We look at screens and through them for most of our days, our only relaxation being the switch from having to click and point for ourselves to being compelled to do so by some clever editor’s crosscutting between shots, which are becoming shorter and shorter in lockstep with our own diminishing attention spans.
I asserted at the outset that I believed human psyches and the specular and accelerating technologies of the past two centuries had entered a sort of symbiotic relationship with one another, each proliferating by means of the other. To paraphrase Freud differently: If there were no mobile phones with built-in cameras and no assemblage of the internet, there would be no requirement for me to visit another town in order to take selfies in front of its landmarks so as to upload them to my social-media feeds. And what is all of this world-girdling reflecting and re-reflecting, if not the compulsions of a collective psyche condemned to remember rather than forget—to remember not the grand narratives of human redemption, but the trauma by a thousand blows that descends on the human psyche by reason of its occupying these sorts of environments? Fast-forward from Benjamin’s posthumous shock a little and we find that
“haptic experiences of this kind [are] joined by optic ones, such as are supplied by the advertising pages of a newspaper or the traffic of a big city. Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery.”
The insistence that technologies of this sort are value-neutral is shown up for the speciousness it is once the cost of their production becomes clear. That we live in affluent societies, in bubbles of safety and comfort underwritten by the labor of machines and people banished from our purview, is a realization everywhere repressed: these are the steely wheels slicing away beneath the most vulnerable portions of our bodies, as we swipe left and the train of progress chunters on into the night. The light of reason shines the way.
Into the crepuscular realm of social media, for example. If we understand trauma to be a function of technologies that engender in us a sense of profound security underscored by high anxiety, then platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok would seem purpose-built for its manufacture, offering as they do the coziness of Marshall McLuhan’s global village and its inevitable social problems: global gossip, global reviling, and global abuse. A recent article in Slate pointed out that on TikTok, any number of behaviors are now dubbed “trauma responses” by the self-styled “coaches” who post videos on the app telling their followers how to identify the trauma within themselves. Many thousands of people are becoming convinced that perfectly ordinary reactions to such commonplace problems as overbearing bosses or perfidious friends are, in fact, reflex responses seared into their psyches by the white heat of trauma, which suggests to me that this medium is indeed its own message. That message is the very antithesis of Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” namely: being infected with emotion in pandemonium. This epochal social and technological change has indeed involved millions reclining in little pixelated psychic train carriages, powered by mutual affirmation, which from time to time are violently derailed. And yes—there also seems an exact ratio between all those likes . . . and all those hates.
That social media is inherently traumatogenic is thus a truth universally acknowledged—the very names of the sites proclaim it: TikTok evoking the merciless imposition of clock time that severs us, again and again, from our subjective experience and propels us into the savage realm of impersonal quantification.