(2021-06-18) Austin Minimum Viable Self

Drew Austin on the Minimum Viable Self Two decades ago, before social media existed, Zygmunt Bauman articulated a perfect description of how it would soon shape our behavior and frame our relationships to one another. In his 2000 book Liquid Modernity, Bauman wrote: “Seen from a distance, (other people’s) existence seems to possess a coherence and a unity which they cannot have, in reality, but which seems evident to the spectator. This, of course, is an optical illusion.

The conditions Bauman described had already emerged in other media environments, such as television, but the participatory nature of the internet and specifically social media would compel everyone involved to develop an online identity

For most people, though, a personal brand is an accidental side effect of their digital presence, something they assume to be a faithful reflection of their “real” selves whether it really is or not.

Every social media feed is an endless parade of these fragmentary identities.

The speed of the information flow is essential to the entire illusion: A platform like Twitter makes our asynchronous posts feel like real-time interaction by delivering them in such rapid succession, and that illusion begets another more powerful one, that we’re all actually present within the feed.

If you and I are both present, moreover, that implies that we’re together, something that is always almost true within these social networks but never quite achieved.

Something I frequently joke about—a dark truth that begs for humor—is how social media requires continuous posting just to remind everyone else you exist.

Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.

The illusions that enable social media to feel like a primary reality (rather than a medium that supplements that reality) have become increasingly seamless and less likely to be broken, but as Venkatesh Rao has observed, many users are sacrificed at the altar of this reality, slipping through the cracks and becoming “digitally homeless.”