on ads & wrinkles

the other day I got an ad on YouTube that didn’t feel… right? I don’t even remember what it was about and YouTube isn't really known for personalized ads (although I do remember that once I got a job the ads went from encouraging me to donate my eggs for 40k to joining the army for 55k and a bonus) but I was briefly annoyed. and then two seconds later, concerned. why the hell did I need to see myself reflected in… my ads?

it reminded me of this YouTube video essay about how we purchase items as a quick fix to signal our belonging to particular communities as a proxy for extracting identities from our cultures, and social media has certainly exacerbated this element of performativity. but the internet these days seems to offer more than a space to project a version of ourselves for others to see, becoming a way to confirm some version of ourselves instead. I don't want to make big declarations based on one YouTube ad and my very embarrassing response, but there's been a subtle shift from seeking validation to seeking identity (more specifically, the confirmation of identity).

I see the comment "I built this for your page brick by brick" under niche videos on TikTok. and I find it funny, but it's a uniquely solitary activity. I mean yes, someone needs to create the content to engage with, but watching and commenting on videos is not interactive. you can do all those things without any human on the receiving end of it. as John Green writes in his essay collection about being a teenager struggling to find the right friends (I really enjoyed listening to this one as an audiobook!), the internet was at one point a tool to facilitate human interaction. but dare I say the role of the internet in our identity formation seems to have shifted? the construction of our "self" in the virtual world is no longer contingent on interacting with others.

influencers are still crafting a persona that they then project to the world and we're still buying identity through things. but there's a new form of identity formation that's satisfied by the internet alone and does not require any real human to be on the other end. I might be making something out of nothing, but I can't help but read into the fact that we've gone from “explore” pages to “for you" pages. everything is about you. and with every reminder of me me me me me, we're each moving further and further away from existing as an individual embedded in society.

Pinterest doesn't pretend to be a form of social media, but I noticed that it's really similar to how I scroll through TikTok: one-sided consumption. both the creators and consumers can enjoy the app without an audience. it maintains this guise of interactivity, perhaps because there's always this promise of blowing up. but is it social media if the existence of the app doesn't necessarily require more than one human to be a part of it? and what does it mean for us to continue viewing this one-sided engagement with the internet as social interaction?

last semester I read “Self” by sociologist George Herbert Mead (don’t do it, it was Tough.) whose theory baaaaaasically says that everything we do is a reaction to the version of the greater society we each internalize. as such, our consciousness does not and cannot exist without other humans for us to internalize and respond to. so then what happens when we begin to form identities based on a "generalized other" that's just the internet without its real human users?

(Mead was one of the sociologists who nudged the discipline to think about micro-interactions between individuals and is credited as the father of social psychology. I recently learned that he was very vocal about his support for female scholars and made active efforts to include them in the otherwise incredibly exclusionary world of academia. do we think this has anything to do with him being interested in human interactions and not just the system...? a fleeting thought.....)

---

I saw this Tweet the other day and was immediately overwhelmed with very intense love and gratitude for my friends. I've experienced not having someone to go to for a post-event debrief or to share some emotion about a niche topic on the internet, and I do not like it. (what I usually do is share the thought with a friend anyway and provide a long, windy explanation of the context.)

I was a bit confused by the idea that these people need a space to project their hatred. I mean, isn't the internet where people go to say nasty stuff under the protection of anonymity?

are we at some kind of saturation point of hate on the internet that it has begun to spill over or does the internet no longer offer the sense of connection needed to be satisfactorily mean? I'm not saying that we should revert to seeking external validation on or offline. in fact, my goal is to shift away (far, far, far away) from needing validation. as the self-love books and internet gurus say, we need to stop caring about what others think. but even that has somehow devolved into “not caring about others” and eventually, "protecting our peace," ideas that all seem to push us into further isolation. this TikTok (I think this is the one I watched) reminds us that inconvenience is a necessary element of a community. but we seem to be out of the habit of it.

whether we don't want to be inconvenienced or we don't want to inconvenience others, I don't know. but it does seem like we're becoming increasingly unfamiliar with how it feels to belong in a community, whether in person or even online. this article in The Atlantic asks If “self-imposed solitude” could be “the most important social fact of the 21st century in America” to explain (at least part of) the social phenomenon that is Trump. (if you need access to it, I can send you a copy lol.)

“Our “mistaken” preference for solitude could emerge from a misplaced anxiety that other people aren’t that interested in talking with us,.. ‘But in reality… social interaction is not very uncertain, because of the principle of reciprocity. If you say hello to someone, they’ll typically say hello back to you. If you give somebody a compliment, they’ll typically say thank you.’ Many people, it seems, are not social enough for their own good. They too often seek comfort in solitude, when they would actually find joy in connection.”

but the part that stood out the most was a hypothetical about two parents with opposite political beliefs in an in-person PTA meeting. presumably, they'd have to find some kind of common ground about what to do because they can't just leave it the way you would an online argument. I don't think the article wants us to practice compromise, but it certainly points us toward the inevitability and importance of friction that comes from coexistence.

there's this weird obsession with the strength of our opinion on both ends of, and honestly throughout, the political spectrum. but as this TikTok warns, that could take us into a dangerous territory of refusing to admit error. and subsequently, not growing. (ironically, the stuff brought up in the original video by a Trump supporter that this TikToker responds to showed up on a "very progressive" friend's Instagram story the next day.)

there’s a ramen spot back home that allows you to build your own bowl. it is also incredibly popular. when it first opened, my mom (two important facts about her: 1) an immigrant and 2) from Japan.) rolled her eyes a bit and said that customizing everything is "just so American." in Japan, you seek out ramen shops based on what the owner/chef/master has decided. there’s a trust that the shop owner has optimized the broth, noodles, and toppings to reflect their goals, whether technique, taste, originality, price, or speed. if anything it's why you try different spots. you can have the humility to acknowledge that they know better and also want to find a spot that fits your taste the best.

speaking of over-curation, I subscribed to a print copy of The New Yorker last fall because we only click on notifications or links that appeal to us. in the spirit of New Year's resolutions, I've declared a no-phone rule on the toilet and moved a stack of magazines to the bathroom. I’m not delusional enough to think I’ll read every copy front to back (they come... every week......). but at the very least I am experiencing someone else’s editorial decisions as I flip through and decide what to read. I wouldn't go so far as to call it inconvenience, but at the very least it's not just me. the copies have gotten wet from when I read it while brushing my teeth and the moisture from my showers has done a number on them. but you know what? it's about time I shift to looking forward to aging, growing, and evolving anyway.

so here’s to wrinkles. on my face, brain, and the stack of magazines in my bathroom.