We are flooded by images when we wake up until we go to bed, images selling us social acceptance as Berger claims in his book Ways of Seeing:” Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous. […] Publicity is about social relations, not objects.” One cannot always decipher where the truth lies about the original meaning of those images; Social media constitutes one version of the truth, as a space displaying various self-advertised identities. In this essay I will raise questions about the contribution of the sense of sight to our beliefs, while focusing it on the virtual experience in Instagram, specifically on private users using that platform as a form of social validity.

Is identity fixed or malleable? Judith Butler, a Gender Theorist provides her answer, claiming that there is no identity but an illusion of it: “an idea of an inner foundational identity […] is ultimately unknowable […]. Instead, […] the very structure of signification and of how language gives and produces meaning opens the possibility of understanding identity.” Based on this theory I will develop my essay, demonstrating how virtual performances on screen may contribute to the sense of self. In the book Digital Identities, the Butlerian approach is demonstrated: “The self or the ‘I’ is made up of a matrix of pre-given identity categories, experiences and labels that, through repetition, lead to the illusion of an inner identity core.”

Thus, the imitation of others, the copying and pasting, is what generate a sense of identity. Baudrillard in his book Simulations, argues that truth does not exist: “It is no longer a question of imitation nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather substituting the signs of the real for the real itself. Reality has been experienced through many of its representations.[…] There is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate true from false, the real from its artificial.” Here, Baudrillard speaks about the hyperreal society, an abstracted reality stripped down to symbols formulating and reformulating either new meanings or none, a simulacrum; similar to Instagram, one cannot know to what extent the images observed are staged and reliable to what it claims to show. Why do spectators believe those hollow promises? Guy Debord says in his book The Society of the Spectacle that sight is the easiest sense to deceive.

How can Instagram shape users’ consciousness? The book The Homeless Mind discusses at length how machines can shape workers’ consciousness; He describes workers in a factory given a set of rules that because of the hierarchy are taken for granted: “The work process is a machine-like functionality so that the actions of the individual worker are tied in as an intrinsic part of a machine. […] it can be reproduced […] this sequence [of production] is apprehended and taken for granted by him as logical, even if the engineering logic behind it is not completely understandable to him. […] regardless of whether the worker involved in this particular production process approves or even knows about its intended end, he is able to perform the actions that are technologically necessary to bring it about.”

Similarly, Instagram has different social norms to those we are used to; users feel free to perform as an alter-ego without being criticized or seen as an outcast. A comparison to video games can help illustrate this: “The player loses his identity, […] becoming the “other” and identifies with the character in the game. […] Using our bodies to fight, harm, or kill others … is something we would never do in our corporeal existence as social subjects”. The book continues and says that the online activity is as real as any “real-life” activity, as it has similar effects on our bodies: “The brain chemistry, the cognitive processing, the adrenaline, the movement, the engagement is always active and corporeal. […] Gaming, in that sense may not necessarily disrupt the identity of the subject, but it informs the performativity of that self by adding experiences and perceptions that are simultaneously felt as “real” in a real bodily sense and as separated from the narrative.” In other words, our bodies react the same way to experiences that happen virtually or not, thus, having experiences from both constituting one’s sense of belonging while at the same time, mentally one is able to differentiate between the two spaces and act accordingly.

The spectacle mediates between spectators through their separateness, reinforcing the cycle of isolation: ”Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness.”

The spectacle, or what Berger calls “publicity” images, constitute glamour by showing us people that have been transformed and are now happy, free, popular and mainly enviable, which according to Berger is a solitary form of reassurance. As one feels lonely, one consumes in order to numb that feeling: “The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence. […] All community and all critical awareness have disintegrated;” Thus, loneliness is what pushes people to consume the Instagram app too, but the consumption of goods does not connect between people, it does the opposite while giving the illusion of it while numbing other senses and feelings. From the spectacle’s perspective, the numbing of pain might be derived from being very likable, but from the spectators’ point of view the results can be quite harmful; it can lead to that same illusion of popularity that others work so hard to create and cause much more than envy for the followers but low feeling of self-worth, overwhelmed from mass exposure to images numbing as their critical awareness.

Surveillance, invented for the army for seeing the enemy without being seen, was merged into our daily lives; At the beginning, to facilitate and improve the quality of life but over time has been misused, documenting peoples’ lives to entertain. Most Instagram users record their private lives on a regular basis, relinquishing their own privacy which seems to have drastically decreased. The example of military photography in war zones can help us understand the impact of the screen, as the photographers are both physical and virtual participators. Looking through the camera lens disassociates the photographer from a potentially traumatic situation, reducing the quality of emotion as well as the quality of vision: “The screen exposes the viewer to harsh realities, but it screens out the harshness of those realities. It has a certain moral weightlessness: it grants sensation without demanding responsibility, and it involves us in a spectacle without engaging us in the complexity of its reality. […] A process of psychic numbing: […] the visible was separated from the sound and feeling of pain, from the smell and taste of burning and death.“ The screen encourages viewers into voyeurism by separating between “them” and “us”, creating a clear distinction with the Other depicted. Also, the viewer has a sense of control: “The voyeur is the taker of information, not the giver. The voyeur is able to learn about others’ lives simply by watching them. There is no reciprocal responsibility placed on the voyeur in the watching process.” This process of voyeurism, of psychic numbing, of taking information that feeds with one’s owns emotional needs on the account of others, is present too in Instagram. Instagram unfortunately can create a dichotomy of how people are viewed and treated, it thus encourages stereotypes and narrow mindedness. (See images 4-6).

In this essay I tried to shed light on the effect of social media on society’s consciousness; While social media provides a platform to express one’s own feelings and opinions, it can be misread and encourage a reduction of sensitivity, because only one sense is at work.