Can you feed me... again?
Losing language and trying to stay afloat.
Can you feed me that line again?
If I make another Pinterest board or saved collection on Instagram to curate the person I want to be, will I feel real?
Will I suddenly have the script memorised? The script to tell people who I am? The script I didn’t really write myself – a pastiche of trends and culture and aesthetics which do not come from my own experiences?
Will I feel authentic?
Do I need to feel authentic?
Attention and dreaming. Scrolling and being. There’s no blueprint for this way of living, for coming of age and trying to learn personhood and humanity within an internet-moderated world. The Green Brothers have likened the internet to a) a cigarette, and b) food (which is a metaphor also used in this -
- essay). I’m not sure I like any of it - it feels kind of convoluted (or maybe I’m just resistant to people intellectualising [is that a word] a place where I spend so much time); but I’m interested in it nonetheless.
One of my favourite essays I’ve read this year is this New Yorker piece titled ‘The Battle For Attention.’ This quote in particular stands out to me:
“When I look at the world, I feel that something is being lost or actively undermined,” she told me. “Sometimes it feels like attention. Sometimes it feels like imagination. Sometimes it feels like”—she thought for a moment—“that thing you wanted when you became an English major, that sort of half-dreamed, half-real thing you thought you were going to be. Whatever that is: it’s under attack.”
The Battle for Attention is my favourite essay about our reduced attention spans I’ve read. The essay is hopeful and uses The Order of the Third Bird to introduce a different perspective on attention and perception, while many other discussions remain perfectly focused on people who often use social media.
It’s a no-brainer, really – I’m not sure anyone who uses Instagram or TikTok believes it’s good for them. But a huge side effect - or maybe just effect - is on our curation and construction of identity. Performance of self has never been easier (see here); we’re so in control of how other people perceive us, and we’re surrounded by what seems like inspiration for all the versions of ourselves we could grow into.
But increasingly, I feel like I’m learning a script of how to be a particular kind of person. It’s not personal, or individual. I’m reliant on cultural touchstones and turns of phrase to perform all aspects of my identity because it feels like the easiest way to understand myself and in turn have other people understand me.
Honestly? I’m scared of it. I’m losing the things that used to inform and inspire the way I acted and understood the world. I’m losing my ability to articulate my place in the world and my relationship to myself and other people. As a poet? What do I do if all my words become unoriginal, what do I do when all I know is how to reference already decontextualised cultural moments and trending aesthetics? How do I make sense of anything if that’s the way I experience the world?
What bothers me the most is that I’m losing vocab. Often I revert to ‘brain-rot’ dialect; so real, so true. Diabolical, criminal, crazy. People I know are defined by vibes or terms which used to be reserved for therapy. “You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events,” writes Freya India.
I’m worried I don’t take the time to articulate what people/places/events mean to me because it’s easier to reduce them to a learned buzzword. I’m doing the same thing to myself, and I know it’s impacting my art and creative output.
None of this was part of my life when I fell in love with poetry, or when I spent hours trawling the dictionary as a kid. My favourite words were (are?) brown, agglomeration, synthesise and awl (among others). Maybe I’m missing Life through my constant search for understanding etc. which is particularly exhausting when I’m actively losing the words I need to form that understanding (diva DOWN!!!!!)
When I was seventeen, I published an article entitled ‘Girlhood by Design: How teenage girls are setting the trends for mass media’. This is the general premise:
“We’ve developed a social media culture that custom-builds community for people based on their wants, beliefs, and thinking – it is easier than ever to search for something that reflects who you are and who you want to be. Primarily, the drivers of this culture are teenage girls – and who else would we trust to do the job? Aren’t thirteen-year-old-girls the ones who have sensationalised one-word self-definitions: ‘Hufflepuff,’ ‘Aries,’ ‘Amity,’ ‘ENFP,’ ‘Cabin 10’ – we’ve been doing this for so many years, both on and off the internet, only now self-definition in internet spaces is allowed to be more nuanced and complex because of the links we make between popular, mainstream mass media and our personalities.”
I feel bad for negating everything I wrote two years ago (and had published a year ago), but… I just disagree.
Naïvely, I wrote that the culture created by teenage girls would still exist if it wasn’t something we had to buy, wasn’t inherently tied to tickets to the Barbie movie and Little Women posters and Tamagotchis and CDs and Vinyls and and and… but I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t think teenage girls are designing the internet world they live in. It’s being manufactured for us. Moreover, I no longer believe our obsession with one-word definitions provides us with ‘nuanced and complex’ reflections on our personality; I think it means we’re losing originality and uniqueness because we’re scared that if we’re different, we won’t belong anymore.
The uniformity of an algorithm is in our heads. Once we’re trapped in our echo-chamber social media spaces, we feel like we must become a part of it, rather than developing an identity and personality based on original experiences. Being ‘authentic’ online means being recognisable. Being ‘performative’ isn’t much different. There’s no way to curate a true sense of self within the internet because of how easily certain aspects of identity are reduced to nothingness by its everchanging touchpoints.
I’m mourning the magic of language. The little descriptors I used to use for people, soft, romantic, mine, have been exchanged for words I know people will understand (DIVAAAA). Where is the mystery and intrigue!? How do we unpack The World without giving life to the people in it, life which exists in colorful, magical terms unable to be captured by the internet and its language?
And how do I give that same grace and respect to myself?
see also:
(on performativity and authenticity.)
(Eliza McLamb talks a lot about reliance on labels and how it impacted her construction of identity - I especially enjoy this quote:
“it’s like, here’s an explanation for all of these existential feelings… but eventually it became sort of a prison. Like, oh, this is who I am as a person, I will always feel this way, I will always have these tendencies and these inclinations.”)
(more from Eliza McLamb on authenticity and why we don’t want or feel it online - so why should we try?)
(the Green brothers on addiction and the internet.)
inthiscorneroftheworld i’m asking you to please address any future glimmers of inspiration to my dreams or the spring flowers in bloom or the salt in the ocean or the smell of summer or the sound of my friend’s laughter instead of my Discovery page.
Great piece - thanks for writing it.