Alienation and Anxiety: The Effects of Media, Technology, and the Internet on Our Subjectivities

“This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation.”

-Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

We are always being shaped and are always human becomings. Our subjectivities are not static and fixed; rather, we are in flux and are plastic. While our plastic selves can solidify around certain ideas and experiences—they are not stuck. In fact, as soon as our sense of self arises—as soon as consciousness forms and is directed—we are being shaped by the world that we find ourselves thrown into. Language itself appears to structure our consciousness and our relation to and in the world. We experience objects, others, emotions, ideas, and these all find their birthplace in a network of shared meanings—linked and strung together like the network of neurons in our brains. In the 21st century, chief among these influences on our consciousness are the media, technology, and the internet. These forces shape and reify our subjectivities and how we engage with and move throughout the world. What we were promised with each of these additions to our world was a more connected and integrated world—no longer separated by long geographic distances over sea and land. However, this is not what we received—or rather—how we have taken up these technologies and institutions. Instead of overcoming the alienation of the industrial revolution, the informational age has become more alienated through our real-world disconnections with one another in favor of a digital landscape. Moreover, our notion and experience of what the “real world” even is has become convoluted and contested—moving into what some philosophers have described as hyperreality. Drawing from our cultural individualism, narcissism, and obsession with power and alterity: media, technology, and the internet have wreaked havoc on our sense of belonging and purpose in the world leading to greater feelings of alienation and anxiety in our lives.

Media: Constructing Reality

While it is difficult to parse out these influences of media, technology, and the internet, since they are deeply integrated with one another, an exploration and analysis of each may help us to approximate the varying degrees of their effects and our disposition as alienated and estranged subjects. When discussing and analyzing how media constructs our reality, it is important to note that media appears to be—at its most root level—a phenomenon which naturally arises in human societies. For, if we consider media fundamentally simply as the shared network of influences and ideas between subjects, the concept may not seem so interesting and almost a banal given. However, when we consider media as an alive institution of influence, its effects become more concerning. Kellner, in their Critical Media Literacy Guide, brings attention to the complex and multifunctional purpose of media. They write, “Media and information communication technologies can entertain, educate, and empower or distract, mislead, and manipulate. They are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy that educate and socialize us about how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire” (Kellner, 2019, XI). So, media should not be a concept that is taken up as de facto evil or nefarious; rather, we need to understand that it is also not simply a means to be entertained. We also need to understand that media is not a monolithic entity; instead, media in multiplicitious, multifunctional, and multifaceted. Therefore, Kellner does well in citing media as a plurality of communication technologies and underlining the fact that because of this, plural bubbles of perspectival and contested realities form due to varying emerging cultural pedagogies. In other words, media(s) shape our subjectivities and help to create fractured mirrors of our shared lifeworld—some mirrors magnifying certain aspects of our world more than others and other mirrors diminishing other aspects of our world.

Media Manipulation

Perhaps the first thing many might think about when critiquing media and its effect on us is simply that of the power of media to effect—or as some might say—manipulate. This conception of media is one of institutional power. Even while considering media as multifaceted and plural—that is, there being different medias with different content and ideas—each of these medias work to gain influence over people. In their book entitled Hate, Inc., Taibbi comments on understanding media—via the news—being a great source of social manipulation. Taibbi writes, “News companies don’t just want you feeling ashamed of not knowing the news. That’s desperate marketing, ring-around-the-collar tactics. They want you so emotionally invested that your psyche falls apart if the wrong story appears on screen. We want you awake at night, teeth chattering, panicking about things over which you have no control” (Taibbi, 2021, 187). It is truly a double layer of manipulation and influence when one not only hears the message of the media as the only truth-maker, but also that they should not try to tune out because doing so is shameful. When we are formed into ideological camps not only consciously but unconsciously through the environment and media we find ourselves in it is always an alienating effect.

We feel that we must either partition parts of ourselves off to engage with others different from ourselves or we completely sever ourselves from whole groups of people—shrinking our world down into homogenous ideology bubbles hearing the echoes of our own voices. Taibbi further comments on the tactics of manipulation that alienate us all from one another: “The key is to always report negatively about the other audience, but never about your own. They’re bad equals you’re good, and endlessly spinning in that cycle creates hardened, loyal, dependent followers. . .we’re addicting people to conflict, vitriol, and feelings of superiority. It works. Companies know: fear and mistrust are even harder habits to break than smoking” (Taibbi, 2021, 145). Again, if our ideas continuously come packaged to us in such a seductive manner that makes one feel shameful to even disengage with, identities congeal around what we are flooded with. We then come to believe that these identities constitute the entirety of our selves. What’s even more problematic is that these selves are further reified via seeing any other that is not like you as entirely other—something alien. Furthermore, as Taibbi points out, when we supercharge this alienation with feelings of morality and superiority, when we become firm in our loyalties to media, we quickly estranged from people who we often turn into enemies. It goes without saying how disastrous these effects can then become once we demonize and dehumanize whole groups of people.

Hyperreality

Another problem that arises from our relationship with media and the power it has is that we not only alienate ourselves from one another into various camps, but also, we lose any notion of a unified or shared lifeworld/reality. We become estranged from one another and ourselves in disjointed hyperrealities. Fiske, author of Television Culture, comments on this phenomenon and references the philosopher Jean Baudrillard as a theoretical foundation to pull from. Fiske writes, “Images are neither the bearers of ideology, nor the representations of the real, but what Baudrillard calls “the hyperreal”: the television image, the advertisement, the pop song become more “real” than “reality,” their sensuous imperative is so strong that they are our experience, they are our pleasure” (Fiske, 2010, 259). Here we see a more nuanced and rich understanding of media and technologies shaping of reality. Fiske states that not only does the image—that is, a presentation of some experienced reality—not act simply as a tool for ideology (think propaganda), it also does not re-present the real. The image instead becomes more real that the real. The image is what is interacted with and sought after. Let’s look at an example of this important concept. Pornography is a great example of hyperreality. In pornography, the actors (note: there’s a reason why we refer to them as actors) play a part. They are on a movie set. Camera techniques alter the display of the event. The sex one views on screen was taken in multiple scenes. Makeup and lighting are used as well as photo and video editing. In a substantial sense, even the actual physical sex as witnessed by the production team is not real.

However, to understand what Fiske and Baudrillard are truly trying to convey here we must analyze the consuming viewer of the porn. Through whatever device, the viewer watches the video of the porn and is thus yet another step removed from the event. This is true of anything one watches on a screen. What makes pornography a great illustration of hyperreality is that the consumer becomes easily addicted to the image rather than what is represented. In fact, many come to prefer watching pornography rather than seeking to have sex themselves. Hyperreality becomes more real than the real. Fiske illustrates this well when they say: “The words or images in the text are exchanged for pleasure, the commodity that the reader buys is not a sense of the world, but pleasure in the processes of representing and figuring that world” (Fiske, 2010, 226). When we begin to prefer the image over the thing itself, we become estranged and alienated. We are alienated because rather than seeking the actual object or other, we sublimate our desire with a copy. How easy is it for someone to simply stay at home online watching pornography to satisfy a sexual desire than to seek a relationship with an actual person who might reject them? The result of this is not only an alienation from others but also ourselves since we now commodify the answers to our internal desires and interests.

To reiterate, this phenomenon happens with all media—broadly defined—in our lives. Baudrillard describes this in the following famous passage from his Simulacra and Simulation: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard, 1994, 1). A great example to drive this concept home is that of the xerox machine which Baudrillard references in later works. The xerox machine makes copies of original documents; however, these copies can then in turn become copies. Copies of copies of copies ad infinitum. With each copy—with each abstraction—we not only are further removed from the original; additionally, we eventually lose the original. To use Baudrillard’s language, the map that charts the territory not only disappears but so too does the territory. In this hyperreality we experience the world as foundationless, and this provokes feelings of anxiety and detachment from anything stable. Perhaps this may seem at odds with the notion of media as an institutional power; however, we must realize that the very danger here is that the content itself is malleable and it is difficult to trace who is pulling the strings. The more terrifying thought is that no one person or group is pulling strings.

Technology: Identity Formation and Narcissism

If media is the King that we pledge allegiance to, surely technology is his handmaid. Technology is perhaps the main focus of this analysis as it acts as our mediator—our very own personal Hermes. With each passing generation it appears that we become more and more reliant on and attached to our technologies. Indeed, there are whole schools of thought devoted to technological progress and the supposed coming salvation that the posthuman singularity messiah will bring us—a logical extension of neoliberalism. For good or for ill there is no doubt that technology acts as a medium of identity formation in our culture. Kellner echoes this sentiment when they write: “Radio, television, film, cell phones, popular music, the Internet, social networking, and other forms and products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our sense of selfhood; our notions of gender; our conceptions of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, and of sexuality” (Kellner, 2019, XI). While technologies are integral to the species from the very earliest of times, their strength in ideological influence have grown. Just as the invention of the printing press in the 1500s turned the world upside-down, so now has the technologies of smartphones, computers, and the Internet. Interestingly, it seems that society is both aware and unaware of this—or at least unaware of the consequences: isolation, identity politics, and narcissism. Parents of children have long been concerned of the influence of old institutions on their children: school, church, family life. However, this pales in comparison to the primary mode of influence today: media as accessed through technology.

The Mediated Self

Before discussing some of the effects of technology on our contemporary subjectivities—namely, alienation and narcissism—a discussion regarding how it is that technology works as a mediator in our lives is necessary. De Zengotita, in their book appropriately titled Mediated, defines what is meant by the term mediated: “…mediation refers to arts and artifacts that represent, that communicate—but also, and especially, to their effects on the way we experience the world, and ourselves in it” (de Zengotita, 2022, 12). Moving forward, this will work as our operational definition. The key point here is found in the last part of the definition, mediation effects our very experience of and in the world. The question that arises is what experiences are we having in and of the world through these selves mediated by technology? As the reader here might guess, frequently it has been one of alienation and estrangement—as previously discussed. But what about the technologies proper? Baudrillard provides an illuminating and chilling analysis for us: “There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages.” (Baudrillard, 1989, 49) The technology is indifferent to its own messages. Our televisions, phones, computers, all providing indifferent images and information to everyone and to no one. In this, we see a further illustration of the hyperreal. The machine is cold and lifeless, and the cogs turn to produce and produce regardless of whether there is a function to be seen or a purpose to be divined. This is the image of the perpetuation of ideology that has no puppet master pulling the strings. There is something quite ominous about this. Our technologies that give rise to the hyperreal and our mediate selves are from another world. When society slowly brings this unconscious experience into consciousness, as Baudrillard does here, it is difficult to make sense of our sense of freedom, control, and purpose in the world; for, if there is a puppet master, there can be resistance. Otherwise, how can one resist and break free?

Moreover, our mediated selves are constantly reified by our attachments to what lies on the other side of the telephone. That is to say, when our identities become some intertwined in the material that technology provides—essentially all that we have come to see as what constructs our subjectivity—we become reliant on affirmations of who we are by symbolic and cyber-others. De Zengotita provides a powerful insight into how this process unfolds. He writes, “The flattered self is a mediated self, and the alchemy of mediation, the osmotic process through which reality and representation fuse, gets carried into our psyches by the irresistible flattery that goes with being incessantly addressed” (de Zengotita, 2022, 12). If the flattered self is a mediated self, the mediated self is a flattered self. What does he mean here by flattered? He answers this question by addressing how this mediated self is reified by flattery. As we are connected to our cyber-social worlds, we seek validation and attention from other cyber-selves. We connect to Facebook hoping for that release of dopamine in our brains when we see a like on our post. We continue our streak on Snapchat—even with meaningless images—simply to believe that we are connected to the receiver. With each view of our Instagram story, we are more and more flattered as we believe that someone cares about us. One might respond, “Sure. What’s wrong with feeling good about yourself and making others feel good about themselves?” The answer to this comes to us in a story we are all familiar with but misread.

The Myth of Narcissus

Indeed, there is something psychological happening here in our mediated selves as we relate to and through our technologies to bolster our sense of identity and self-worth. However, there is something deeper still in our building of our self-conception. Renown media theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan reminds us of the story of Narcissus in his seminal work entitled Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man: “The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.” (McLuhan, 1994, 51) Sadly, we have long interpreted the story of Narcissus as falling in love with himself which acts not only as a misinterpretation but an unconsciously deliberate misinterpretation to reify our cultural landscape—the ideology we breathe. The key element in the story of Narcissus is that he mistook his reflection for that of an other. As McLuhan rightly states, Narcissus does not recognize the mirrored image as himself and thus as a subject numbed to himself. While being dependent on the hyperreality of the like on your photo on Instagram may be a problem unto itself; however, this is not the problem we all face as Narcissus. McLuhan says as much when he states, “It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus” (McLuhan, 1994, 52). To put it clearly and concisely, what we all miss is that this image in the water is ourselves. Our technology has come to constitute ourselves. It is an “extension of man.” McLuhan’s subtitle is key to our understanding the story of Narcissus. When we become numb to this fact, we lose awareness of what processes are ongoing in our lifeworld that work to constitute ourselves and this of course has a direct impact on how we are and can be in the world.

The Digital Landscape: Alienation and Alterity

As a final topic of analysis, we will turn to the digital landscape itself that we are mediated to through our medias and technologies. The aim here is to uncover how the digital landscape operates to manifest itself through the creation of our subjectivities as participants in it. Turning once more to Kellner’s Critical Media Literacy Guide, they write, “Media culture shapes our views of the world into categories of “us” and “them,” influencing our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media narratives provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture.” (Kellner, 2019, XI). While we briefly touched on this idea of identity formation via alterity earlier, it is worth a deeper examination. In the digital landscape lives the majority of our navigations with and through media. In this cyberspace, our myths and symbols are constantly constructed and deconstructed. What is important to note is that the solidification of these are often the result of alterity or Othering. While it might be fruitful to explore the dialectical nature between myth-making and Othering—simply put, to determine the causal order if there is one at all—the purpose here will be that of analyzing the psychosocial effects.

Alterity and Technological Alienation

It is a familiar scene; a family sits down to dinner “together” and turns on the television to which they turn their attention. The critique of the alienation of technology is nothing new and people have voiced the separating effect of television since becoming commonplace in America during the 1950s. However, with the advent of television or even of radio, families would still turn their attention together. While this resulted in a diminished face to face communication between individuals, the act was nonetheless communal. Fast forward to today where each person has their own internet connected media device and the picture looks different. Rather than turning attention together as a group to the television or radio, we sit down for dinner and turn to our individual bubbles of cyberspace. We have become so addicted to these individual curated bubbles that even the thought of face-to-face communication is anxiety provoking for many. Not only this but whole modes of being such as solitude are avoided at all costs for fear of boredom and loneliness. The psychologist Sherry Turkle has worked to document and analyze this phenomenon for more than two decades now. In her book entitled Reclaiming Conversation, Turkle states the following, “…in our rush to connect, we flee solitude. In time, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves is diminished. If we don’t know who we are when we are alone, we turn to other people to support our sense of self. This makes it impossible to fully experience others as who they are.” (Turkle, 2016, 44). Interestingly, through our loss of solitude in search for connection, what happens is not meeting and connecting to others at all. When we build our identities solely from the likes or dislikes of the other, all of us fail to know the other as anything more than what we make them to be. While this is a fundamental part of identity formation—to know ourselves through the eyes of the Other—any act of reflection on our own experiences through solitude are not just lost but intensely avoided altogether. Turkle continues in saying: “The web promises to make our world bigger. But as it works now, it also narrows our exposure to ideas. We can end up in a bubble in which we hear only the ideas we already know. Or already like” (Turkle, 2016, 256). In this important critique we see the breeding grounds of prescriptive tribalism and groupthink. If you’re a conservative American, you watch Fox News. If you’re liberal, you watch CNN or MSNBC. If you want people to like you, you must wear what’s in fashion. If you live in Georgia and like the University of Alabama’s football team, you are the devil incarnate. Since your sense of identity comes from the voice of other participants in your digital landscape, it is difficult to escape this and encounter ideas and ways of being other than what your bubble dictates. So, in a very real sense, we are not only alienated from truly meeting one another, we are also alienated from ourselves.

Turning a final time to the work of Baudrillard for further insight and analysis, the depth of the effects here grows further still. In reference to our mediated relationship with the Other, Baudrillard writes, “with modernity, we enter the age of the production of the Other. The aim is no longer to kill the Other, devour it, seduce it, vie with it, love it or hate it, but, in the first instance, to produce it. The Other is no longer an object of passion, but an object of production” (Baudrillard, 2002, 51). This further complicates the picture of how we construct and cut up the identities of ourselves and others in our digital landscapes. While it is true that communities and subjects are cut along tribal lines, what Baudrillard suggests here is that the production of the Other is for the mere sake of production itself. To make sense of this, we need not look further than the function of capitalism. While capitalism can be spoken of in terms of its profit motivation, it relies entirely on incessant production and growth. Indeed, growth is a necessary condition for a capitalist system and what it produces is not of much relevance. What is important is just that it does produce, and these productions should not merely be thought of as limited to goods and objects, but also of services, ideas, culture, and subjects. Capitalism also seeks efficiency dogmatically. This ties in well with our forementioned discussion of hyperreality and the advent of the Xerox machine. To be sure, Baudrillard speaks candidly and accurately in describing the production and copying of our own selves. In referencing the film Blade Runner, he states, “The clones are already there; the virtual beings are already there. We are all replicants! We are so in the sense that, as in Blade Runner, it is already almost impossible to distinguish properly human behaviour from its projection on the screen, from its double in the image and its computerized prostheses” (Baudrillard, 2002, 199-200). In the hyperreality of the digital landscape it becomes extremely difficult to parse out where one subject ends and another begins. Again, doubtlessly, we are all always already in our thrownness and constituted by the Other; however, what we see in the digital landscape is an exacerbation of individual subjectivities that can create, choose, meet, and be met. Moreover, even while we are unaware of this reality, it unconsciously manifests in us through feelings of estrangement and anxiety.

Conclusion

So, what conclusion can be drawn here? Is there a solution? Should there even be a solution? Certainly, the effects of media, technology, and the internet are deeply entrenched in our world. Certainly, our society is growing more and more alienated and anxious. The effects of our relationship—our near total embodiment within the hyperreal—are becoming apparent. Undoubtably, a philosopher of the caliber of Jean Baudrillard or the brilliance of a psychologist like Sherry Turkle are helpful in diagnosing psychosocial ills; however, such issues are not akin to taking ibuprofen for a headache. These are complex and overdetermined problems that we face. This analysis is only one of a multiplicity of possible reflections and diagnoses. Many may even deny that there is no clear problem here while some like Turkle have made suggestions on possible remedies to “Reclaim Conversations.” If there is a solution, it is not a simple one. In our society, it is near impossible to simply “unplug” from every gadget and gizmo. It is not clear that that is even desired—as we have seen through our discussion of addiction. However, while we reflect upon the implications of these lived experiences, one thing does appear to be possible. We can continue to talk about them. We can raise our awareness of psychosocial struggles—even when there are no clear solutions and even when we know our investigations and knowledge will be limited. That alone is worth it.

References

Baudrillard, J. (1989). America. Verso.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Amsterdam University Press.

Baudrillard, J., & Turner, C. (2002). Screened Out. Adfo Books.

Fiske, J. Television Culture (2nd ed.). (2010). Routledge.

Kellner, D., Share, J., & Luke, A. (2019). The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education. Brill Sense.

McLuhan, M., & Lapham, L. H. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press.

Taibbi, M. (2021). Hate Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. Adfo Books.

Turkle, S. (2016). Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. Penguin Books.

Zengotita, T. de. (2022). Mediated (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Paperbacks.