ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

This Quarterly Essay feels as if it’s written just for me.  Net Loss, the Inner Life in the Digital Age by art critic for the Washington post Sebastian Smee explores the doubts we are beginning to have about social media.

Not long ago I had a conversation about my remarkable luck at the Louvre, when it just so happened that The Spouse and I were the only two people in the gallery that houses the Mona Lisa.  ‘Did you take a photo?’ I was asked.  There was mutual puzzlement.  Hers was about why I didn’t, so that I could remember it and prove it happened, and mine because it was an unforgettable magical experience and my friends don’t need me to ‘prove’ my story.  This conversation still bothers me because it represents a gulf between the kind of memories I have (and like to share) and those of people who are more connected to their phones than I am.  I think it says something about a wariness of ‘fake news’ too.

This is the blurb for Net Loss, from Fishpond:

What is the inner life? And is it vanishing in the digital age?

Throughout history, artists and philosophers have cultivated the deep self, and seen value in solitude and reflection. But today, through social media, wall-to-wall marketing, reality television and the agitation of modern life, everything feels illuminated, made transparent. We feel bereft without our phones and their cameras and the feeling of instant connectivity. It gets hard to pick up a book, harder still to stay with it.

In this eloquent and profound essay, renowned critic Sebastian Smee brings to the surface the idea of inner life – the awareness one may feel in front of a great painting or while listening to extraordinary music by a window at dusk or in a forest at night. No nostalgic lament, this essay evokes what is valuable and worth cultivating – a connection to our true selves, and a feeling of agency in the mystery of our own lives. At the same time, such contemplation puts us in an intensely charged relationship with things, people or works of art that are outside us.

If we lose this power, Smee asks, what do we lose of ourselves?

To explain what he means by ‘inner life’, Smee quotes Chekhov describing Gurov, a character from his story The Lady with the Dog.  ‘He had two lives’ writes Chekhov,

one open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret.  And through some strange, perhaps accidental conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth — such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club … his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities — all that was open.  And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. (p.3)

Smee sets out to explore this idea that we all have an inner life with its own history of metamorphosis — rich, complex and often obscure, even to ourselves, but essential to who we are.  He thinks this elusive inner self is under threat as companies shape our new reality with their powerful tools.

They promise to connect us on social media; to entertain us on reality TV, YouTube and Facebook; to identify, target and even diagnose us through surveys, questionnaires and tests; to win our votes, enlist our support and market their wares and services.  All this is being done.  New efficiencies are being found.  Meanwhile, the idea of a dark, inner being, silent, inaccessible — the part of us that comes into view while standing by a window at dusk, while walking in the suburbs at midnight or while listening to a melancholy song — has come to seem exotic and unfamiliar, like a rumoured lake in a dark forest, a living body of water which no one has seen for years.  Is this idea of the self, from which whole histories of literature and art have been woven a mere fiction? […] To the extent that it exists at all, it seems to have no place in public discourse.  Even in discussions of art, it is ignored, thwarted, factored out.  The senses with which we could have grasped, recognised and nurtured it are atrophying. (p.4)

A year ago I would have scoffed at Smee’s claim that the obscurity and unknowability of our inner selves is a nuisance, perhaps even a threat, to the social media companies. But back in April of this year 2018 I advised the readers who follow my Facebook page that I was abandoning it.  I haven’t posted on FB since, though I check notifications once a week in case a particular friend who’s important to me gets in touch.  But as the weeks and months went by, the notifications changed.  None of them are from people I know.  They are all from Facebook itself, trying to manipulate me into re-engaging, nagging me about how long it’s been since I’ve posted, and telling me about posts by my friends or scouring my friends’ circles of friends and relations for people I might want to ‘friend’.  What FB doesn’t know is that I’m now more in touch with my f2f friends because I have more time.  And I’m using old media to do it – phone calls, greeting cards, personal emails and lunches and excursions together.  Not that FB cares about that.  FB is just cross that I’m not seeing their ads any more and they can’t sell my out-of-date profile to the highest bidder.

Like Smee, I’ll be honest, I don’t particularly feel like an algorithm. Like Zadie Smith, I feel that we tend to ‘reduce’ ourselves in order to ‘fit’ the software designed by social media companies.  I don’t want to be a disembodied self whose attention is harnessed by Facebook for its own purposes.  I think that now I have enhanced wellbeing because I’m immune to the short-term, dopamine driven feedback loops that […] are destroying how society works.  I no longer see things which used to bother me: the trolls, the lack of civil discourse and cooperation, or the misinformation or mistruth.  I have turned my back on comment threads that show how quickly people fall into abuse, sarcasm and general nastiness.  (My Twitter account is very carefully curated so that I don’t see it there either.)

Jean Siméon Chardin -The Young Schoolmistress (Wikipedia Commons*)

I love the way Smee uses the work of writers and artists to convey his ideas, and I was charmed by what he has to say about the intimacy between teachers and students when the relationship is working [and] something enigmatic is allowed to occur.  We teachers more prosaically call this the ah-ha moment, but it is a special meeting of minds, a bridge from one inner life to another.  One of the things the teacher-student relationship does is establish a formal structure for the hope, the intuition, that you are not alone.  I used to feel this in the library, reading stories, when the children were together with me in the same fictional world.  It is a wondrous thing to have a class in the palm of your hand, when they are equally lost in the world of Sir Gawain and his predicaments, or stifling a tear over the Little Match Girl who has no parents to love her.

Towards the end of this captivating essay, Smee goes some way towards explaining why I didn’t need —or more importantly, want —my Mona Lisa moment immortalised in a photo.  He references art critic Peter Schjeldahl…

…talking about the problem of paintings which have become so popular, so well-known (think Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’, Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’, or Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa’) that they exist more as a shared resource in a communal image bank than as a specific image with any hope of activating an individual’s imagination.  How to get back to the thing itself, before it hardened into a cliché? (p.53)

Well, in the silent privacy of an empty gallery, I think I did as Smee suggests, that is, I lasered in on the painting itself and saw it independently of the thousands of reproductions I’ve seen at other times.  When I see the Mona Lisa now, I see it in my mind’s eye, just as it was on that day, unfiltered by anything else.

And even now, writing this, I cannot really convey how I feel when I think about it.  It’s like reading a wonderful book, like Kristina Olsson’s Shell for example.  I try to write a review that shares the power of sublime writing, I post a Sensational Snippet and I rejoice when another reader like Theresa Smith seems to have shared the same experience but I know that even the very best of reviews can’t really describe what is beautiful and true about a book.  You have to read it for yourself.

Unlike the artificial connectivity of social media, great art, as Schjeldahl wrote, puts ‘you on your own, responsive and responsible in your aloneness.’ (p.53)

PS Just in case you’re wondering, Smee is just as captive to social media as the next person:

Every day I spend hours and hours on my phone.  I have Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts.  I have three email addresses.  I watch soccer highlights, comedy clips, how-to advice and random music videos on YouTube.  I download podcasts, which I listen to while driving, and I’m addicted to Waze [a GPS navigation software app] and Google Maps.  I do all this, and much more besides, without much thought, just a little lingering anxiety.

We are all doing it, aren’t we?  It has come to feel completely normal.  (p.1)

*Image credit: Wikipedia, public domain

Author: Sebastian Smee
Title: Net Loss, the Inner Life in the Digital Age
Quarterly Essay #72, published by Black Inc 2018
ISBN: 9781760640712
Source: personal subscription

Available from Fishpond: Sebastian Smee on the Inner Life in the Digital Age: Quarterly Essay 72 or better still, subscribe through the QE website.