Digital Unconscious

While it may a new experience, it really is not so surprising that we dream about Facebook friends.  After all, social media gives you the feeling of having regular contact with people, you haven’t seen in years, perhaps never.   For those friends who post a lot, you get a vague sense that you know what they did last week.  The network calls them friends, and while curmudgeons complain that these are fake friendships, your unconscious happily accepts the request.  “We all want to be loved and what’s wrong with 587 people loving me?”  We’ll never be Elvis or Marilyn.  Social media takes our fifteen minutes of fame and stretches it out over time, making it less glamorous, but giving us a media audience nevertheless, which is to say our psyche expands to cover more relationship than we could ever manage in person.  Social media streams us onto the screens of all our friends, and they can mirror back that they have seen us. 

Of course postings are always already filtered. The most harmless, pet postings, are sometimes just screens.  Safe images you can discuss without giving too much away, phatic discourse, chatter for the sake of keeping in touch, for the sake of conversation itself.  What lies behind the pet posting?  When does the really important message sneak out?  Are cats more of a deception than dogs?  What about wildlife photos?  How about hippos saving antelopes from marauding crocodiles?  What’s the subliminal message there?  Is everything an allegory?

These are questions about how to read behind the image FB presents, but what about when FB seeps into your dreams?  When FB becomes an active part of your off-screen life?  What does it mean when you dream about meeting an old friend, and they look much older now, but a little like their profile picture?  For the grownups, FB shows how much we have aged.  We are no longer the skinny kids with clothes hanging off our gawky shoulders.  Now we hide our bellies behind children, desks, pets and shorter loved ones.

 So what happens when you dream about your FB friend and they look and sound like some balance between their young and the old photos?  When they look like their profile picture, with all its evasions, and are still charming, still wonderful to see again?  The reunion FB promised when you first joined, that longed for rediscovery of your lost friends, becomes an even richer reality when they enter your dreams.  You walk and you talk, smile, tell old stories, while busy acting out whatever drama your dream has invented. You’re in the office and your old FB friend walks down the hall.  You’re at a big convention and there you see the pixilated friend turned into a real dream image. 

Does FB stir memory?  Does it create a string of associations that could only exist in dreams?  Your second high school sweetheart chats with the boss you had three jobs ago.  And of course they are both teasing you.  That’s why you baited them with your post in the first place, and now those two people, who would seem to have nothing in common, except for having once known you, are side-by-side on the screen, or at least their names and photos are.  Perhaps, the unconscious is structured like a network.  And at its best, FB works like a dream.

When are you political, when are you not?

Just imagine that everything you posted on Facebook were evaluated on the standard of a public official.  Can you post pictures of your kids, talk to your old school friends, upload Led Zeppelin videos, without having these judged by some political correctness standard, left or right-wing?  In the blurring age of social media, email is already outdated for its clunky administrative functionality.  The difficulty separating nostalgic photos from politics are only going to get more difficult as communication technology pervades our lives.


So now turn to the ongoing discussion of William Cronon, the University of Wisconsin History professor, who criticized conservative lobbies and is now subject to the Republican Party's request to have his emails scanned for political content unbecoming of a public employee,  Milwaukee conservative columnist, Patrick McIlheran, protests that it is wrong for liberals to object to such Freedom of Information Act requests.  Conservatives are merely holding liberals to the same standards they deploy, so runs his argument, and indeed that is fair enough. 

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/118800679.html

The Freedom of Information Act serves to allow citizens insight into the operation of government officials and agencies. 

The question remains was the request intended to intimidate Cronon into silence?  For there is a huge difference between requesting that a secretive, powerful government agency reveal information, and combing through one person's emails.  A similar problem arises when prosecutors try to use RICO statutes, originally intended to investigate secretive organizations like the mob, on other organizations, such as businesses.  Corporations can act like mobsters, but the question remains whether it is fair and appropriate to use mob surveillance on businesses.

As my buddy Matt Grant (link at the sidebar) has argued, the lines dividing legitimate and illegitimate political activity become very unclear when you focus on an individual's opinion expressed in email versus fund-raising by a state legislator.  The boundaries between scholarship, administrative planning and budgeting, conversation between friends, and public statements are often interlocking steps in the formulation of an argument.  The tone of a statement to a friend may sound overtly political but that does not make it illegal under Wisconsin state law. You don't even have to reach for the sixties motto, "The personal is political," to understand that a single person can express many different meanings in a single email.  When is his statement political, when is an expression of administrative worry, when is it an act of friendship between colleagues?  In a government agency, these boundaries have to be respected, in the everyday life of a person they are not separated into administrative functions.  

Facebook Cocktail Party

Because Facebook relies so much on the idiom of pop music, there are clear limits on what you can express. You quickly learn that people only want to hear happy news.

If your marriage is a mess or you got laid off, there is really no room for such talk on Facebook. Here even pop love songs have more range, for you can always find a tune about love gone bad on the radio, but Facebook lacks the anonymity of pop. Public performance of a sad song does not guarantee an automatic link between the singer's personal life and the lyrics. Of course the audience always wants to connect the song to gossip about the singer, but we know it takes some effort, some speculation.

On Facebook, any sad posting is automatically attached to us, so we suddenly become very bourgeois about what we write. Facebook becomes an upscale cocktail party, witty banter that always shields the speaker. Here the clichés of pop music come to our rescue. If you want to say something sad, you can phrase it as a familiar refrain.

But even here, we middle aged users don't announce anything too intimate. We don't wear our alienation on our profile page. No Mohawks, nasty body art or chemical excesses to be seen. What's most amazing: these good manners are entirely self-imposed.

Face the Face

Facebook is the pop song we all get to write. In the 60s everyone commented on how short pop songs were, that composers were allowed no more than four minutes. Now we are down to just a few characters, as the readers of tweetature know. The key change is that we all get to participate.

The democraticization of publishing your thoughts comes at the price of brevity. Everyone can put their inner monologue out for there but we don't get to go on and on like James Joyce. Instead we send out short bulletins from our lives. When we aren't borrowing from a pop song or Oscar Wilde, we are writing brief memos about ourselves.

Sometimes, when we are lucky, what's on our mind" sounds a line from a cool song, but we don't usually get to write hits. More writers doesn't mean more great one-liners, but at least we are having fun. Pop culture has become the archive and dictionary for our running self-commentaries.