reality which, like MIDI tone, pales in comparison to the real thing. As has been explained above, you and I are both persons, each with a wealth of exceedingly unique and meaningful concrete experiences. For me right now that includes tired eyes, a restless mind, patient temperament, and a tremendous amount of typing, which is unfolding at an unusually late hour. Nothing I could state in a status update would sufficiently inform my abstract friends what the last several hours have been like for me. But I yield to the restricted social world of Facebook in service to what I have come to believe is just as good as the real thing. I might even include a picture—adding about a thousand words. This helps. My friends might see me in my underwear with swollen eyes, hunched over a laptop, and conclude something about my evening, but they are still limited to an abstraction of my night. The concrete experience of my evening has been collected by the eye of a camera and transmitted into the abstract world of Facebook. My concrete experience is represented by a picture, an abstraction. The reversal—abstractification—occurs when the abstract world of Facebook comes back through the camera and informs my concrete experience, like the puppeteer who has limited her life-actions to those of her puppet. Let me explain.
My unusually late-hour post invariably draws some attention, and one of my “friends” decides that she “likes” it. The supreme and absolute restrictions placed on evaluational options make exceedingly ambiguous the “like” that I have been awarded. Despite this, I have a concrete experience of being “liked.” There is actually a concrete experience that follows from the abstract indication that some person, infinitely restricted by Facebook’s program design, has liked my picture. The puppeteer experiences the affirmation that has been limitedly bestowed on her puppet. I have had a concrete experience through my abstracted personality because the latter has been “liked” by another abstracted personality. While the reversal has begun, it is not yet complete; abstractification has not yet taken place. Abstractification occurs when the concrete experience of being “liked” becomes indistinguishable from, or identical to, the concrete experience as a person of being liked by another person. Try also the scarier version: when the experience of being “liked” is actually preferable to the concrete experience. In its abstractified form, the abstract world of Facebook has intercepted concrete social contact.
Karl Marx (Marx & Engels, 1987) explains this concrete social world marked by the relationships that we keep:
Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically-cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of you real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return—that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent—a misfortune. (p. 105)
As soon as they have been commandeered by Facebook, the “individual,” “specific,” and “living expression” are necessarily lost to abstract representations. Moreover, it is through this abstraction that one now communicates and relates with others. But the opportunity that this presents is compelling. In the concrete social world, there is a possibility that I am not the kind of person that I would like to be—for example, I might be ugly. In the abstract world of Facebook, I can be selective about what abstractions represent me. For example, I can doctor up a picture to remove blemishes, or I can pick one that gets my “good side,” etc. “Thus,” in the land of Facebook, “what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality” (Marx & Engels, p. 103). I can be whatever I would like to be. While Marx’s discussion concerned the abstractification of persons by money and commodification, it applies equally well to the abstractification of persons by Facebook.
[Facebook] converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or willed existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, [Facebook] is the truly creative power. (p. 104)
Now, instead of going about my concrete life, I am instead motivated by a fixed set of potential actions that might receive a certain approval rating when transmitted through Facebook. I can attend a baseball game as a concrete experience, or I can show up and have my picture taken and allow its subsequent feedback to inform my experience of having been there. In this manner, one becomes alienated from one’s own-experience, choosing instead to defer to the experience mediated by Facebook. Fromm (1990) explains:
By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts—but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, are experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside. (pp. 120–121)
The camera is a piece of technology that has been commandeered in Facebook’s abstractification of people, used as a portal through which users are alienated from their experiences.
The camera used to be for extra-special occasions. As such it had little to do with documenting regular events and more to do with a reminder of “this is what Uncle Mac looked like this year,” or “this was that family vacation to Hawaii.” These pictures, now losing their original vividness, have since acquired a singular aroma now bound in albums for walks down memory-lane. While abstractions, these pictures elicit powerful and transformative concrete experiences—“I remember when ….” Here the concrete experience is one of a memory that has been elicited by a picture, which at that time was capable of being held in your hands. Pictures once belonged to a roll of camera-film that would often extend across several such “extra-special occasions,” and this film would need to be developed at the photo shop. When finally developed, enough time had passed from the original event that there was a certain measure of an “oh yeah!” memory recollection associated with thumbing through the prints. The experience of remembering the event is a singular one but distinct from the original event itself. Seeing pictures from my tenth birthday party is not the same experience as me turning ten, but is an experience nonetheless. The photograph has seen a revolution. Like MIDI to music, digital cameras have increasingly replaced exposure cameras. Now these digital cameras are in every phone. Events are captured with the click of a readily available button. No more “extra-special occasions.”
To be fair, the alienating potential of the exposure camera long preceded that of the digital camera. Fromm explains:
Indeed, the taking of snapshots has become one of the most significant expressions of alienated visual perception, of sheer consumption. The “tourist” with his camera is an outstanding symbol of an alienated relationship to the world. Being constantly occupied with taking pictures, actually he does not see anything at all, except through the intermediary of the camera. The camera sees for him, and the outcome of his “pleasure” trip is a collection of snapshots which are the substituted for an experience which he could have had, but did not have. (p. 137)
Here Fromm describes the photographing tourist that is ignoring his own experience for-the-sake-of the abstract experience denoted by the snapshots. In his example, the caricatured photographer would have to wait until the pictures were developed in order to see whether or not he had a good time. The digitization of the camera has increased the likelihood of this type of alienation in two ways. First, the ubiquity of digital cameras is such that every experience is susceptible to “snapshot alienation”; and second, pictures may be reviewed instantly for feedback and the shaping of experience where necessary (as in “that one was okay but have more fun for this second one”).
