Abstract
Digital technologies are pervasive and ensnaring, resulting in widespread dependence of their varying forms and functions. In this commentary we reflect on the effects of our own digital dependencies, noticing how as digital technologies edge toward higher degrees of sentience, we humans are becoming psychically deadened, ever reliant on such technologies to support our fractured selves. Providing three intimate introspective accounts, we foreground emergent themes related to aliveness and addiction, illustrating how social media tendencies are rooted in existential insecurities stemming from psychic difficulties and traumas. We encourage marketing theorists to critically interrogate how digital technologies, and in particular social networking sites, exploit our vulnerabilities to propagate an addictive logic toward aims of capital accumulation.
What does it mean to be ‘alive’ in an age of digital consumption? How are we to understand our humanity, particularly when what it means to be ‘distinctly human’ is in crisis (O’Gieblyn, 2021)? This crisis stems from the increasing aliveness we attribute to technological forms and functions. Indeed, our aliveness, in its embodied vitality, energy, and expression 1 , is increasingly interwoven into technological forms. At least in industrialized contexts, we allow digital technologies to inform and mediate our everyday experiences, our experiences of living, of being alive (Lupton, 2016). As these technologies edge closer toward what we might consider more human insight, using semantic thought and natural language processing (e.g. ChatGPT), we may increasingly feel our basic humanity threatened. We wonder if, as technology becomes more autonomous, we humans are becoming increasingly deadened, alienated from our own sense of aliveness.
Of course, capital interests are embedded, nay invested, in the pervasive everyday blurring of what it is to be human and technology (Brennan, 2002; Stiegler, 2019). Digital technologies – many claiming to be distinctly ‘social’ 2 – are purposively designed to keep us ‘connected’ in order to generate data shared with (sold to) a multitude of stakeholders for marketing purposes (Seymour, 2019; Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016). Therefore, as we mediate our lives with digital technologies our aliveness is more integrally influenced by capital. Given that digital marketing tactics lie at the heart of digital design, as marketing theorists we share a burden of collective responsibility for understanding the machine/human interface and its consequences. From the position of critical scholarship (Ahlberg et al., 2022), reclaiming the essence of our humanity apart from the interest of capital is paramount.
Reflecting on our collective relationships with social media over the past 20 years, we are struck by its uncanny ability to ensnare us in a loop of rumination. What was once considered an extension of self (Belk, 2013) now consumes us. We have become slaves to the scroll, collectors of views, likes, followers, comments, and unreservedly dependent on the polarizing doctrines espoused by celebrities and influencers. Social media provides more than just a dopamine hit (Burhan and Moradzadeh, 2020); it facilitates a transitory dissociation from reality, from aliveness. Perhaps a social media ‘reality,’ touting concepts such as ‘social,’ ‘connection,’ ‘friends,’ and ‘sharing’, has always been a fiction. In this world where algorithms rule and our informational and immaterial selves reign supreme, we are witness to the imminent extinction of our own humanity (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016).
It is in this spirit that we write this commentary, an encounter with the human psyche 3 through three reflexive accounts of our relationship with technology. We choose to reflexivity comment on these existential questions because the rhizomatic reality of digital life with its ideological underpinning is not what it means to be human. We instead turn our gaze inward into our humanity, ‘prob[ing] for unconscious destructive impulses’ (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016: 278). We illuminate two life stages in these reflections: early adulthood (the first account written by the third author) and early motherhood (the second two accounts written by the second and first authors, respectively). What we come to find across the reflections is that it is not us per se but our psychic wounding – that is, our vulnerabilities, emotional conditioning, and traumas from early childhood – that mediates our relationship with technology; our reliance dependent on the anxieties and fears that in fact keep us from feeling truly alive. Technology therefore does not threaten our aliveness but is a vessel through which we seek alienation to protect ourselves and our fragile psyches.
Trapped in a digital mirror
It has taken me years to overcome the toxic glorification of thinness; to realize that being skinny does not equal being more successful or worthy. I am making progress towards that, but some days are harder than others, especially while scrolling Instagram. I know somehow, I prefer to ignore the truth. Not to heal, because otherwise, I would become what I am most afraid of: completely alive.
Instead, I am a victim of my own self-criticism and spend tedious amounts of time in front of a mirror, continuously engaged in the perennial search for imperfections. The mirror is a utopian reality where I see myself in a placeless space, transforming my image into an unreal one. Instagram has become my digital mirror, letting me escape from my daily dystopian truth. I measure my worth in the hundreds of likes and comments. Yet, I am left with a constant desire to post and repost in order to feel validated; it is never enough. Using Instagram has become a morbid attachment to something I have always craved but never truly felt: worthy.
I think about all the hours I have spent scrolling through my feed instead of sleeping. Certain forms of addiction could be conceived as attempts at self-healing aimed at exorcising anxieties by capturing the other’s gaze. Maybe I am just using the body image to repair a psychic fault – such as my dad abandoning me or having a troubled relationship with my mum – through new displays of it. I post many pictures with my dad, the two of us embracing, the perfect father/daughter pair. I post a childhood picture with my mum, us both appearing so connected and serene. Here, I can filter and edit my life to appear as I have always wished it was, while evading any semblance of the authentic connection that I so yearned for as a child.
The alienating capture of the mirror image seems to be expressed for certain subjects through the compulsive search for the gaze of others. My body and, by extension, personal value are exclusively linked to demand; I have become a commodity. For years I starved myself to not be thrown away, to receive attention, to fuel a longing for recognition. I forced myself to take less space, to transform myself into an object to be admired. My trauma and low self-esteem eat away at me, and Instagram reminds me that there is always someone skinner, and therefore happier, than me.
But I was not born with the need to engage in debilitating destructive self-criticism. I have been socially conditioned to think that any body that falls outside society’s neatly defined and ironically perfect ‘norms’ needs to be criticized and rejected. Growing up, the difficult relationship I had with my mum conditioned me into thinking that a woman was disposable, easily replaceable. I remember the time I spent browsing magazines, looking at the skinny models, and trying to imitate them, and now it's the same on Instagram, the models replaced by an endless reel of influencers portraying some ideal version of femininity: skinny, wealthy, and conventionally beautiful. This taught me that our identities are empty, the aesthetic aspect is considered a ‘social value’, and self-esteem is measured by physical appearance. And now, as I post the perfect selfie with a friend at a Fashion Week, displaying my taut abdomen, perfectly contoured cheeks, and designer clothes, I question whether I am even worthy enough for others to notice me. My appearance is a mere instrument, synthesizing the totality of my person.
These repeated experiences of objectification have led to my internalization of the observer’s perspective. I learned to think of my body as available for the use and pleasure of others, not defined in terms of my own abilities and skills. I constantly feel an urge to post the perfect picture so that I feel accepted by the public view, a symptom of our culture’s deeper pathology. I compulsively compare myself to others, drowning in a sense of envy and inferiority. Yet, is it not up to me to understand these dynamics and see Instagram as ‘just an app’ instead of a tool that defines my worth? Is it not up to me to decide to face the reality of my trauma? Do I not deserve to embrace my full aliveness in all of its forms?
Digital disinhibition
For 17 years, social media has chronicled versions of a life that resemble but do not embody my own. As a numbing agent, it has allowed me to superficially deaden my insecurities: my fear of abandonment, fear of losing control, and fear of vulnerability. Suppressed and redressed, this pain does not dissipate but rather reincarnates in my intimate, offline relationships. Intimacy has long evaded my grasp and I have dedicated much of my research career trying to untangle its enigmatic essence. As I write this, I am forced to contemplate how social media has thwarted my quest to develop meaningful, healthy, and authentic connections; my quest to be Alive. Masquerading as a lifelong ally, social media has captured every sacred moment and milestone: graduations, breakups, weddings, and the birth of my children. Reclaimed as fodder for the feed, the most significant moments of my life have been stripped of their organic vitality, consigned to an eternal existence in the realm of digital perpetuity. Looking back over the thousands of posts I have collected over the past decade, I sometimes struggle to recognize the person behind the screen. The version of myself I present(ed) in these posts does not – has not – existed in reality. A lifeless simulacrum: my curated identity has become detached from my interiority.
For a long time, I coped with this internal discord by developing an unhealthy reliance on alcohol. I would wake with the remnants of my intoxication displayed for all to see on Myspace, Facebook, and Instagram. Saturday and Sunday mornings were spent doing damage control: deleting, editing, and obscuring any evidence that ran contrary to the narrative that I am in control. Control was the culprit. Growing up without healthy emotional boundaries, I have been burdened with a false sense of power that I wield over myself and others. For a long time, drinking provided a refuge and social media served as my posting pulpit. Under the influence, I became disinhibited: impelled to exaggerate, boast, and overshare personal and private details about myself and others in an attempt to forge friendships and intimacy that never materialized (Belk, 2015). Instead, these visual displays of vulnerability left me plagued with anxiety, shame, and regret. Inebriated interludes betrayed my carefully curated grid and self-image I longed to embody. Could others read between the lines? Did these lapses in character threaten to divulge my interiority? Could they see the feelings of loneliness, inadequacy, and shame lurking behind edited and filtered images and clever captions that solidified the lie?
Eventually, I ended my disordered relationship with alcohol, but I do not profess to be ‘healed’. Through social media, I remain fixated on curating an unattainable image of perfection that now extends to my partner and children. New fears, such as my apprehension of failing in my role as a new mother that quells my maternal instincts, render me a slave to online personalities that promise the perfect parenting strategy. ‘Instaparenting’ subdues the primal connection between my children and me. At night, I lay between my twin daughters and ‘reward’ myself with a binge-scroll. I scour hundreds of Momfluencer accounts, searching for inspiration, validation, and solutions; when I finish, I feel hollow, plagued by anxiety, guilt, and an unintelligible yearning (Belk et al., 2021).
These insecurities, rooted in the self and fuelled by social media, are being passed down to my children, though they manifest in novel ways. Privacy may be a modern fixation, yet it predominates our era of unfettered surveillance (Horppu, 2023). My ambivalence towards social media does little to shield my children from having to contend with a digital footprint that existed before they were even born. I treat my children as if they are extensions of me, but children belong to themselves. I know this and yet, my egoistic desire for a digital presence still trumps their agency and their right to privacy, safety, and genuine connection. This fear of what happens to ‘me’ if I fail to materialize and showcase my role as a, for example, mother, wife, academic, or any other predefined expectation on social media is not exceptional but has forced me to contemplate past experiences of ‘genuine’ human experience. How do I even begin to untangle tangible moments of aliveness and authentic connections that have become enshrouded by the veil of technology?
Active avoidance
My iPhone is sitting on my desk, staring at me. Or am I staring at it? It haunts me. When it is near, I can feel it beckoning me to tap it, to double, triple, quadruple check whether I have any messages (I don’t). When I put it in another room, I can feel its magnetic pull – was it not designed this way (Neyman, 2017)?
Many years ago, I removed the Facebook app from my phone. I used Facebook on Safari for some time after until the log-in expired and in my harried state, I forgot my password, hallelujah. That doesn’t mean I don’t mindlessly scroll. I’ve become dependent on the Guardian and BBC news apps for that and, on Facebook’s clandestine form, WhatsApp. I suppose even my mode of musical expression, Spotify, falls into the category of social media these days, or YouTube, where my son watches old Moomin episodes.
After plenty of arguments shouting accusations (‘Stop being a phonie!’) in moments when the accuser sought connection but instead discovered a human void, we have constructed house rules: leave the room if on the phone (because we do leave the room if we go on our phones); no phones at the dinner table; no phones in the bedroom; and so forth. Some may refer to this as iRegulating; a somewhat feeble attempt to reclaim our humanity in the midst of a surveillance capitalist assault on our most private, banal moments; moments that make us human.
I have come to accept that my urge to be on the phone stems from psychic defence and social desire. Whilst writing this, in moments threatened by the discomfort and boredom of aliveness, moments where creativity might be sparked if I could just endure, I compulsively check my emails, WhatsApp, and scroll Facebook. I don’t even know what I am looking at; my Facebook feed has long ceased to be a sort of never-ending High School yearbook and has instead become a bulletin for lost cats; a vessel for psychoanalytic wonderings; and a mélange of bad advertisements. I suppose scrolling is the same impulse as reaching for a piece of crappy chocolate or drinking an extra glass of cheap wine. Can I numb the kaleidoscopic and sometimes unbearable emotions intrinsic to my basic humanity?
My refusal to join Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat stems from a sense of ideological activism – they won’t get more data from me, dammit! – and from an unwillingness to spend time posting and reposting. But I also feel uncomfortable with the process of sharing. Will I post the ‘right’ content? Will people ‘like’ my posts? Will I be included in posts from others? In short, do I belong? Feelings of abandonment and exclusion are etched into my soul. I can still feel the knot in my stomach triggered by Facebook pictures posted by my closest friends enjoying an afternoon together years ago now. They seem to have forgotten all about me.
That was a pivotal moment that sparked my decision to stop actively using social media. The pain of feeling left out and rejected was reminiscent of childhood pain, where I felt I could not measure up to what was expected and could not be in my full aliveness as this would trigger hurt, disappointment, or rejection from those in my family and peer group. I could see my anxious attachment style reproduced in this digital world: and if I did not receive the inclusion, care, and affirmation that I desired (e.g. through likes), not engaging would best protect me from those unbearable feelings of hurt. But this does not stop me scrolling. It does not stop my attachment to a device that seems to have the habit of distracting me from the ennui of daily living at best, and from once-in-a-lifetime moments at worst, like when my ever-growing baby tugs at my trousers to show me a toy, her quiet, soulful gaze fixated on me, and my vacuous one fixated on my iPhone.
A reckoning
Scholarly work on addiction posits that it is not only the drug itself that causes the addiction but also the social context of the user (Heilig et al., 2016). The contexts of digital technologies and their consumption matter (Belk et al., 2021), and yet so do the digital consumer’s psychic-emotional experiences. Our focus in this commentary on the subjective experience of social media diverges from critical research that tends towards Marxist critiques (e.g. Cova and Dalli, 2009; Cova et al., 2011; Zwick, 2018), or theoretical understanding (e.g. Cluely, 2020; Deighton, 2019; Hoang et al., 2022). It also diverges from descriptive accounts of consumption acts in a digital age (e.g. Mardon et al., 2023; Schöps et al., 2020) that notably do not often implicate the researchers themselves. In contrast, through our own embodied experiences we comment on how such platforms encourage, capitalize, and exploit users’, specifically women’s, interiority, that is, our vulnerabilities and emotional wounds, for profit. In some way or another, each of us is wounded. And perhaps this is precisely what it means to be human: to have an interiority unlike algorithms, programmes, and machines (O’Gieblyn, 2021).
That the design of such technologies draws us in through the very wounding that makes us human then becomes the ethical conundrum. The seemingly mundane use of technology – such as to write this commentary, to Facetime a relative, and to scroll on Instagram – obfuscates the potential psychic ramifications of such acts. And unfortunately, such psychic ramifications are often overlooked by marketing theorists intent on describing consumption acts, rather than critically appraising their real, and often depressing, effects on daily life (Ahlberg et al., 2022). Our introspective accounts reflect two different life stages and unique individual experiences, but our commitments to social media are singular: enabling a refuge from ‘real life’ (Jones, 2020). We filter lived experiences, posture our children, and compulsively seek external differentiation and affirmation. These platforms – not unlike any other addictive outlet – are designed to fuel and support practices that shore up a fractured subjectivity just enough to keep the consumer engaged and therefore generating revenue (Seymour, 2019).
The challenge then becomes how do we heal? For those of us bound up in some algorithmic logic of digital technology and social media, how do we (re)discover our own aliveness rooted in embodiment? Can we break free from the constant pursuit of external, ephemeral, and disingenuous affirmation sought on social media? How might we reenchant our humanity in a world that is irrevocably technological? How might we embrace a self-reflective capacity to follow an inner sense of knowing, to feel in each moment what arises without repression, attachments, judgements, or goals; to fully accept our emotional expression and energy (Tuominen, 2010; Woodman, 1985)? These are the types of questions we hope can inspire future critical marketing research, and indeed personal development, in an algorithmic age (Airoldi and Rokka, 2022).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
