Socially Mediated

A Guest Post by Carol Sill

This week, Let’s Talk features a guest post by fellow Substack writer, Carol Sill, a writer and editor living on Salt Spring Island, BC. Her newsletter, Personal Papers, is at carol.substack.com. Her novel, Attars, is available on Amazon. Find her on Twitter @carolsill.

And here’s the question….What causes you more alarm, the degree to which your life revolves around social media or the possibility that it might break down as it did the other day? Send us your thoughts.

Photo by Desiré Kranenburg on Unsplash

Socially Mediated

I’m writing this as the world shudders a little from the Facebook outage. I’m thinking about another level of involvement in our shared awareness. With social media giving a body to the shared unconscious, it gets kinda murky down there these days. But somehow we keep connecting, or at least I do, with friends and family and algorithms all cozied up together by the digital hearth of our personal screens.

Until today.

The outage feels like a test of personal strength. It’s as if I saw the roadblock, stopped the car and got out to look down in amazement at the washed out bridge. “How did that happen?” Other people are there, too. We all stand and stare, scratching our heads, before backing out of the line to go back home again. “Now what? Listen to the sound of the fridge?”

The world-over, so many people feel the glitch in the matrix. The insta-self shimmers, fades and flickers in and out of existence, like a poorly produced hologram. It was never real, we tell ourselves, before we check again, just to see if it’s back up now.

Pundits tell us we’ve been hoodwinked and manipulated. While I reconnected with a friend from kindergarten days, nefarious mathematics targeted us both with ads and opinions neither of us wanted. In that social mediation, my mind’s been kidnapped and set to slave for others. How did that happen?

Is this the state of our lives? All reduced to happening in a tiny screen? Yes, I admit, it is partly so. Because just like peeking through a keyhole lets us see into a greater vaster room, these screens really do assist the scope of our lives. You’re reading this on your screen right now. Did people reject a telescope that showed the universe in focused detail? Of course they did. How about the astrolabe? The electric light?

These inventions, and so many more manifestations of human effort and mind, all are at our fingertips.  And sharing our human mind through these tools changes us, brings up the murky understuff that we have barely named or acknowledged. We can’t help but see all that unclaimed baggage as it circles around on the track, but we insist it surely must belong to others. It may be abandoned at the airport. It may be floating and washing to shore after the boat has sunk. It might be left in an old storage unit, in the back lane, up in the attic, flooded out in the basement. Dad’s garage. Mum’s china cabinet.

“That can’t possibly be mine. I’m different.”

Is it up to us to open it up and find out once and for all who owns this stuff, what it’s for, and what we are supposed to do with it? Can we just leave it there for a while longer?

I don’t know what to do with all this, and my good-hearted vows to make life better, to contribute to a more whole world, require a new configuration. Something more than “likes” and “shares” and “comments”. But what? How? As I’m figuring this out, I’m stepping into a more natural algorithm. From this standpoint, I remain aware this social-mediation is only one part of my life. And remember, the saying goes, “I can quit anytime.”