start, I have my finger on the button; at an
y moment I can turn the image off, or click to arrive at some new encounter. The
other is free in his own space, but he is not really free in my space, over whi
ch I am the ultimate arbiter. I am not risking myself in the friendship to nearl
y the same extent as I risk myself when I meet the other face to face. Of course
, the other may so grip my attention with his messages, images, and requests tha
t I stay glued to the screen. Nevertheless, it is ultimately a screen that I am
glued to, and not the face that I see in it. All interaction with the other is a
t a distance, and whether I am affected by it becomes to some extent a matter of
my own choosing.
In this screenful form of conducting relationships, I enjoy a power over the oth
er person of which he himself is not really aware
since he is not aware of how m
uch I wish to retain him in the space before me. And the power I have over him h
e has too over me, just as I am denied the same freedom in his space that he is
denied in mine. He, too, therefore, will not risk himself; he appears on the scr
een only on condition of retaining that ultimate control himself. This is someth
ing I know about him that he knows that I know and vice versa. There grows betwe
en us a reduced-risk encounter, in which each is aware that the other is fundame
ntally withheld, sovereign within his impregnable cyber-castle.
But that is not the only way in which cyber-relationships are affected by the me
dium of their formation. For instance, while messaging is still very much alive on
Facebook, much of it is depersonalized in nature: the use of private messages h
as for many been supplanted by posting messages on a friend s public Wall, meaning t
hat the entire network is now participant in the communiqu. And while the Wall po
st still maintains the semblance of interpersonal contact, probably the most com
mon form of communication on Facebook is the status update, a message that is broa
dcast from one person to everyone (or, put another way, to no one in particular)
.
All of these communications, along with everything on the screen, appear in comp
etition with whatever else might be called up by the mouse. You click on your frie
nd, as you might click on a news item or a music video. He is one of the many pr

oducts on display. Friendship with him, and relationships generally, belong in t

he category of amusements and distractions, a commodity that may be chosen, or n
ot, depending on the rival goods. This contributes to a radical demotion of the
personal relationship. Your friendships are no longer special to you and definit
ive of your moral life: they are amusements, things that have no real life of th
eir own but borrow their life from your interest in them
what the Marxists would
call fetishes.
There is a strong argument to be made that the Facebook experience, which has at
tracted millions of people from all around the world, is an antidote to shyness,
a way in which people otherwise cripplingly intimidated by the venture outwards
into society are able to overcome their disability and enjoy the web of affecti
onate relationships on which so much of our happiness depends. But there is an e
qually strong argument that the Facebook experience, to the extent that it is su
pplanting the physical realm of human relationships, hypostatizes shyness, retai
ns its principal features, while substituting an ersatz kind of affection for th
e real affection that shyness fears. For by placing a screen between yourself an
d the friend, while retaining ultimate control over what appears on that screen,
you also hide from the real encounter
denying the other the power and the freed
om to challenge you in your deeper nature and to call on you here and now to tak
e responsibility for yourself and for him.
I was taught growing up that shyness (unlike modesty) is not a virtue but a defe
ct, and that it comes from placing too high a value on yourself
a value that for
bids you to risk yourself in the encounter with others. By removing the real ris
ks from interpersonal encounters, the Facebook experience might encourage a kind
of narcissism, a self-regarding posture in the midst of what should have been o
ther-regarding friendship. In effect, there may be nothing more than the display
of self, the others listed on the website counting for nothing in themselves.
Freedom Requires Context
In its normal occurrence, the Facebook encounter is still an encounter however a
ttenuated
between real people. But increasingly, the screen is taking over ceasi
ng to be a medium of communication between real people who exist elsewhere, and
becoming the place where people finally achieve reality, the only place where th
ey relate in any coherent way to others. This next stage is evident in the avatar
phenomenon, in which people create virtual characters in virtual worlds as proxi
es for themselves, so enabling their controllers to live in complete self-compla
cency behind the screen, exposed to no danger and yet enjoying a kind of substit
ute affection through the adventures of their cyber-ego.
The game Second Life offers a virtual world and invites you to enter it in the f
orm of an avatar constructed from its collection of templates. It has its own cu
rrency, in which purchases can be made in its own stores. It rents spaces to ava
tars as their homes and businesses. By late 2009, the company that created Secon
d Life announced that its user base had collectively logged more than a billion
hours in the system and had conducted business transactions worth more than a bi
llion dollars.
Second Life also provides opportunities for social action, with social positions a
chieved by merit or, at any rate, virtual merit. In this way people can enjoy, t
hrough their avatars, cost-free versions of the social emotions, and can become
heroes of compassion, without lifting a finger in the real world. In one notorious
incident in 2007, a man attempted to sue an avatar for theft of his Second Life
intellectual property. The property itself was an adult entertainment product
one
among many such Second Life products now available that enable your cyber-ego t
o realize your wildest fantasies at no risk to yourself. There have been many re
ports of couples who have never met in person conducting adulterous affairs enti
rely in cyberspace; they usually show no guilt towards their spouses, and in fac
t proudly display their emotions as though they had achieved some kind of moral

breakthrough by ensuring that it was only their avatars, and not they themselves
, that ended up in bed together.
Most people probably would see this as an unhealthy state of affairs. It is one
thing to place a screen between yourself and the world; it is another thing to i
nhabit the world on that screen as the primary sphere of your relationships. In
vesting one s emotional life in the adventures of an avatar, one retreats complete
ly from real relationships. Instead of being a means to augment relationships th
at exist outside of it, the Internet could become the sole arena of social life
but an unreal life involving unreal people. The thought of this reawakens all of
those once-fashionable claims of alienation and the fetishism of commodities of
which Marx and his followers accused capitalist society. The nerd controlling t
he avatar has essentially placed his being outside of himself, as they would have
put it.
The origin of those critiques lies in an idea of Hegel s, an idea of enduring impo
rtance that is constantly resurging in new guises, especially in the writings of
psychologists concerned with mapping the contours of ordinary happiness. The id
ea is this: we human beings fulfill ourselves through our own free actions, and
through the consciousness that these actions bring of our individual worth. But
we are not free in a state of nature, nor do we, outside the world of human rela
tions, have the kind of consciousness of self that allows us to value and intend
our own fulfillment. Freedom is not reducible to the unhindered choices that ev
en an animal might enjoy; nor is self-consciousness simply a matter of the pleas
urable immersion in immediate experiences, like the rat pressing endlessly on th
e pleasure switch. Freedom involves an active engagement with the world, in whic
h opposition is encountered and overcome, risks are taken and satisfactions weig
hed: it is, in short, an exercise of practical reason, in pursuit of goals whose
value must justify the efforts needed to obtain them. Likewise, self-consciousn
ess, in its fully realized form, involves not merely an openness to present expe
rience, but a sense of my own existence as an individual, with plans and project
s that might be fulfilled or frustrated, and with a clear conception of what I a
m doing, for what purpose, and with what hope of happiness.
All those ideas are contained in the term first introduced by the philosopher Jo
hann Gottlieb Fichte to denote the inner goal of a free personal life: Selbstbes
timmung, self-determination or self-certainty. Hegel s crucial claim is that the l
ife of freedom and self-certainty can only be obtained through others. I become
fully myself only in contexts which compel me to recognize that I am another in
others eyes. I do not acquire my freedom and individuality and then, as it were,
try them out in the world of human relations. It is only by entering that world,
with its risks, conflicts, and responsibilities, that I come to know myself as
free, to enjoy my own perspective and individuality, and to become a fulfilled p
erson among persons.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right, Hegel tells many ple
asing and provocative parables about the way in which the subject achieves freed
om and fulfillment through his Entusserung
his objectification
in the world of ot
hers. The status of these parables whether they are arguments or allegories, con
ceptual analyses or psychological generalizations
has always been a matter of di
spute. But few psychologists now would dispute the fundamental claim that underp
ins them, which is that the freedom and fulfillment of the self come about only
through the recognition of the other. Without others, my freedom is an empty cip
her. And recognition of the other involves taking full responsibility for my own
existence as the individual who I am.
In his efforts to set Hegel on his feet, the young Marx drew an important contrast
between the true freedom that comes to us through relationships with other subj
ects and the hidden enslavement that comes when our ventures outwards are not to
wards subjects but towards objects. In other words, he suggested, we must distin

guish the realization of the self, in free relations with others, from the alien
ation of the self in the system of things. That is the core of his critique of p
rivate property, and it is a critique that is as much bound up with allegory and
storytelling as the original Hegelian arguments. In later writings the critique
is transformed into the theory of fetishism, according to which people lose their
freedom through making fetishes of commodities. A fetish is something that is a
nimated by a transferred life. The consumer in a capitalist society, according t
o Marx, transfers his life into the commodities that bewitch him, and so loses t
hat life becoming a slave to commodities precisely through seeing the market in
goods rather than the free interactions of people; as the place where his desire
s are brokered and fulfilled.
These critiques of property and the market, it should be noted, do not merit end
orsement. They are flamboyant offshoots of a Hegelian philosophy which, properly
understood, endorses free transactions in a market as much as it endorses free
relations between people generally
indeed, it sees the one as an application of
the other. Rather, the crucial idea from which we may still learn is that of the
Entusserung, the realization of the self through responsible relations with othe
rs. This is the core contribution of German Romantic philosophy to the understan
ding of the modern condition, and it is an idea that has direct application to t
he problems that we see emerging in our new world of social life conducted on th
e Internet. In the sense in which freedom is a value, freedom is also an artifac
t that comes into being through the mutual interaction of people. This mutual in
teraction is what raises us from the animal condition to the personal condition,
enabling us to take responsibility for our lives and actions, to evaluate our g
oals and character, and both to understand the nature of personal fulfillment an
d to set about desiring and intending it.
This process of raising ourselves above the animal condition is crucial, as the
Hegelians emphasized, to the growth of the human subject as a self-knowing agent
, capable of entertaining and acting from reasons, and with a developed first-pe
rson perspective and a sense of his reality as one subject among others. It is a
process that depends upon real conflicts and real resolutions, in a shared publ
ic space where each of us is fully accountable for what he is and does. Anything
that interferes with that process, by undermining the growth of interpersonal r
elations, by confiscating responsibility, or by preventing or discouraging an in
dividual from making long-term rational choices and adopting a concrete vision o
f his own fulfillment, is an evil. It may be an unavoidable evil; but it is an e
vil all the same, and one that we should strive to abolish if we can.
Television and the Trend Toward Self-Alienation
Transferring our social lives onto the Internet is only one of the ways in which
we damage or retreat from this process of self-realization. Long before that te
mptation arose (and preparing the way for it) was the lure of television, which
corresponds exactly to the Hegelian and Marxist critique of the fetish
an inanim
ate thing in which we invest our life, and so lose it. Of course we retain ultim
ate control over the television: we can turn it off. But people don t, on the whol
e; they remain fixed to the screen in many of those moments when they might othe
rwise be building relationships through conversation, activities, conflicts, and
projects. The television has, for a vast number of our fellow human beings, des
troyed family meals, home cooking, hobbies, homework, study, and family games. I
t has rendered many people largely inarticulate, and deprived them of the simple
ways of making direct conversational contact with their fellows. This is not a
question of TV s dumbing down of thought and imagination, or its manipulation of peo
ple s desires and interests through brazen imagery. Those features are familiar en
ough, and the constant target of despairing criticism. Nor am I referring only t
o its addictive quality
though research by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmih
alyi and Robert Kubey offers convincing evidence that TV is addictive in the sam
e way as gambling and drugs.

The concern is rather the nature of television as a replacement for human relati
onships. By watching people interacting on TV sitcoms, the junkie is able to dis
pense with interactions of his own. Those energies and interests that would othe
rwise be focused on others
in storytelling, arguing, singing together, or playin
g games; in walking, talking, eating, and acting
are consumed on the screen, in
vicarious lives that involve no engagement of the viewer s own moral equipment. An
d that equipment therefore atrophies.
We see this everywhere in modern life, but nowhere more vividly than in the stud
ents who arrive in our colleges. These divide roughly into two kinds: those from
TV-sodden homes, and those who have grown up talking. Those of the first kind t
end to be reticent, inarticulate, given to aggression when under stress, unable
to tell a story or express a view, and seriously hampered when it comes to takin
g responsibility for a task, an activity, or a relationship. Those of the second
kind are the ones who step forward with ideas, who go out to their fellows, who
radiate the kind of freedom and adventurousness that makes learning a pleasure
and risk a challenge. Since these students have had atypical upbringings, they a
re prone to be subjects of mockery. But they have a head start over their TV-add
led contemporaries. The latter can still be freed from their vice; university at
hletics, theater, music, and so on can help to marginalize TV in campus life. Bu
t in many other public or semi-public spaces, television has now become a near n
ecessity: it flickers in the background, reassuring those who have bestowed thei
r life on it that their life goes on.
These criticisms of television parallel criticisms of the fetishizing nature of ma
ss culture made by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and other members of the neoMarxist Frankfurt school. Interestingly enough, the Frankfurt school ideas have
been recently put to use in criticizing another way in which we can now achieve
instant and cost-free stimulation: the iPod. In his 2008 book Sound Moves, Micha
el Bull draws on the cultural theory of Horkheimer and Adorno to argue that, thank
s to the iPod, urban space has in many ways ceased to be public space and has be
come fragmented and privatized, each person retreating into his own inviolable s
phere and losing his dependency upon and interest in his fellows. This process n
ot only alienates people from each other, it enables people to retain control ov
er their sensations, and so shut out the world of chance, risk, and change.
Although there is good reason to be sympathetic with Bull s argument, as well as t
hose original criticisms of the consumer economy made by Adorno and Horkheimer,
their criticisms had the wrong target: namely, the system of capitalist producti
on and the emerging culture industry which forms part of it. The object of Adorn
o and company s scorn was the substitution of risk-free and addictive pleasures fo
r the pleasures of understanding, freedom, and relationship. They may have been
right in thinking that the culture industry has a propensity to favor the first
kind of pleasure, for this kind of pleasure is easily packaged and marketed. But
take away the healthy ways of growing up through relationships and the addictiv
e pleasures will automatically take over, even where there is no culture industr
y to exploit them
as we witnessed in communist Europe. And, just like the theate
r, the media of mass culture can also be used positively (by those with critical
judgment) to enhance and deepen our real sympathies. The correct response to th
e ills of television is not to attack those who manufacture televisions or who s
tock them with rubbish: it is to concentrate on the kind of education that makes
it possible to take a critical approach to television, so as to demand real ins
ight and real emotion, rather than kitsch, Disney, or porn. And the same is true
for the iPod.
To work towards this critical approach means getting clear about the virtues of
direct rather than vicarious relations. Why, as Villiers de l Isle-Adam said, do w
e go to the trouble of living rather than asking our servants to do it for us? W
hy do we criticize those who eat burgers on the couch, while life plays out its
pointless drama on the screen? Get clear about these questions, and we can begin

to educate children in the art of turning off the television.

The avatar can therefore be seen as merely the latest point in a process of alie
nation whereby people learn to put their lives outside of themselves, to make thei
r lives into playthings over which they retain complete, though in some way deep
ly specious, control. (They control physically what controls them psychologicall
y.) And this is why it is so tempting to look back to those old Hegelian and Mar
xist theories. For they were premised on the view that we become free only by mov
ing outwards, embodying our freedom in shared activities and mutually responsible
relations. And the Hegelians distinguished a true from a false way of moving out
wards : one in which we gain our freedom by giving it real and objective form, as
opposed to one in which we lose it by investing it in objects that alienate us f
rom our inner life. Those theories show how the thing that we (or at any rate th
e followers of Hegel) most value in human life
self-realization in a condition o
f freedom
is separated by a thin dividing line from the thing which destroys us
self-alienation in a condition of bondage.
Impressive though they are, however, the Hegelian-Marxist theories are shot thro
ugh with metaphor and speculation; they are not anchored in empirical research o
r explanatory hypotheses; they rely for their plausibility entirely on a priori
thoughts about the nature of freedom, and about the metaphysical distinction bet
ween subject and object. If they are to be of use to us we will have to translat
e them into a more down-to-earth and practical language one that will tell us ho
w our children should be educated, if we are to bring them out from behind the s
creen.
The Necessary Risks of Life Off the Screen
We must come to an understanding, then, of what is at stake in the current worri
es concerning the Internet, avatars, and life on the screen. The first issue at
stake is risk. We are rational beings, endowed with practical as well as theoret
ical reasoning. And our practical reasoning develops through our confrontation w
ith risk and uncertainty. To a large extent, life on the screen is risk-free: wh
en we click to enter some new domain, we risk nothing immediate in the way of ph
ysical danger, and our accountability to others and risk of emotional embarrassm
ent is attenuated. This is vividly apparent in the case of pornography and the a
ddictive nature of pornography is familiar to all who have to work in counseling
those whom it has brought to a state of distraught dependency. The porn addict
gains some of the benefits of sexual excitement, without any of the normal costs
; but the costs are part of what sex means, and by avoiding them, one is destroy
ing in oneself the capacity for sexual attachment.
This freedom from risk is one of the most significant features of Second Life, a
nd it is also present (to an extent) on social networking sites like Facebook. O
ne can enter and leave relationships conducted solely via the screen without any
embarrassment, remaining anonymous or operating under a pseudonym, hiding behin
d an avatar or a false photograph of oneself. A person can decide to kill his scre
en identity at any time, and he will suffer nothing as a consequence. Why, then,
trouble to enter the world of real encounters, when this easy substitute is ava
ilable? And when the substitute becomes a habit, the virtues needed for the real
encounter do not develop.
It should not go unmentioned that the habit of reducing risk is one that is wide
spread in our society, and indeed encouraged by government. An unhealthy obsessi
on with health and an unsafe craze for safety have confiscated many of the risks
that previous generations have not merely taken for granted but incorporated in
to the process of moral education. From the padding of children s playgrounds and
the mandating of helmets for skateboarders to the criminalization of wine at the
family table, the health-and-safety fanatics have surrounded us at every point
with a web of prohibitions, while encouraging the belief that risks are not the
concern of the individual but a matter of public policy. Children are not, on th

e whole, encouraged to risk themselves in physical ways; and it is not surprisin

g if they are reluctant, in consequence, to risk themselves in emotional ways ei
ther.
But it is unlikely that this is either the source of risk-avoidance in human rel
ationships, or a real indication of the right and the wrong way to proceed. No d
oubt children need physical risk and adventure if they are to develop as respons
ible people, with their full quota of courage, prudence, and practical wisdom. B
ut risks of the soul are unlike risks of the body; you don t learn to manage them
by being exposed to them. As we know, children exposed to sexual predation do no
t learn to deal with it but, on the contrary, tend to acquire the habit of not d
ealing with it: of altogether closing off a genuine emotional engagement with th
eir sexuality, reducing it to a raw, angry bargaining, learning to treat themsel
ves as objects and losing the capacity to risk themselves in love. Much modern s
ex education, which teaches that the only risks of sex are medical, exposes chil
dren to the same kind of harm, encouraging them to enter the world of sexual rel
ations without the capacity to give or receive erotic love, and so learning to s
ee sex as lying outside the realm of lasting relationships a source of pleasure
rather than love.
In human relations, risk avoidance means the avoidance of accountability, the re
fusal to stand judged in another s eyes, the refusal to come face to face with ano
ther person, to give oneself in whatever measure to him or her, and so to run th
e risk of rejection. Accountability is not something we should avoid; it is some
thing we need to learn. Without it we can never acquire either the capacity to l
ove or the virtue of justice. Other people will remain for us merely complex dev
ices, to be negotiated in the way that animals are negotiated, for our own advan
tage and without opening the possibility of mutual judgment. Justice is the abil
ity to see the other as having a claim on you, as being a free subject just as y
ou are, and as demanding your accountability. To acquire this virtue you must le
arn the habit of face-to-face encounters, in which you solicit the other s consent
and cooperation rather than imposing your will. The retreat behind the screen i
s a way of retaining control over the encounter, while minimizing the need to ac
knowledge the other s point of view. It involves setting your will outside yoursel
f, as a feature of virtual reality, while not risking it as it must be risked, i
f others are truly to be encountered. To encounter another person in his freedom
is to acknowledge his sovereignty and his right: it is to recognize that the de
veloping situation is no longer within your exclusive control, but that you are
caught up by it, made real and accountable in the other s eyes by the same conside
rations that make him real and accountable in yours.
In sexual encounters it is surely obvious that this process of going out to the ot
her must occur if there is to be a genuine gift of love, and if the sexual act i
s to be something more than the friction of body parts. Learning to go out in this
way is a complex moral process, which cannot be simplified without setting sex
outside the process of psychological attachment. And it seems clear
though it is
by no means easy to give final proof of it that attachment is increasingly at r
isk, and that the cause of this is precisely that sexual pleasure comes without
justice or commitment. It is surely plausible to suggest that when we rely on th
e screen as the forum of personal development, we learn habits of relationship w
ithout the discipline of accountability, so that sex, when one arrives at it (as
even the screen addict may eventually), will be regarded in the same narcissist
ic way as the vicarious excitements through which it has been rehearsed. It will
occur in that indefinable elsewhere from which the soul takes flight, even in the
moment of pleasure.
Perhaps we can survive in a world of virtual relations; but it is not a world in
to which children can easily enter, except as intruders. Avatars may reproduce o
n the screen: but they will not fill the world with real human children. And the
cyber-parents of these avatar-children, deprived of all that makes people grow

as moral beings
of risk, embarrassment, suffering, and love
points of view, on a world in which they do not really occur.

will shrink to mere

Roger Scruton, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a vis
iting professor of philosophy at Oxford University, is the author, most recently
, of The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope (Oxford, 2010). This ess
ay is adapted from a lecture delivered as part of the 2008-2009 Cardinal Newman
Lecture Series sponsored by the Institute for the Psychological Sciences.
Roger Scruton, "Hiding Behind the Screen," The New Atlantis, Number 28, Summer 2
010, pp. 48-60.
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Christine Rosen
For centuries, the rich and the powerful documented their existence and their st
atus through painted portraits. A marker of wealth and a bid for immortality, po
rtraits offer intriguing hints about the daily life of their subjects
profession
s, ambitions, attitudes, and, most importantly, social standing. Such portraits,
as German art historian Hans Belting has argued, can be understood as painted an
thropology, with much to teach us, both intentionally and unintentionally, about
the culture in which they were created.
Self-portraits can be especially instructive. By showing the artist both as he s
ees his true self and as he wishes to be seen, self-portraits can at once expose
and obscure, clarify and distort. They offer opportunities for both self-expres
sion and self-seeking. They can display egotism and modesty, self-aggrandizement
and self-mockery.
Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixe
ls rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook,
our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photog
raphs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. Th
ey are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond
to, the life portrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that

ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching t

heir work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital
objects they are far more ephemeral than oil on canvas. Vital statistics, glimp
ses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our
attention
and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the
dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.
Although social networking sites are in their infancy, we are seeing their impac
t culturally: in language (where to friend is now a verb), in politics (where it
is de rigueur for presidential aspirants to catalogue their virtues on MySpace)
, and on college campuses (where not using Facebook can be a social handicap). B
ut we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of our use of th
ese sites: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, communi
ty, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what t
ype of behavior online social networking encourages. Does this technology, with
its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing
ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises
a sure
r sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracle s guidance was know
thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle s advice might
be show thyself.
Making Connections
The earliest online social networks were arguably the Bulletin Board Systems of
the 1980s that let users post public messages, send and receive private messages
, play games, and exchange software. Some of those BBSs, like The WELL (Whole Ea
rth Lectronic Link) that technologist Larry Brilliant and futurist Stewart Brand
started in 1985, made the transition to the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. (No
w owned by Salon.com, The WELL boasts that it was the primordial ooze where the o
nline community movement was born. ) Other websites for community and connection e
merged in the 1990s, including Classmates.com (1995), where users register by hi
gh school and year of graduation; Company of Friends, a business-oriented site f
ounded in 1997; and Epinions, founded in 1999 to allow users to give their opini
ons about various consumer products.
A new generation of social networking websites appeared in 2002 with the launch
of Friendster, whose founder, Jonathan Abrams, admitted that his main motivation
for creating the site was to meet attractive women. Unlike previous online comm
unities, which brought together anonymous strangers with shared interests, Frien
dster uses a model of social networking known as the Circle of Friends (developed
by British computer scientist Jonathan Bishop), in which users invite friends an
d acquaintances
that is, people they already know and like to join their network
.
Friendster was an immediate success, with millions of registered users by mid-20
03. But technological glitches and poor management at the company allowed a new
social networking site, MySpace, launched in 2003, quickly to surpass it. Origin
ally started by musicians, MySpace has become a major venue for sharing music as
well as videos and photos. It is now the behemoth of online social networking,
with over 100 million registered users. Connection has become big business: In 2
005, Rupert Murdoch s News Corporation bought MySpace for $580 million.
Besides MySpace and Friendster, the best-known social networking site is Faceboo
k, launched in 2004. Originally restricted to college students, Facebook
which t
akes its name from the small photo albums that colleges once gave to incoming fr
eshmen and faculty to help them cope with meeting so many new people soon extend
ed membership to high schoolers and is now open to anyone. Still, it is most pop
ular among college students and recent college graduates, many of whom use the s
ite as their primary method of communicating with one another. Millions of colle
ge students check their Facebook pages several times every day and spend hours s
ending and receiving messages, making appointments, getting updates on their fri

ends activities, and learning about people they might recently have met or heard
about.
There are dozens of other social networking sites, including Orkut, Bebo, and Ya
hoo 360. Microsoft recently announced its own plans for a social networking site
called Wallop; the company boasts that the site will offer an entirely new way fo
r consumers to express their individuality online. (It is noteworthy that Microso
ft refers to social networkers as consumers rather than merely users or, say, people. )
Niche social networking sites are also flourishing: there are sites offering fo
rums and fellowship for photographers, music lovers, and sports fans. There are
professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, that keep people connected with
present and former colleagues and other business acquaintances. There are sites
specifically for younger children, such as Club Penguin, which lets kids preten
d to be chubby, colored penguins who waddle around chatting, playing games, earn
ing virtual money, and buying virtual clothes. Other niche social networking sit
es connect like-minded self-improvers; the site 43things.com encourages people t
o share their personal goals. Click on watch less TV, one of the goals listed on t
he site, and you can see the profiles of the 1,300 other people in the network w
ho want to do the same thing. And for people who want to join a social network b
ut don t know which niche site is right for them, there are sites that help users
locate the proper online social networking community for their particular (or pe
culiar) interests.
Social networking sites are also fertile ground for those who make it their live
s work to get your attention
namely, spammers, marketers, and politicians. Incide
nts of spamming and spyware on MySpace and other social networking sites are leg
ion. Legitimate advertisers such as record labels and film studios have also set
up pages for their products. In some cases, fictional characters from books and
movies are given their own official MySpace pages. Some sports mascots and bran
d icons have them, too. Procter & Gamble has a Crest toothpaste page on MySpace
featuring a sultry-looking model called Miss Irresistible. As of this summer, she
had about 50,000 users linked as friends, whom she urged to spice it up by sendin
g a naughty (or nice) e-card. The e-cards are emblazoned with Crest or Scope logo
s, of course, and include messages such as I wanna get fresh with you or Pucker up
baby I m getting fresh. A P& G marketing officer recently told the Wall Street Jour
nal that from a business perspective, social networking sites are going to be one
giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers.
As for politicians, with the presidential primary season now underway, candidate
s have embraced a no-website-left-behind policy. Senator Hillary Clinton has off
icial pages on social networking sites MySpace, Flickr, LiveJournal, Facebook, F
riendster, and Orkut. As of July 1, 2007, she had a mere 52,472 friends on MySpa
ce (a bit more than Miss Irresistible); her Democratic rival Senator Barack Obam
a had an impressive 128,859. Former Senator John Edwards has profiles on twentythree different sites. Republican contenders for the White House are poorer soci
al networkers than their Democratic counterparts; as of this writing, none of th
e GOP candidates has as many MySpace friends as Hillary, and some of the leading
Republican candidates have no social networking presence at all.
Despite the increasingly diverse range of social networking sites, the most popu
lar sites share certain features. On MySpace and Facebook, for example, the proc
ess of setting up one s online identity is relatively simple: Provide your name, a
ddress, e-mail address, and a few other pieces of information and you re up and ru
nning and ready to create your online persona. MySpace includes a section, About
Me, where you can post your name, age, where you live, and other personal details
such as your zodiac sign, religion, sexual orientation, and relationship status
. There is also a Who I d Like to Meet section, which on most MySpace profiles is fi
lled with images of celebrities. Users can also list their favorite music, movie
s, and television shows, as well as their personal heroes; MySpace users can als
o blog on their pages. A user friends people that is, invites them by e-mail to ap

pear on the user s Friend Space, where they are listed, linked, and ranked. Below th
e Friends space is a Comments section where friends can post notes. MySpace allo
ws users to personalize their pages by uploading images and music and videos; in
deed, one of the defining features of most MySpace pages is the ubiquity of visu
al and audio clutter. With silly, hyper flashing graphics in neon colors and cli
p-art style images of kittens and cartoons, MySpace pages often resemble an over
decorated high school yearbook.
By contrast, Facebook limits what its users can do to their profiles. Besides ge
neral personal information, Facebook users have a Wall where people can leave them
brief notes, as well as a Messages feature that functions like an in-house Face
book e-mail account. You list your friends on Facebook as well, but in general,
unlike MySpace friends, which are often complete strangers (or spammers) Faceboo
k friends tend to be part of one s offline social circle. (This might change, howe
ver, now that Facebook has opened its site to anyone rather than restricting it
to college and high school students.) Facebook (and MySpace) allow users to form
groups based on mutual interests. Facebook users can also send pokes to friends;
these little digital nudges are meant to let someone know you are thinking about
him or her. But they can also be interpreted as not-so-subtle come-ons; one Fac
ebook group with over 200,000 members is called Enough with the Poking, Let s Just
Have Sex.
Degrees of Separation
It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the curious use of the word netwo
rking to describe this new form of human interaction. Social networking websites
connect users with a network
literally, a computer network. But the verb to netwo
rk has long been used to describe an act of intentional social connecting, espec
ially for professionals seeking career-boosting contacts. When the word first ca
me into circulation in the 1970s, computer networks were rare and mysterious. Ba
ck then, network usually referred to television. But social scientists were alread
y using the notion of networks and nodes to map out human relations and calculat
e just how closely we are connected.
In 1967, Harvard sociologist and psychologist Stanley Milgram, best known for hi
s earlier Yale experiments on obedience to authority, published the results of a
study about social connection that he called the small world experiment.
Given any
two people in the world, person X and person Z, he asked, how many intermediate a
cquaintance links are needed before X and Z are connected? Milgram s research, whic
h involved sending out a kind of chain letter and tracing its journey to a parti
cular target person, yielded an average number of 5.5 connections. The idea that
we are all connected by six degrees of separation (a phrase later popularized by
playwright John Guare) is now conventional wisdom.
But is it true? Duncan J. Watts, a professor at Columbia University and author o
f Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, has embarked on a new small world
project to test Milgram s theory. Similar in spirit to Milgram s work, it relies on
e-mail to determine whether any two people in the world can be connected via six
degrees of separation. Unlike Milgram s experiment, which was restricted to the Unit
ed States, Watts s project is global; as he and his colleagues reported in Science
, Targets included a professor at an Ivy League university, an archival inspector
in Estonia, a technology consultant in India, a policeman in Australia, and a v
eterinarian in the Norwegian army. Their early results suggest that Milgram might
have been right: messages reached their targets in five to seven steps, on aver
age. Other social networking theorists are equally optimistic about the smallnes
s of our wireless world. In Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert-Lszl Barabs
i enthuses, The world is shrinking because social links that would have died out
a hundred years ago are kept alive and can be easily activated. The number of so
cial links an individual can actively maintain has increased dramatically, bring
ing down the degrees of separation. Milgram estimated six, Barabsi writes. We could
be much closer these days to three.

What kind of links are these? In a 1973 essay, The Strength of Weak Ties, sociologis
t Mark Granovetter argued that weaker relationships, such as those we form with
colleagues at work or minor acquaintances, were more useful in spreading certain
kinds of information than networks of close friends and family. Watts found a s
imilar phenomenon in his online small world experiment: weak ties (largely profe
ssional ones) were more useful than strong ties for locating far-flung individua
ls, for example.
Today s online social networks are congeries of mostly weak ties
no one who lists
thousands of friends on MySpace thinks of those people in the same way as he does
his flesh-and-blood acquaintances, for example. It is surely no coincidence, the
n, that the activities social networking sites promote are precisely the ones we
ak ties foster, like rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the e
ver-shifting movements of popular culture and fad. If this is our small world, i
t is one that gives its greatest attention to small things.
Even more intriguing than the actual results of Milgram s small world experiment
o
ur supposed closeness to each other
was the swiftness and credulity of the publi
c in embracing those results. But as psychologist Judith Kleinfeld found when sh
e delved into Milgram s research (much of which was methodologically flawed and ne
ver adequately replicated), entrenched barriers of race and social class undermi
ne the idea that we live in a small world. Computer networks have not removed th
ose barriers. As Watts and his colleagues conceded in describing their own digit
al small world experiment, more than half of all participants resided in North Am
erica and were middle class, professional, college educated, and Christian.
Nevertheless, our need to believe in the possibility of a small world and in the
power of connection is strong, as evidenced by the popularity and proliferation
of contemporary online social networks. Perhaps the question we should be askin
g isn t how closely are we connected, but rather what kinds of communities and fri
endships are we creating?
Won t You Be My Digital Neighbor?
According to a survey recently conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life P
roject, more than half of all Americans between the ages of twelve and seventeen
use some online social networking site. Indeed, media coverage of social networ
king sites usually describes them as vast teenage playgrounds
or wastelands, dep
ending on one s perspective. Central to this narrative is a nearly unbridgeable ge
nerational divide, with tech-savvy youngsters redefining friendship while their
doddering elders look on with bafflement and increasing anxiety. This seems anec
dotally correct; I can t count how many times I have mentioned social networking w
ebsites to someone over the age of forty and received the reply, Oh yes, I ve heard
about that MyFace! All the kids are doing that these days. Very interesting!
Numerous articles have chronicled adults attempts to navigate the world of social
networking, such as the recent New York Times essay in which columnist Michelle
Slatalla described the incredible embarrassment she caused her teenage daughter
when she joined Facebook: everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy wh
en adults have facebooks, her daughter instant-messaged her. unfriend paige right
now. im serious.... i will be soo mad if you dont unfriend paige right now. actu
ally. In fact, social networking sites are not only for the young. More than half
of the visitors to MySpace claim to be over the age of 35. And now that the fir
st generation of college Facebook users have graduated, and the site is open to
all, more than half of Facebook users are no longer students. What s more, the pro
liferation of niche social networking sites, including those aimed at adults, su
ggests that it is not only teenagers who will nurture relationships in virtual s
pace for the foreseeable future.
What characterizes these online communities in which an increasing number of us

are spending our time? Social networking sites have a peculiar psychogeography.
As researchers at the Pew project have noted, the proto-social networking sites
of a decade ago used metaphors of place to organize their members: people were l
inked through virtual cities, communities, and homepages. In 1997, GeoCities boa
sted thirty virtual neighborhoods in which homesteaders or GeoCitizens could gather
rtland for family and parenting tips, SouthBeach for socializing, Vienna for classica
l music aficionados, Broadway for theater buffs, and so on. By contrast, today s soc
ial networking sites organize themselves around metaphors of the person, with in
dividual profiles that list hobbies and interests. As a result, one s entre into th
is world generally isn t through a virtual neighborhood or community but through t
he revelation of personal information. And unlike a neighborhood, where one usua
lly has a general knowledge of others who live in the area, social networking si
tes are gatherings of deracinated individuals, none of whose personal boastings
and musings are necessarily trustworthy. Here, the old arbiters of community geo
graphic location, family, role, or occupation
have little effect on relationship
s.
Also, in the offline world, communities typically are responsible for enforcing
norms of privacy and general etiquette. In the online world, which is unfettered
by the boundaries of real-world communities, new etiquette challenges abound. F
or example, what do you do with a friend who posts inappropriate comments on your
Wall? What recourse do you have if someone posts an embarrassing picture of you
on his MySpace page? What happens when a friend breaks up with someone
do you de
friend the ex? If someone friends you and you don t accept the overture, how serious
a rejection is it? Some of these scenarios can be resolved with split-second sn
ap judgments; others can provoke days of agonizing.
Enthusiasts of social networking argue that these sites are not merely entertain
ing; they also edify by teaching users about the rules of social space. As Danah
Boyd, a graduate student studying social networks at the University of Californ
ia, Berkeley, told the authors of MySpace Unraveled, social networking promotes i
nformal learning.... It s where you learn social norms, rules, how to interact wit
h others, narrative, personal and group history, and media literacy. This is more
a hopeful assertion than a proven fact, however. The question that isn t asked is
how the technology itself the way it encourages us to present ourselves and int
eract
limits or imposes on that process of informal learning. All communities ex
pect their members to internalize certain norms. Even individuals in the transie
nt communities that form in public spaces obey these rules, for the most part; f
or example, patrons of libraries are expected to keep noise to a minimum. New te
chnologies are challenging such norms
cell phones ring during church sermons; bl
aring televisions in doctors waiting rooms make it difficult to talk quietly
and
new norms must develop to replace the old. What cues are young, avid social netw
orkers learning about social space? What unspoken rules and communal norms have
the millions of participants in these online social networks internalized, and h
ow have these new norms influenced their behavior in the offline world?
Social rules and norms are not merely the strait-laced conceits of a bygone era;
they serve a protective function. I know a young woman attractive, intelligent,
and well-spoken who, like many other people in their twenties, joined Facebook
as a college student when it launched. When she and her boyfriend got engaged, t
hey both updated their relationship status to Engaged on their profiles and friend
s posted congratulatory messages on her Wall.
But then they broke off the engagement. And a funny thing happened. Although she
had already told a few friends and family members that the relationship was ove
r, her ex decided to make it official in a very twenty-first century way: he cha
nged his status on his profile from Engaged to Single. Facebook immediately sent out
a feed to every one of their mutual friends announcing the news, Mr. X and Ms. Y a
re no longer in a relationship, complete with an icon of a broken heart. When I a
sked the young woman how she felt about this, she said that although she assumed

her friends and acquaintances would eventually hear the news, there was somethi
ng disconcerting about the fact that everyone found out about it instantaneously
; and since the message came from Facebook, rather than in a face-to-face exchan
ge initiated by her, it was devoid of context
save for a helpful notation of the
time and that tacky little heart.
Indecent Exposure
Enthusiasts praise social networking for presenting chances for identity-play; t
hey see opportunities for all of us to be little Van Goghs and Warhols, renderin
g quixotic and ever-changing versions of ourselves for others to enjoy. Instead
of a palette of oils, we can employ services such as PimpMySpace.org, which offe
rs layouts, graphics, background, and more! to gussy up an online presentation of
self, albeit in a decidedly raunchy fashion: Among the most popular graphics use
d by PimpMySpace clients on a given day in June 2007 were short video clips of t
wo women kissing and another of a man and an obese woman having sex; a picture o
f a gleaming pink handgun; and an image of the cartoon character SpongeBob Squar
ePants, looking alarmed and uttering a profanity.
This kind of coarseness and vulgarity is commonplace on social networking sites
for a reason: it s an easy way to set oneself apart. Pharaohs and kings once celeb
rated themselves by erecting towering statues or, like the emperor Augustus, pla
cing their own visages on coins. But now, as the insightful technology observer
Jaron Lanier has written, Since there are only a few archetypes, ideals, or icons
to strive for in comparison to the vastness of instances of everything online,
quirks and idiosyncrasies stand out better than grandeur in this new domain. I i
magine Augustus MySpace page would have pictured him picking his nose. And he woul
dn t be alone. Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of MySpace most striking
to anyone who spends a few hours trolling its millions of pages: it is an overw
helmingly dull sea of monotonous uniqueness, of conventional individuality, of d
istinctive sameness.
The world of online social networking is practically homogenous in one other sen
se, however diverse it might at first appear: its users are committed to self-ex
posure. The creation and conspicuous consumption of intimate details and images
of one s own and others lives is the main activity in the online social networking
world. There is no room for reticence; there is only revelation. Quickly peruse
a profile and you know more about a potential acquaintance in a moment than you
might have learned about a flesh-and-blood friend in a month. As one college stu
dent recently described to the New York Times Magazine: You might run into someon
e at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they cra
zy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains
over presenting themselves. It s like an embodiment of your personality.
It seems that in our headlong rush to join social networking sites, many of us g
ive up one of the Internet s supposed charms: the promise of anonymity. As Michael
Kinsley noted in Slate, in order to stake their claims as unique individuals, use
rs enumerate personal information: Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the
CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. Kinsley is not impressed; he
judges these sites vast celebrations of solipsism.
Social networkers, particularly younger users, are often nave or ill-informed abo
ut the amount of information they are making publicly available. One cannot help
but marvel at the amount, detail, and nature of the personal information some us
ers provide, and ponder how informed this information sharing can be, Carnegie Me
llon researchers Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross wrote in 2006. In a survey
of Facebook users at their university, Acquisti and Gross detected little or no r
elation between participants reported privacy attitudes and their likelihood of pu
blishing personal information online. Even among the students in the survey who
claimed to be most concerned about their privacy the ones who worried about the s
cenario in which a stranger knew their schedule of classes and where they lived
a

bout 40 percent provided their class schedule on Facebook, about 22 percent put
their address on Facebook, and almost 16 percent published both.
This kind of carelessness has provided fodder for many sensationalist news stori
es. To cite just one: In 2006, NBC s Dateline featured a police officer posing as
a 19-year-old boy who was new in town. Although not grounded in any particular l
ocal community, the imposter quickly gathered more than 100 friends for his MySp
ace profile and began corresponding with several teenage girls. Although the gir
ls claimed to be careful about the kind of information they posted online, when
Dateline revealed that their new friend was actually an adult male who had figur
ed out their names and where they lived, they were surprised. The danger posed b
y strangers who use social networking sites to prey on children is real; there h
ave been several such cases. This danger was highlighted in July 2007 when MySpa
ce booted from its system 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up for memberships
using their real names. There is no way of knowing how many sex offenders have
MySpace accounts registered under fake names.
There are also professional risks to putting too much information on social netw
orking sites, just as for several years there have been career risks associated
with personal homepages and blogs. A survey conducted in 2006 by researchers at
the University of Dayton found that 40 percent of employers say they would consid
er the Facebook profile of a potential employee as part of their hiring decision
, and several reported rescinding offers after checking out Facebook. Yet college
students reaction to this fact suggests that they have a different understanding
of privacy than potential employers: 42 percent thought it was a violation of p
rivacy for employers to peruse their profiles, and 64 percent of students said em
ployers should not consider Facebook profiles during the hiring process.
This is a quaintly Victorian notion of privacy, embracing the idea that individu
als should be able to compartmentalize and parcel out parts of their personaliti
es in different settings. It suggests that even behavior of a decidedly question
able or hypocritical bent (the Victorian patriarch who also cavorts with prostit
utes, for example, or the straight-A business major who posts picture of himself
funneling beer on his MySpace page) should be tolerated if appropriately segreg
ated. But when one s darker side finds expression in a virtual space, privacy beco
mes more difficult and true compartmentalization nearly impossible; on the Inter
net, private misbehavior becomes public exhibitionism.
In many ways, the manners and mores that have already developed in the world of
online social networking suggest that these sites promote gatherings of what psy
chiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called protean selves. Named after Proteus, the Gr
eek sea god of many forms, the protean self evinces mockery and self-mockery, iro
ny, absurdity, and humor. (Indeed, the University of Dayton survey found that 23 p
ercent [of students] said they intentionally misrepresented themselves [on Faceb
ook] to be funny or as a joke. ) Also, Lifton argues, the emotions of the protean s
elf tend to be free-floating, not clearly tied to cause or target. So, too, with
protean communities: Not just individual emotions but communities as well may be
free-floating, Lifton writes, removed geographically and embraced temporarily and
selectively, with no promise of permanence. This is precisely the appeal of onlin
e social networking. These sites make certain kinds of connections easier, but b
ecause they are governed not by geography or community mores but by personal whi
m, they free users from the responsibilities that tend to come with membership i
n a community. This fundamentally changes the tenor of the relationships that fo
rm there, something best observed in the way social networks treat friendship.
The New Taxonomy of Friendship
There is a Spanish proverb that warns, Life without a friend is death without a w
itness. In the world of online social networking, the warning might be simpler: Li
fe without hundreds of online friends is virtual death. On these sites, friendship
is the stated raison d tre. A place for friends, is the slogan of MySpace. Facebook i

s a social utility that connects people with friends. Orkut describes itself as an
online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends. Frien
dster s name speaks for itself.
But friendship in these virtual spaces is thoroughly different from real-world fri
endship. In its traditional sense, friendship is a relationship which, broadly s
peaking, involves the sharing of mutual interests, reciprocity, trust, and the r
evelation of intimate details over time and within specific social (and cultural
) contexts. Because friendship depends on mutual revelations that are concealed
from the rest of the world, it can only flourish within the boundaries of privac
y; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron.
The hypertext link called friendship on social networking sites is very different:
public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized. Friendship on these s
ites focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you kn
ow. Everything about MySpace, for example, is designed to encourage users to gat
her as many friends as possible, as though friendship were philately. If you are
so unfortunate as to have but one MySpace friend, for example, your page reads:
You have 1 friends, along with a stretch of sad empty space where dozens of thumb
nail photos of your acquaintances should appear.
This promotes a form of frantic friend procurement. As one young Facebook user w
ith 800 friends told John Cassidy in The New Yorker, I always find the competitiv
e spirit in me wanting to up the number. An associate dean at Purdue University r
ecently boasted to the Christian Science Monitor that since establishing a Faceb
ook profile, he had collected more than 700 friends. The phrase universally foun
d on MySpace is, Thanks for the add!
an acknowledgment by one user that another ha
s added you to his list of friends. There are even services like FriendFlood.com
that act as social networking pimps: for a fee, they will post messages on your
page from an attractive person posing as your friend. As the founder of one such
service told the New York Times in February 2007, he wanted to turn cyberlosers i
nto social-networking magnets.
The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization o
f friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users
employ most often is managing. The Pew survey mentioned earlier found that teens sa
y social networking sites help them manage their friendships. There is something
Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: Change My Top Fr
iends,
View All of My Friends and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the
need for a virtual purge, Edit Friends. With a few mouse clicks one can elevate o
r downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship.
To be sure, we all rank our friends, albeit in unspoken and intuitive ways. One
friend might be a good companion for outings to movies or concerts; another migh
t be someone with whom you socialize in professional settings; another might be
the kind of person for whom you would drop everything if he needed help. But soc
ial networking sites allow us to rank our friends publicly. And not only can we
publicize our own preferences in people, but we can also peruse the favorites am
ong our other acquaintances. We can learn all about the friends of our friends
o
ften without having ever met them in person.
Status-Seekers
Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that people are incapable of making di
stinctions between social networking friends and friends they see in the flesh. Th
e use of the word friend on social networking sites is a dilution and a debasement
, and surely no one with hundreds of MySpace or Facebook friends is so confused as
to believe those are all real friendships. The impulse to collect as many friend
s as possible on a MySpace page is not an expression of the human need for compan
ionship, but of a different need no less profound and pressing: the need for sta
tus. Unlike the painted portraits that members of the middle class in a bygone e

ra would commission to signal their elite status once they rose in society, soci
al networking websites allow us to create status
not merely to commemorate the a
chievement of it. There is a reason that most of the MySpace profiles of famous
people are fakes, often created by fans: Celebrities don t need legions of MySpace
friends to prove their importance. It s the rest of the population, seeking a for
m of parochial celebrity, that does.
But status-seeking has an ever-present partner: anxiety. Unlike a portrait, whic
h, once finished and framed, hung tamely on the wall signaling one s status, maint
aining status on MySpace or Facebook requires constant vigilance. As one 24-year
-old wrote in a New York Times essay, I am obsessed with testimonials and solicit
them incessantly. They are the ultimate social currency, public declarations of
the intimacy status of a relationship.... Every profile is a carefully planned
media campaign.
The sites themselves were designed to encourage this. Describing the work of B.J
. Fogg of Stanford University, who studies persuasion strategies used by social ne
tworking sites to increase participation, The New Scientist noted, The secret is
to tie the acquisition of friends, compliments and status
spoils that humans wil
l work hard for to activities that enhance the site. As Fogg told the magazine, Yo
u offer someone a context for gaining status, and they are going to work for tha
t status. Network theorist Albert-Lszl Barabsi notes that online connection follows
the rule of preferential attachment
that is, when choosing between two pages, one w
ith twice as many links as the other, about twice as many people link to the mor
e connected page. As a result, while our individual choices are highly unpredictab
le, as a group we follow strict patterns. Our lemming-like pursuit of online stat
us via the collection of hundreds of friends clearly follows this rule.
What, in the end, does this pursuit of virtual status mean for community and fri
endship? Writing in the 1980s in Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah
and his colleagues documented the movement away from close-knit, traditional com
munities, to lifestyle enclaves which were defined largely by leisure and consumpti
on. Perhaps today we have moved beyond lifestyle enclaves and into personality enc
laves or identity enclaves
discrete virtual places in which we can be different (an
d sometimes contradictory) people, with different groups of like-minded, though
ever-shifting, friends.
Beyond Networking
This past spring, Len Harmon, the director of the Fischer Policy and Cultural In
stitute at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, offered a new course about
social networking. Nichols is a small school whose students come largely from Co
nnecticut and Massachusetts; many of them are the first members of their familie
s to attend college. I noticed a lot of issues involved with social networking si
tes, Harmon told me when I asked him why he created the class. How have these sit
es been useful to Nichols students? It has relieved some of the stress of transit
ions for them, he said. When abrupt departures occur
their family moves or they ha
ve to leave friends behind they can cope by keeping in touch more easily.
So perhaps we should praise social networking websites for streamlining friendsh
ip the way e-mail streamlined correspondence. In the nineteenth century, Emerson
observed that friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually comma
nd. Now, technology has given us the freedom to tap into our network of friends w
hen it is convenient for us. It s a way of maintaining a friendship without having
to make any effort whatsoever, as a recent graduate of Harvard explained to The N
ew Yorker. And that ease admittedly makes it possible to stay in contact with a
wider circle of offline acquaintances than might have been possible in the era b
efore Facebook. Friends you haven t heard from in years, old buddies from elementa
ry school, people you might have (should have?) fallen out of touch with
it is n
ow easier than ever to reconnect to those people.

But what kind of connections are these? In his excellent book Friendship: An Exp
os, Joseph Epstein praises the telephone and e-mail as technologies that have gre
atly facilitated friendship. He writes, Proust once said he didn t much care for th
e analogy of a book to a friend. He thought a book was better than a friend, bec
ause you could shut it and be shut of it
when you wished, which one can t always d
o with a friend. With e-mail and caller ID, Epstein enthuses, you can. But social
networking sites (which Epstein says speak to the vast loneliness in the world ) h
ave a different effect: they discourage being shut of people. On the contrary, the
y encourage users to check in frequently, poke friends, and post comments on other
s pages. They favor interaction of greater quantity but less quality.
This constant connectivity concerns Len Harmon. There is a sense of, if I m not onli
ne or constantly texting or posting, then I m missing something,
he said of his stud
ents. This is where I find the generational impact the greatest not the use of th
e technology, but the overuse of the technology. It is unclear how the regular us
e of these sites will affect behavior over the long run
especially the behavior
of children and young adults who are growing up with these tools. Almost no rese
arch has explored how virtual socializing affects children s development. What doe
s a child weaned on Club Penguin learn about social interaction? How is an adole
scent who spends her evenings managing her MySpace page different from a teenage
r who spends her night gossiping on the telephone to friends? Given that people w
ant to live their lives online, as the founder of one social networking site rece
ntly told Fast Company magazine, and they are beginning to do so at ever-younger
ages, these questions are worth exploring.
The few studies that have emerged do not inspire confidence. Researcher Rob Nyla
nd at Brigham Young University recently surveyed 184 users of social networking
sites and found that heavy users feel less socially involved with the community a
round them. He also found that as individuals use social networking more for enter
tainment, their level of social involvement decreases. Another recent study condu
cted by communications professor Qingwen Dong and colleagues at the University o
f the Pacific found that those who engaged in romantic communication over MySpace
tend to have low levels of both emotional intelligence and self-esteem.
The implications of the narcissistic and exhibitionistic tendencies of social ne
tworkers also cry out for further consideration. There are opportunity costs whe
n we spend so much time carefully grooming ourselves online. Given how much time
we already devote to entertaining ourselves with technology, it is at least wor
th asking if the time we spend on social networking sites is well spent. In inve
sting so much energy into improving how we present ourselves online, are we miss
ing chances to genuinely improve ourselves?
We should also take note of the trend toward giving up face-to-face for virtual
contact
and, in some cases, a preference for the latter. Today, many of our cult
ural, social, and political interactions take place through eminently convenient
technological surrogates
Why go to the bank if you can use the ATM? Why browse
in a bookstore when you can simply peruse the personalized selections Amazon.com
has made for you? In the same vein, social networking sites are often convenien
t surrogates for offline friendship and community. In this context it is worth c
onsidering an observation that Stanley Milgram made in 1974, regarding his exper
iments with obedience: The social psychology of this century reveals a major less
on, he wrote. Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of s
ituation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act. To an increas
ing degree, we find and form our friendships and communities in the virtual worl
d as well as the real world. These virtual networks greatly expand our opportuni
ties to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity
for genuine connection. As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, I cons
istently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySp
ace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook. That she finds these online relat
ionships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability

and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk
the ri
sk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking webs
ites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can b
e humanly satisfying remains to be seen.
Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethic
s and Public Policy Center.
Christine Rosen, "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism," The New Atlantis,
Number 17, Summer 2007, pp. 15-31.
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Reviews and Reconsiderations
Christine Rosen
In an August 1938 entry in his journal, the critic Walter Benjamin jotted down a
Brechtian maxim: Take your cue not from the good old things, but from the bad ne
w ones. This is an apt aphorism for Evgeny Morozov s new book, To Save Everything C
lick Here. A coruscating and sometimes scathing polemic, the wide-ranging book c
hallenges our culture s uncritical approach to technology and attacks Silicon Vall
ey s assumption that we should genuflect to its many creations.
Taking as his heroes an eclectic group
philosophers and critics such as Ivan Ill
ich, Jane Jacobs, Michael Oakeshott, and Hans Jonas, among others
Morozov, a con
tributing editor to The New Republic and frequent contributor to the New York Ti

mes, is an enthusiastic skeptic of self-appointed experts who claim to be able t

o mold human nature. He indicts our contemporary technologists for their quest to
fit us all into a digital straitjacket by promoting efficiency, transparency, c
ertitude, and perfection and, by extension, eliminating their evil twins of fric
tion, opacity, ambiguity, and imperfection.
Morozov s chief target is an ideology he calls solutionism, a term he borrows from a
rchitecture and urban planning. It has come to refer to an unhealthy preoccupatio
n with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions
the kind of stuff that wows
audiences at TED Conferences
to problems that are extremely complex, fluid, and
contentious, he writes. Solutionists seek a technological fix to a problem witho
ut ever asking if the thing they are seeking to fix even is a problem. And they
believe that the information and transparency our technologies make available to
us will inevitably make us all freer and happier, a notion as misguided as its
historical antecedent, the Enlightenment belief that knowledge is always liberat
ing.
Take, for example, the Quantified Self movement
the obsessives who use computers
, smartphones, and even wearable sensors to systematically record information ab
out their lives. These self-tracking navel-gazers, Morozov claims, harbor a hidde
n hope that numbers might eventually reveal some deeper inner truth about who we r
eally are, what we really want, and where we really ought to be. They believe tha
t their relentless analysis of data will solve complicated problems, like the ob
esity epidemic. Morozov argues that they make the fundamental error of equating
information with knowledge in this case, self-knowledge. And they ignore the rea
lity that numbers themselves are never objective, since how we choose to slice up
reality, what elements we highlight, and what elements we shade will greatly in
fluence what kinds of measurements we generate. Expectations and assumptions are
buried within each bit of software, within every app that compiles data. But sol
utionists rarely examine those assumptions, in no small part because the urge to
replace human judgments with timeless truths produced by algorithms is the under
lying driving force of solutionism.
Morozov also takes to task Internet-centrists, people for whom the idea of the Int
ernet effortlessly fills minds, pockets, coffers, and even the most glaring narra
tive gaps. To these people, the Internet is imbued with a sense of magic and inef
fability that makes it seem as if the ordinary public and policymakers could not
possibly comprehend it, and so it certainly should be exempt from any meddlesom
e regulations. Morozov is even wary of the term the Internet itself, decrying the
way we have lazily relied on this label as a catch-all to describe a broad array
of technologies. Throughout the book, the term appears in scare quotes.
Morozov s critique of the Internet allows him to survey many of the questionable ass
umptions that plague our discussions of technology: that transparency for its ow
n sake is always good; that efficiency is more important than ethics; that just
because we can do something with technology, we should; that participation means
understanding, and sharing is equal to caring; and that ranking Amazon purchase
s is the same as making decisions in democratic elections. Like all religions, Mor
ozov argues, this sense of reverence for the Internet
might have its productive uses, but it makes for a truly awful guide to solving
complex problems, be they the future of journalism or the unwanted effects of tr
ansparency. It s time we abandon the chief tenet of Internet-centrism and stop con
flating physical networks with the ideologies that run through them.
Morozov applies his argument most persuasively in the arena of politics, noting
how the inefficient, mediocre, opaque processes of local, state, and federal gov
ernance frustrate the titans of Silicon Valley. He quotes Google s Eric Schmidt, w
ho once described Washington, D.C. as an incumbent-protection machine in which the
laws are written by lobbyists
a rich irony given the vast lobbying machine Google

itself runs in the nation s capital. As Morozov puts it, for solutionists and Int
ernet-centrists, politics is out; technocracy is in. But it is a technocracy that
is sophisticated enough not to lay claim to its elite status. Instead, like all
good propagandists, these technocrats convince the masses (the users, as they woul
d put it) that we are in charge. Click the like button on a candidate s Facebook pag
e, electronically sign an online petition, and you re now an active participant in
democratic politics.
But are you? A recent working paper by researchers in Madrid and Mannheim studie
d social-media use and online and offline political activities of Occupy Wall St
reet protestors in Spain, Greece, and the United States. Their findings confirm
Morozov s criticism of the hyperbole surrounding Internet activism : Apparently, new s
ocial media are mainly used as another expansion of the action repertoire of peo
ple already mobilized for a specific cause, according to the researchers. No evide
nce is found for a general increase of offline mobilization among users of socia
l media. In other words: unless you are already actively involved in a cause, twe
eting about it (or reading others tweets about it) is unlikely to inspire you to
get involved in it.
Such Potemkin participation schemes are also evident in the gamification movement,
an effort by Silicon Valley social engineers who want to harness the motivating
effects of video games to persuade you to do the right thing. If you don t feel l
ike taking care of your elderly neighbor, why not turn it into a game where you
can earn points or rewards every time you shovel snow from her driveway? This id
ea that we can game our way to becoming better recyclers, neighbors, and citizens,
Morozov argues, rests on the assumption that the real world is inferior to the v
irtual one precisely because it lacks game mechanisms. As gamification doyenne Ja
ne McGonigal put it in the title of her book: Reality is Broken.
Morozov traces this movement back to the simplistic assumptions of psychological
behaviorism. Such approaches view people as creatures of impulse and reward, an
d they invite us to outsource the difficult work of being virtuous. They encoura
ge us to hand civic responsibilities over to technocrats, and to the technologie
s they design, in exchange for pleasant rewards and freedom from the hard tasks
of citizenship. Gamification apps are little more than moral mercenaries, erodin
g our notions of civic duty.
Although Morozov makes only a handful of passing references to Marshall McLuhan
in his new book in addition to a few in his previous book, The Net Delusion (201
1) it is clear that Morozov is amused and annoyed by the Canadian media theorist s
vague pronouncements and prophetic pose. McLuhan s theories were appealing and ac
cessible at least in part because they were simplistic; Morozov also points out
that McLuhan s grand generalizations overlooked the diversity of actual practices e
nabled by each medium he criticized. By contrast, Morozov wants a technology crit
icism grounded in specifics and open to the possibility that competing claims an
d shifting circumstances make any sweeping statements about the Internet not just
impossible but ridiculous. A devotee of the French sociologist and anthropologis
t Bruno Latour, Morozov wants to complicate the meaning of the Internet in the sam
e way Latour and others have done with the practice of science by revealing the
extent to which it is socially constructed.
This is all well and good, but what are we to do when we move from the realm of
theory to practice? The way in which technology companies resolve practical questi
ons, Morozov writes, depends, in part, on what we, their users, tell them (provid
ed, of course, we can get our own act together). Perhaps I am more of a cynic tha
n Morozov, but assuming we do get our act together, whatever that means, how, pr
ecisely, do we tell corporations like Google and Facebook what we want? The custom
er backlashes that plague Facebook every time the company rolls out a new privac
y-eroding feature is one way, of course, but the speed with which these criticis
ms subside hardly makes them a promising model for communication, much less a pl

ausible way to address the challenges Morozov describes. In dealing with the mak
ers of our technologies, do we need carrots, sticks, or some combination of the
two? And whichever we wield, should we do so as individuals or collectively?
Toward the end of his book, Morozov criticizes the recent installation in Santa
Monica of smart parking meters with sensors that gather data about locations and d
urations of parking sessions and reset the meters when a car leaves a spot so as
to keep the remaining fare from being used by anyone else, while also preventin
g people from feeding the meters beyond their maximum time (at least without reparking the car). This scheme seeks to maximize the economic efficiency of the pa
rking system, Morozov writes, but it could have been designed with different valu
es than the ones the city chose to emphasize. For example, it could instead have
been designed to maximize the deliberative efficiency of our democracy as a whol
e by giving drivers the option to reset the meter, thus making them directly invo
lved in a question of whether they want to provide a benefit to a fellow driver
or to the local government that bears the costs of the service. Morozov believes
that by offering drivers such choices, and perhaps also by giving them statisti
cal information about the cars that park in the area
whether they are fancy new c
ars that only rich people can afford or old, decrepit cars used by grad students o
r illegal immigrants
drivers will suddenly be compelled to think about the severit
y of the parking problem and confront the factors creating it.
But would Morozov s alternative scheme for programming the parking meters really p
rod citizens to think critically about the hidden costs of the invisible infrastr
ucture that surrounds them ? Who is doing the prodding here? Would these citizens
really, as he claims, be made more likely to approach many other aspects of life
with the same critical mindset ? Will the opportunity to reflect on the plight of
grad students paying for parking somehow make people think more critically about
their use of Facebook or their iPhones, or, for that matter, the myriad public
policy problems that we face as a democracy? Is it really the role of technology
designers to create a truly smart system that would find a way to turn us into mor
e reflective, caring, and humane creatures ? Mightn t there be other institutions
su
ch as the family or local communities better suited to perform that molding?
Engineers and programmers could perhaps design their products to encourage peopl
e to pause and reflect on the ways their technology use shapes civic virtues and
political life although how such tweaks would rise above the level of cheap tri
cks like Cass Sunstein s nudges and gamified incentives is hard to imagine. It is no
t easy to reconcile the idea of enforced thoughtfulness with the ease of smooth
designs, of a world where I can Skype with my sister on the other side of the co
untry while downloading a new release from iTunes and
oh yes!
liking Ben Affleck s n
ew TED talk about the situation in the Congo. The seductive simulacrum of partic
ipation in something larger than ourselves is difficult to resist. In the battle
for our collective conscience, one fears that TED-sized nuggets of Affleck will
win over rigorous applications of Latour every time.
In Buddhist philosophy, people are encouraged to embrace discomfort and inconven
ience as important aspects of a fully lived life. But most people aren t Buddhists
; they want convenience, and insofar as we are living in a convenience culture,
we are actively discouraged from living with limits and instead taught to treat
them as simply technical problems to overcome bumps on the road to glorious effi
ciency and greater happiness. The technologies we buy to make our lives more con
venient inherently discourage conscious reflection about our use of them. As a 2
012 advertisement for the iPad put it, When a screen becomes this good, it s simply
you and the things you care about. (And what the ads definitely do not want you
to care about is whether the minerals inside that iPad, like tantalum and tungst
en, have been mined in the Congo to fuel a warlord s murderous campaigns, or wheth
er the Chinese factory workers toiling in unspeakable conditions to assemble the
device with which you are having your special moment are being treated ethicall
y.)

Morozov is more interested in (and better suited to) diagnosing the problems of
solutionism and Internet-centrism than in offering, well, solutions to them. For
example, he writes, We need to develop a better way of evaluating, comparing, an
d discriminating across technological fixes
rather than repeating the same tirin
g message that social fixes are always better. True enough. And yet, there is a g
reat deal of ambiguity in that simple we. Does this mean us, the users of technology
, versus them, the technologists? How do we encourage our technologists to take the
time to study what makes us human in the first place, as Morozov urges them to?
Or should we expect them to do that on their own?
Morozov wants philosophical and practical limits placed on the solutionist impul
se. But where will he find the justification for those limits beyond his own cri
tique? He doesn t delve deeply into virtue ethics or religion, as other critics of
technology have. Instead, he makes the case for the imperfect give-and-take of
democratic politics as the superior alternative to solutionism. But this approac
h assumes that the values people bring to the table haven t already been so decide
dly shaped by the technologies they use that they will be unwilling to accept te
chnological systems that enforce thoughtfulness or public-mindedness. The devil
might be in the -isms Morozov identifies (Internet centrism, solutionism), but t
he details are now stored in our devices and Facebook timelines, easily summoned
to remind us of who we are, or claim to be, or should be. And all of this is wi
thin the platforms created by technology companies which are, of course, in the
business of satisfying our wants, and once they are satisfied, creating new ones
. So what if our use of new technologies changes our understanding of the self i
tself?
For his part Morozov embraces a dynamic view of selfhood as something that emerge
s only slowly and gradually both in the context of individual self-development a
nd across generations in the broader historical context, and he correctly notes t
hat our technologies actively shape our notion of the self; they even define how
and what we think about it. But apart from politics, he says little about other s
ocial and cultural institutions that contribute to the construction of the self,
and that also offer havens from the relentless self-exposure that our use of te
chnology demands havens that will become more important in the future.
One thing Morozov can claim to be is a fine pugilist. No gentle blandishments or
caveats interrupt his criticism of the solutionists, and I confess to being as
giddy as a schoolgirl reading his takedowns of techno-utopians like Steven Johns
on and Clay Shirky (and, likewise, his eviscerations in The New Republic of the
cult of Steve Jobs and the inanity of TED Conferences). The techno-utopians parti
cular brand of cant is long overdue for a thorough thrashing. Many self-appointe
d technology experts have been suckling undisturbed at the teat of the technolog
y industry for so long that they think Facebook s and Google s organic cafeterias an
d subsidized massages and faux-humanitarian rhetoric render them immune to the k
ind of criticism of their business practices that are regularly leveled at the t
obacco or oil industries.
But the techno-pundits Morozov criticizes aren t wildly popular merely because the
y are hawking Silicon Valley snake oil and using a so-broad-as-to-be-meaningless
term like the Internet to do it. They are also telling people what they want to h
ear: that the time they spend playing video games makes them smarter ; that retweet
ing is an act of civic engagement on par with organizing a protest; that quantit
y (measured in clicks, tweets, or likes) is the same as quality and determines t
he worthiness of everything from art to music to literature; that the many hours
they spend on the Internet help solve the world s problems.
And these tranquilizers of the conscience, to borrow a phrase from the tech apos
tate Joseph Weizenbaum, are much harder to fight. The critic must contend with t
he reality that not everyone will cotton to his criticism, not because he is wro

ng but because they can comfortably ignore what he is saying and instead feed on
a steady diet of what they would prefer to hear. Software and technologies that
allow us to personalize the content we see make this ironically much easier to
do than in previous eras. Criticism itself has succumbed to this impulse, which
is why Morozov is right to point out, in his discussion of restaurant reviews, t
hat the science that first Zagat and now Yelp offer is the science of aggregating
opinions about food experiences. The problem is that many people, seduced by the
ease with which they can get information, don t care or even notice that this isn t
the same thing as thoughtful criticism. Perhaps they think, as they self-righte
ously upload yet another ornery restaurant review to Yelp, I have just as much a
right to air my opinion as any stupid food critic. And in a sense they are righ
t: the fact that some people don t have the knowledge or experience to judge a che
f s cuisine is overshadowed by the power of the means they have at their disposal
to do just that.
Criticism has its limits, however, and Morozov himself explores them. At the ris
k of sounding like an overly meddlesome referee in a heavyweight bout, it must b
e said that he is at times too dismissive of critics who, like him, are making a
good-faith effort to chip away at our collective techno-utopianism, but are usi
ng a different set of tools than the particular categories and -isms Morozov out
lines in his book. For example, he recently engaged in a heated argument in the
comments section of the blog of tech critic Nicholas Carr. As the argument escal
ated it became a kind of virtual duel
Pixels at dawn!
that left neither side per
suaded of the other s position. Morozov complains that Carr indulges in Internet-c
entrism, writing in his book, For Carr, the brain is 100 percent plastic, but the
Internet is 100 percent fixed .... he keeps telling us that the Net is, well, shite
. But Carr is essentially criticizing the same thing as Morozov: our uncritical a
pproach to technologies with which we spend an ever-increasing share of our waki
ng hours.
Carr s 2010 book The Shallows grapples with how our experience of certain human ac
tivities like thinking and reading is changing given our use of new technologies
. He asks if this use is changing us physically (especially neurologically) and
culturally. That Morozov wants Carr to be more precise in his critique
is he tal
king about a particular website or the Kindle? is fair. What seems unfair is the
way he tars Carr with the same broad brush as hucksters like Clay Shirky.
This problem seems to happen in part because Morozov is determined to apply labe
ls to all other contenders in debates over technology: they are solutionists and
Internet-centrists; in other parts of the book he also discusses technoneutrals a
nd technostructuralists. But just as a Facebook profile doesn t capture the essence
of a person, nor do these labels entirely do justice to the people they supposed
ly define. (For what it s worth, I tried to divine what my appropriate Morozovian
label would be and came up with: curious and irascible historian skeptical about
solutionist claims, but who has no doubt committed heinous acts of Internet-cen
trism and who is on occasion cloyingly and unapologetically sentimental about pa
rticular aspects of our pre-digital past. You know the type: the person who neve
r misses an opportunity to natter on about the smell of old books or the lost ar
t of letter-writing.)
Morozov s overzealous examination of others theoretical heresies means that he some
times veers from vigorous critique to something that feels more like score-settl
ing. As a result, although there is much to admire and support in Morozov s desire
to set clear theoretical boundaries for our contemporary debates about technolo
gy, one also at times has the feeling of being scolded by the teacher for fidget
ing too much when you re supposed to be standing patiently in line.
Morozov s argument is ultimately most persuasive when he appeals to history, urgin
g readers to see the technologies we use today as part of a much longer story of
man s efforts to alter his environment
a story of brilliant successes and spectac

ular failures. Among the beliefs of Internet-centrists is the firm conviction tha
t we are living through unique, revolutionary times, in which the previous truth
s no longer hold, everything is undergoing profound change, and the need to fix t
hings runs as high as ever. What Morozov does so well is to tell us that we aren t t
hat special; in fact, we are just as blind to our limitations as previous eras w
ere to theirs which opens the door for him to argue for ways of thinking about t
echnology that are more fruitful and humanistic. This is why we have to engage direc
tly and clearly with specific technologies if we are to criticize them properly.
It is also why we are not wrong to be concerned when a company with Google s reac
h and influence hires the transhumanist cheerleader Ray Kurzweil as its Director
of Engineering, and renames its Search Quality Team to its Knowledge Team.
Technological amnesia and complete indifference to history (especially the histor
y of technological amnesia), Morozov writes, remain the defining features of conte
mporary Internet debate. Or, as he puts it in a more plaintive moment, Would it be
too much to expect our geeks to know something about history? No, it would not a
nd they might do well to read some poetry too. Although he was writing long befo
re the ascendance of Silicon Valley, W. H. Auden once commented on a sensibility
all too common in our times, one Morozov s book ably criticizes: The tyrant s device
: Whatever Is Possible Is Necessary.
Beyond simply teaching children to code, we should strive to teach them the comp
licated and fascinating history of science and technology
not to seek out some m
ythical Golden Age when we lived in perfect harmony with technology and nature,
nor to congratulate ourselves on our sophistication, but merely to do what histo
ry does best: allow us to see how others, under different constraints and in dif
ferent eras, tackled the questions we should still ask today. What does it mean
to be human? How might our tools enrich our humanity and how might they inadvert
ently undermine it? Why has every era, including our own, produced people who be
lieve that the latest technologies, ideologies, and social arrangements will be
the ones that finally solve the puzzle that is human nature? History offers us a
chance to learn about something our techno-utopians utterly lack, something for
which there is not and never will be an algorithm: humility. Thinking and delibe
ration are unavoidable; even the most perfect algorithms won t spare us those, Moro
zov writes.
Critics of technology are too apt to quote Aldous Huxley s Brave New World to offe
r warnings and ominous projections of our future. But after reading Morozov s desc
ription of the solutionist fixation with techno-fixes, including solving problem
s that aren t problems, I couldn t help but be reminded of a passage from Huxley s dys
topia in which the Savage explains to Mustapha Mond what it is that Mond s perfect
ly controlled and comfortable society lacks: I don t want comfort, the Savage says. I
want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I
want sin. What he wants is all of the messy complications of being human. So doe
s Morozov. And that is why, although he makes the occasional misstep and stamps
on some all-too-human toes along the way, his provocative book is well worth the
journey.
Christine Rosen, a senior editor of The New Atlantis, is a 2013 Bernard L. Schwa
rtz Fellow at the New America Foundation.
Christine Rosen, "The Imperfectionist," The New Atlantis, Number 38, Winter/Spri
ng 2013, pp. 174-183.
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