Fake News False Selves – presentation to the IAAP Congress in Buenos Aires 2022
January 24, 2025 at 04:45AM
There are many ways in which the internet enables living and individuation. Not only does the internet extend the reach of our interactions and agency, virtual environments enable us to live out parallel versions of our plural selves (Roesler, 2008). But the Internet has a shadow too and it on this that I will focus this evening.
The internet has a disturbing pull on us. We cannot leave our phones alone. Human interaction with the internet has a compulsive quality. We can’t look away, we are enchanted. The attraction of the luminous phone screen is so powerful that it seems to be numinous.
But what is so fascinating? It is not the endless succession of cats being cute, or yet another video of a cake being iced or the latest dance craze, or even the available singles on the dating apps. That is not what’s fascinating us, those things are all just a pretext. It is the screen itself that draws us to touch it, as though it were the altar of a god whose blessing we seek, or the withholding dry nipple of Andre Green’s Dead Mother.
When contemplating the increasing grip of broadcast media in 1967 Marshall McLuhan said pithily: “The medium is the message”. Another American media theorist less well know but just as important, Neil Postman, in his analysis of our relationship with mass media said that we are in danger of “Amusing Ourselves to Death”.
What is the message of the internet medium and why does it insist on amusing us?
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