More than half a century ago Theodor W. Adorno argued that “the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 99), and it couldn’t be more relevant today. With 4.55 billion users around the world -i.e, 57.6% of the world’s population-, the average worldwide daily usage of social media is 145 minutes[1] and an average person spends 15% of their waking life on social media[2]. In other words, social media is taking over a good proportion of time of a good proportion of people. These ‘communication tools’ have become to be widely used by a large number of people remarkably frequently that today it’s challenging to define them as mere communication tools. Rather, they increasingly became an integral part of everyday life and came to define, not only our mode of relation with each other, our way of experiencing the world but, more importantly, our sense of self. As social media is indeed one of the most effective tools that create and shape the culture of today it is vital to understand its social, cultural, and personal implications.
Hence, this article aims to provide a critical analysis of social media through Adorno’s critique of the culture industry by focusing on the issues of subjectivity, autonomy, and pseudo-individuality in relation to the concept of totality. In addition to making use of Adorno’s argument of the culture industry as a force that constructs the individual by the imposition of ideology, I argue that this effect of pseudo-individuation gets manifold with social media as each individual observes and consumes other’s lives as a form of entertainment and is aware that the same is being applied to them. Furthermore, I argue that because the one-sided characteristic of traditional media on which Adorno bases his critique has transformed into an interactive system with new media, the assertion of subjectivity has not necessarily become more achievable, but rather more complex.
The “crisis of individuality” as outlined by Adorno occurs in relation to the totality that is formed by the culture industry. Totality, as a certain form of society, compels the individual into compliance and therefore is made up of objectified masses rather than a collective of autonomous subjects. Adorno argues that the autonomy of the individual gets attacked by the uniformity created through the culture industry, in which both the cultural products and the people are standardized: “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 94). The sameness that is being imposed creates, what Adorno calls, pseudo- individualities, in which the uniqueness of the self is reduced to meaningless differences of looks or personality because “individuals are tolerated only as far as their wholehearted identity with the universal is beyond question” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 125). Pseudo-individuation, to the extent that it is the result of the erosion of autonomy, includes the illusion of the individual’s ability to select, when they are in fact, socially and culturally predetermined to make certain choices. The culture industry manipulates people into thinking that it gives them merely what they want, that its products are “derived from the needs of the consumers” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 95) when in fact it produces not only the products but also the very people who are going to consume those products. Adorno explains this process as a “cycle of manipulation and retroactive need” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 95). This is how people are degraded to a state of an object as conforming existences.
It can be argued that today, even though social media provides each consumer with the ability to ‘produce’ this does not necessarily mean the recovery or the assertation of subjectivity. Still, to a remarkable extent, social media objectifies people by putting them in the position of thoughtless and passive consumers. Such manipulation, I think, most clearly finds its expression in phenomena of ‘influencers’ and trends. One of these trends that can be productive for the arguments of this paper is the trend of “that girl” that took off mostly on Instagram and Tiktok. The trend is a curious one because at the basis of it, is the idea of self-fulfillment. The trend promotes focusing on oneself, working on goals, getting healthier physically and mentally, being in the moment, and overall wellness. However, because it is a trend, and because trends -by their very nature- are supposed to be followed and realized by large numbers of people who quickly consume whatever that is, it gets distorted from the very beginning: because the idea of self-achievement is one of the most personal matters that require the autonomy of the self. How then, ‘self’ achievement is to be accomplished if it has nothing to do with individuality? By default, trends necessitate masses (not collectives made up of subjects) to unthinkingly reproduce the content of the trend. Hence, what’s so curious about the That Girl trend is that it creates a paradox: it takes something that can only be achieved through subjectivity and promotes the idea that it can, in fact, be achieved through certain general behaviors and aesthetics. It gives a false idea of self-fulfillment and the process of achieving it. It is as if one can get their life together only through specific actions (waking up at 6 am, doing yoga, eating avocado, and writing journals) carried out in very specific ways (one should do all these accompanied by candles and nice odors, the colors should be soft, earth tones and one must wear expensive leggings). Hence, this whole idea of being ‘that girl’ gets falsely equated with self-fulfillment, when it functions to create quite opposite condition: all individuals become the same in their effort of following the trend that promises self-fulfillment. The trends, not only this one, create pseudo-individuals in that people take on the desires, manners, looks, or as in this case whole identity of That Girl. Therefore, the trend functions to cover the ‘tragedy’ of losing one’s subjectivity by the very thing that promises that subjectivity: “Pseudoindividuality is a precondition for apprehending and detoxifying tragedy: only because individuals are none but mere intersections of universal tendencies are it possible to reabsorb them smoothly into the universal” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 125).
It is in this sense that social media is very productive in creating sameness and a false sense of individuality. Influencers, as trendsetters, play a critical role in this. Within the mimetic landscape of social media, there are what’s called “the external mediators of desire” and “the internal mediators of desire” (Burgis). Respectively, they correspond to models who are external to our individual lives, like celebrities, actors, models, and so on who exist in a different social sphere than we do because of their success, money, or fame. The internal mediators of desire, on the other hand, are the models from the same social sphere with us or a close one. These could be friends, family, co-workers, or a stranger with whom we don’t have direct contact with but still, their lives are not so different from ours in socio-economic terms. The common quality of both groups is that they create false desires in the individual. ‘Influencers’ (used in terms of occupation) come from both groups. While there can be celebrities who are also seen as Influencers -Like the Kardashians- there can be more humble characters in comparisons like Duygu Özaslan or even a friend.
The desire creation and role modeling of influencers determine both what is desirable and what is acceptable. They offer narratives of how life should be, how one should look, what to think, how to behave, and so on. It is no coincidence that they all have similar looks -the characteristics of what is called the Instagram face- the small nose, catlike eye, fleshy lip, long eyelashes, high cheekbone, and poreless skin[3]. Offered as the ‘ideal’, many adults and even children’s understanding of beauty and by extension, their appearance completely transforms according to these standards. Something as natural as having stretch marks was something to be ashamed of until it became a trend among influencers to like their stretch marks. First, it was the people who didn’t abstain from showing their stretch marks that were excluded and criticized on social media, and after the trend, the ones who abstained from showing their stretch marks started to be excluded and criticized. In both of the cases, there isn’t a truly conscious act: either way the individuals take on and confirm what the current ideology is.
Individuals’ desire or the need to ‘fit in’ can be understood more clearly through Adorno’s concept of totality. Adorno views society as a collectivity that each individual creates by forming a certain relationality between them. When this collection takes the form of totality, rather than comprising individuals within itself as subjects, it turns them into masses that can be shaped as desired (Adorno as cited in Kulak, 69). The two possibilities correspond to different conditions of the individual: self-realization and the loss of autonomy. Therefore, within totality, differences get excluded, and similarity reigns. Hence, the totality hinders human subjectivity as it does not let the individual exist within itself as an autonomous subject, rather, it compels the individual to comply and reduces its existence to a passive object (Kulak, 70). In short, society accepts and values only pseudo-individualities. The constant competition augmented by the ‘panopticon’ of social media (Weissman, as cited in Bluemink) in which each user observes the others while being aware that they too are being observed by the others, paradoxically requires individuals to establish their selves, as similar to the other and yet different enough to individuate themselves, but only within acceptable terms. This ultimately means the reduction of individuality to meaningless, slight differences in personalities like the “mustache, the French accent, the deep voice of a prostitute” (Adorno, Horkheimer, 125). If the individual fails to be different in an acceptable, identifiable, way they risk becoming an “eccentric loner” (121), which finds its expression today in the phenomena called cyberostracism (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000 as cited in Schneider et al., 2017). Researches on the topic of social media ostracism indicate that even “minimal signals of ostracism were sufficient to threaten fundamental human needs of belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence” (Schneider et al., 2017). Therefore the individual feels the need to be like the others: conformity takes the place of consciousness.
With the influencers being marketing tools for companies and businesses, with social media conglomerates working on specifically to make people want certain things, and with people modeling themselves both according to the external mediators and internal mediators, the possibility of subjectivity gets even more complex- because increasingly, the individual steps away from gaining a sense of self through their own experiences, thoughts, and actions. The more one identifies with this false sense of self -made up of the imposed characteristics-, the more the idea of subjectivity turns into a simulacrum[4]. Because people do indeed identify with the false needs and desires -billions of them are given to the individual through these platforms 24/7- and make them their own through habituation, and taking on the belief that they are in fact natural and real. The engagement in the critique of those needs and desires and the ways in which it changes the psyche, notions of truth, and reality are then the first steps in recognizing them as superimposed on the individual as an externality. Lastly, while for all these reasons social media can be taken as an instrument in the systematic abolition of the psyche of the individual, this is only on the grounds that if it’s accepted uncritically. Becoming aware that the multimillion-dollar tech companies design platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok, or Instagram in a specific way that monetize the data, attention, and the time of its users, and recognizing that they manipulate the users in certain ways is a part of resisting to that manipulation and an act of subjectivity in itself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
-Adorno, Horkheimer. Enlightenment as Mass Deception. “The Culture Industry”.
-Bluemink, Matt. “Book Review: The Crowdsourced Panopticon: Conformity and Control on Social Media by Jeremy Weissman”. LSE.
-Burgis, Luke. “Social Media Addiction- How it changes your brain”. Big Think, Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcIgk94Fp6Y
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-Kulak, Önder. Theodor Adorno: Kültür Endüstrisinin Kıskacında Kültür. İthaki, 2017.
-Margarit, Liraz. “The Rise of ‘Instagram Face’”. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/behind-online-behavior/202105/the-rise-instagram-face
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[1] “Daily Social Media Usage Worldwide”. Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/
[2] “Social Media users”. Data portal. https://datareportal.com/social-media-users
[3] Margalit, Liraz. “The Rise of Instagram Face”. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/behind-online-behavior/202105/the-rise-instagram-face
[4] Baudrillard argued that we live in a world where everything happens on a screen in which one gets further and further away from reality. Instead, simulacrum/images take the place of reality and the distinction between the real and the fake becomes blurred.
