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.

Loving the Machine

Last Spring while teaching E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, we were talking about the protagonist falling in love with a robot, and I mentioned that this was one of the oldest motifs in sci-fi, then trying to update this Romantic tale, I mentioned, “like in Blade Runner.” Blank Stares, “You guys know Blade Runner, with Harrison Ford.” Blank Stares. I thought wow I really am getting old, I wasn’t expecting that anyone would know Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but not knowing a movie from the 80s with a big star still alive.

Time slips by. Grumbling around the mailroom in mock horror about the class and my own agedness, my colleague Eric Hayot, over at http://www.printculture.org/ tells me to throw Battlestar Galactica at them but I knew only the old 70s version. Now a year and many dvds later, I am worn down by the repeated shocking revelation that a character you thought was human is really not.

As everyone else knows, the show starts with the basic pattern: a supposedly intelligent man falls in love with beautiful woman who turns out to be a machine (or something like one). Yet, what works as a single shocking revelation in The Sandman, Metropolis and Blade Runner, is a reoccurring nightmare in Battlestar, pointing do the still fundamental differences between literature, film and television, which is obliged to deliver its surprises in installments even if we watch it on dvd. The show makes a game of it by letting us know well before all the revelations are in that there is a list of Cylons we thought were humans. Thus the horrific shock that drove Nathaniel mad in The Sandman is doled out over the course of several seasons.

Episodic literature tends to repeat. Even Homer’s Odysseus seems to land over and over again on the same strange island with new supernatural beings much like Kirk encountering new aliens on yet another version of that familiar studio-set planet.

The Uncanny that Freud first diagnosed while reading The Sandman has become more than just the return of a repressed desire, a familiar truth housed in an alien body. We are now faced with the uncanniness of the uncanny, we know that there will be revelations in which humans are shocked to discover their dearly beloved are inhuman, we know that this information will drive the tender, arrogant humans to madness, despair, drink and suicide.

So what becomes of the shock? Does it devolve into melodrama? Or is it a new trick to be mastered and then maneuvered around like an obstacle in Gameboy? How does knowing that a shock is coming become shocking?