Introduction

If you haven’t read On Profit, Power and Modes of Communication I highly encourage you to do so. The terminology and history laid out in that article will inform this one. The main point was to show that capital, power and modes of communication have become bound up over time. In short, capital came to be synonymous with power, and modes of communication slowly became avenues for sustaining power, accumulating capital and power structures in themselves. 

There is a distinction I didn’t make in the last article, which will be a focus of this one: the distinction between visual representation and discourse. The definition of discourse is 

“written or spoken communication or debate.”

A large amount of the information we consume on social media platforms is non-verbal. We stare at, share and comment on images and videos. So, if discourse does occur on social media platforms, it’s complicated by a primary visual or symbolic element. The question is whether the visual media shared on social media platforms can be argumentative—I take argumentation to be constitutive of discourse. If yes, the question becomes whether the visual component can help make good arguments. I’ll return to this point later in the article. 

Of course, the last article’s impetus was Americans’ dissatisfaction with political discourse. By virtue of the smartphone, we constantly participate in an exchange that we take to be a discourse (e.g., through comment sections). We need to analyze exactly what kinds of things we are constrained and incentivized to do on social media platforms; then, we can extrapolate to the broader state of discourse. 

Is Social Media a Power Structure?

You may not be convinced that social media platforms are power structures. Because, well, sharing a photo of yourself out with friends is pretty damn mundane. How could that be part of a power struggle? It would be reasonable to raise, for example, a friendly exchange between a shopper and a clerk. This is similarly mundane and seemingly not an exercise of power (except when taken to the extreme, like spending exorbitant amounts to flaunt wealth). While there are abstruse power dynamics between the shopper and the clerk, the distinction lies in their differing contexts.  

The Instagram user offers themself up to judge and to be judged by metrics: follower count, likes and views. They are ranked. They see those above and those below from bottom to top: bots, loners, and normies to the popular, influencers, and celebrities. This world is fundamentally hierarchical; it assigns us metrics and gives them value by amplifying those voices with higher follower counts to more people. The value is the reach and notoriety we gain by increasing our follower count, view count, etc. When we communicate through it and create content, we do so based on what will propel us upwards–what others want to see. Of course, some don’t do that–those who post and communicate exactly what they like and as they like. But they are the exception and not the rule. It’s a simplified world that beckons to be engaged with.

Think of it like this: you discover me on Instagram. I am Lucas Collins. I have 298 followers. I follow 301 people, and I have zero posts. My profile picture is a painting you aren’t familiar with. I am flattened. I am a caricature. You are forced to make judgments based solely on numbers and any other crumbs of information I decide to display. 

Meanwhile, you discover me in person: I introduce myself as Luke and shake your hand. I ask you what major you are, and you ask mine. I tell you I’m studying Philosophy and Plan II. I tell you I enjoy Phil Hale’s art, and so on. Perhaps my eyes move nervously as I twirl my backpack strap and shift from side to side, occasionally glancing past you as you talk. The judgments you’re inclined to make are not based on flat numbers but on mannerisms, quirks and the thoughts that occur to you that correspond to those behaviors. That means beliefs formed about someone who you’re physically speaking to are nuanced and “free”—not obviously applicable to any power structure. 

One thing to note is that our participation in power structures outside of public life informs our interactions inside public life. As I said above, wealth is synonymous with power, and that recognition influences our interactions with wealthy people in public. Similarly, race and gender take on a political meaning so that when we interact with people of different races and genders, those race/gender-based political power struggles inform, at least a little, how we view them, the beliefs we form about them and the ways we interact with them  (E.g., The waiter pays a little more attention to the well-dressed couple to secure a nice tip, or the baker refuses to make a wedding cake for the gay couple, etc.). However, I’m interested in structural incentives that have us act in ways conducive to attaining power. Public life, in general, lacks those kinds of incentives. 

When we’re “out and about” in the flesh, we are subjects and agents, and when we communicate, there’s a beautiful tension that pulls us in unexpected directions. It’s disarming to be face-to-face. There, we know each other first and foremost as friends or acquaintances. On social media platforms like LinkedIn, I am more like an object with the special quality of having connections. You want to connect with me, and I, you, so that we can access each other’s connections; it’s a socially profitable thing to do since employers and recruiters are looking to recognize names from the resume pile. 

Thus, there’s a fundamental motivational difference between interactions on social media and interactions “in real life.” In the former, we operate within the bounds of a platform whose prerogative is to take our complex interests and make them readable by as many institutions as possible to profit as much as possible. While in “real life,” the rules are amorphous–my values are not interpreted by anything except other agents. By submitting myself to other agents, I’m at risk of being misunderstood, but I’m not at risk of being misrepresented like I am when I become a follower or like count. Perhaps it’s precisely this ability to misrepresent ourselves that entices us.

The upshot of this personal flattening we undergo by participating in social media is that we are immediately stratified. It’s reminiscent of the corporate world, where the power one has is defined by titles: CEO, COO, CFO, etc. When we participate in power structures, there’s a bottom, a top, and a way to work upward toward more powerful positions. Social media, I think, has this character in such a way that our interactions “out and about” in the world do not. 

To drive the point home, let’s turn to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s 2009 essay “What Is an Apparatus?” Forgiving Agamben’s reference to outdated technology, he says:

“He who lets himself be captured by the ‘cellular telephone’ apparatus-whatever the intensity of the desire that has driven him cannot acquire a new subjectivity, but only a number through which he can, eventually, be controlled. The spectator who spends his evenings in front of the television set only gets, in exchange for his desubjectification, the frustrated mask of the couch potato, or his inclusion in the calculation of viewership ratings.”

Visual Representation

It’s time we deal with visual representation on social media. In the previous article, I ended my interpretation of modes of communication with the electrical telegraph. That’s because things get much more complicated with the advent of mechanically reproduced images. 

Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” gives us some insight into why. The essay is a response to photography, film and halftone printing, each of which helped to cleave physical works from their contexts to make them suitable for mass consumption. Indeed, just as the telegraph collapsed the distance between the metropole and the colony, so the mechanically reproduced artwork allowed people to

“get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction”

Artworks in themselves maintain an “aura,” which Benjamin thinks consists of their traditional context. Context, in this sense, is the collective history and uniqueness of the physical object, which can only be conferred to us by its being the original physical object. If, Benjamin says,

“while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”

Thus, the “Mona Lisa” viewed at the Louvre maintains its aura, uniqueness and authenticity, by virtue of its actually being there, its being the Mona Lisa and our seeing it. The artwork’s aura also consists of its “cult value.” For example, 

“The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits.”

In other words, objects or artworks that are praiseworthy, venerable, lauded for their beauty or are used ceremonially express cult value.  

Meanwhile, images of the “Mona Lisa”, like those printed in magazines or the one above, reflect the Mona Lisa’s aura but contain none of it. Instead, the reproduced image assumes significance because of its “exhibition value.” The image is stripped of its original context and requires a new one. Rather than being an object of contemplation of Da Vinci’s brushstrokes, the life of Lisa Gherardini or the painting’s heist, the “Mona Lisa” (that you see on your screen) takes on new meaning as an object of this article’s argument. True, I’ve abstracted the painting from its original context. As a result, it retains only the shell of its artistic significance. Its reproducibility allows it to be repurposed.

So, we see how the reproducibility of artworks and images strips them of their authenticity. They become modifiable by their place in a particular magazine, their caption and their order among other images. Even photographs of people, places, and things can be artworks, yet there is no “original” photograph, and it would be nonsensical to ask for it. Indeed, a photograph of the LBJ library, for example, just refers to the brutalist building in East Campus by way of its “likeness”. The photograph itself isn’t unique–it’s a fungible representation of something existing. In many ways, authenticity requires immutability, uniqueness, or originality, and mechanical reproducibility seems to dismantle these aspects. 

Benjamin thought that this characteristic of mass-produced images made them inherently political. He believed that reproducibility would be the death knell of authenticity and that this was good. Why? Isn’t authenticity commonly held up as a virtue?  His rejection of authenticity must be understood against the cultural puritanism of the Nazis. By 1935, the year the essay was written, the Nazis’ grip on Germany was firm. Indeed, in September of that year, the Nürnberg Laws, which deprived German Jews of nearly all rights, were passed. Benjamin, a Jew himself, had fled Germany in 1932 and was a wanted man for the rest of his life. The Nazis intended to wrest control of art by endorsing the “cult of beauty,” as Benjamin calls it, or art that reflected the classical and romantic realist styles. Ludwig Dettman, whose “By the Waterlilies in the Moor” is shown below, was a Nazi-backed artist; his art reflects the romantic realist style. On the other hand, the German expressionist Otto Dix was vilified for his unflattering depictions of German life, brutal portrayals of World War I, and fierce anti-war stance. His work was included in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition. The styles the Nazis favored relied on a nationalist and ethnic authenticity. Insofar as mechanical reproduction subverted the authority of aura, cult value and authenticity, Benjamin believed the cultural basis on which fascism formed would deteriorate. Meanwhile, Benjamin thought the masses, in their struggle for socialism, would be strengthened.

Benjamin’s essay is still, nearly 90 years later, incredibly prescient; social media seems to be the extreme result of the process he described. But Benjamin, I think, was mistaken on two fronts: the emancipatory potential he saw in the reproducibility of images was not realized (and it’s unclear it will ever be). Furthermore, fascism did not wither as reproducibility intensified. Just like the US and many other states, the Nazis made great use of propaganda, a form that heavily relies on mass reproducibility. Indeed, there hasn’t been another fascist regime as radical as the Nazis, and today the tendency merely bubbles below the surface. But is that the result of a more open and connected public? Perhaps, it’s hard to say. Nevertheless, as I see it, new modes of communication cannot inherently favor one political position over another. Instead, power of any kind can and will repurpose such modes to further its goals. 

Social Media and the (Re)Production of the Self

How can a 1935 essay about aesthetics tell us anything about political discourse in 2024? Bear with me. Two aspects of social media prevent it from facilitating discourse: structure and inauthenticity. Structure is composed of the rules, constraints, incentives and dominant ideas that guide our use of social media platforms—the structure of a platform results in the sharing of different kinds of content. For example, you won’t see the same content on LinkedIn as you will on Snapchat. Inauthenticity, as I alluded to in my discussion of Benjamin, results from our participation in a power structure that involves hyper-reproducibility. The age of mechanical reproducibility undermined the authenticity of artworks, places and objects. In the digital age, hyper-reproducibility intensifies that process and, importantly, makes us the object of authenticity-stripping. 

Structure

The image or video on social media is primarily important; we wouldn’t mindlessly scroll through TikTok if all we saw were Times New Roman descriptions. The context a creator gives their post (caption, voice-over, etc.) is secondary but necessary to understand what we’re looking at. Meanwhile, the comment section, in which we’d think good argumentation would occur, is tertiary. As I see it, the comment section’s function is to give further context to the social media post. Comment sections are overwhelmingly filled with reactions–outrage, dismissal, humorous takes, observations about the content–not productive discussion. The ubiquity of “news stories” that simply gauge the comment section for reactions reflects this tendency. All of this, I think, is a result of the image or video being the primary focus of the social media post. When visual representation is primary, we run into another problem: deriving an argument from images alone is impossible. Take the above images: “Mona Lisa,” “By the Waterlilies in the Moor” and “Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden.” They make sense only in the context of this article; they are essentially inert without context. The only exceptions, according to Champagne and Pietarinen in their article “Why Images Cannot be Arguments, But Moving Ones Might”, are diagrammatic images (side-by-side pictures that logically lead from premise to conclusion, like a comic without dialogue). We rarely encounter standalone images on social media; it’s more likely we come across videos or series of images. If logically arranged images can be argumentative by themselves, it follows that images on social media can be argumentative. Videos, too, as strings of images, can be argumentative. To be sure, films are often considered to be thought-provoking and philosophical, and short videos are quite like condensed films. Thus, I think it’s undeniable that social media can facilitate argumentation. So the question becomes whether the arguments we can make on platforms like TikTok are strong enough to be considered discourse collectively. Not an easy question to answer.

Content on social media falls into four categories. (1) Reflections of reality: videos or images of life with little to no added context. (2) Entertainment: videos or images that may be argumentative but for humorous or non-political reasons. (3) Memes: videos or images that engage in political or cultural critique using irony or meta-humor. (4) Argumentative content: videos or images that are informative or persuasive and that “seriously” engage with politics, social issues, or culture. There is a significant overlap between these categories. For simplicity, I won’t consider examples that fall into multiple categories. I will mainly focus on memes and argumentative content since we’re ultimately interested in whether social media can facilitate political discourse. 

That said, we won’t leave reflections of reality and entertainment undescribed. 

They generally evoke basic reactions: the kitten is cute, the guy slipping on ice is funny, the exploration of the abandoned house is eerie, etc. Social media is excellent at bringing novel situations to our eyes, but these posts aren’t strongly argumentative and don’t seem to bear directly on political discourse. Unfortunately, hard data on the types of posts made on social media isn’t widely available. We can say, however, that a massive proportion of content on social media exists to reflect reality or entertain (or both!). 

Memes are an interesting case. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term, identified the meme as akin to an organism replicating in its host and spreading to others–a virus, for example. Daniel Dennett, in his 1990 article “Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination”, took memes to include broad concepts like “cooperation,” “music” and “writing.” Indeed, Dennett thought the origin of memes could be traced back to the first human-to-human communication. Today, memes fall under a much narrower definition. Memes are a type of online content that acknowledge some absurd aspect of politics, culture, or life and are uniquely relatable and transmissible. Memes today are personalized. Algorithms have an attuned understanding of what we like to look at, so the memes we see are mostly customized to our interests. The most viral memes sneak past these filters and make their way to large swathes of the public. As a result, they have great potential to collectively shape, for better or worse, how we think about the world. I said in the previous article that they don’t seem to have a clear purpose regarding the power struggle that undergirds social media. That’s not entirely true; accounts that post memes garner a fair amount of views and followers for their creators and reposters. At its best, the meme is like the gadfly–an omnipresent force that confronts us with new and stimulating ways of thinking about the world, especially ones that contravene the status quo. Of course, new technologies have rendered the human gadfly obsolete. It’s no longer efficacious to stalk around the park questioning people about their political and social views if the hope is to broadly change minds. The contemporary political meme is an impotent adaptation to this recognition; it’s a highly reproducible, transmissible and recognizable artifact that moves through online spheres to annoy and attract. Unfortunately, it’s still subject to the limitations of platforms, so it’s an unreliable  force for social change. That being said, it can succinctly bring to our attention things we otherwise might not hear about. 

Argumentative content on social media is a mess. We don’t get the complete picture on short-form platforms because there isn’t enough time to give it. Let’s imagine I made a TikTok trying to explain this article. You’d see the three images above flash across your screen and hear me babble the Cliff Notes version of this 4000-word article. I could only provide a thin context, and the images would have an outsized impact on your understanding of the argument. For discourse to exist, the argument must subordinate the visual component. Yet, because of structural constraints (video length, comment-length limits, etc.), platforms generally have the visual component subordinate the argument. Put another way, strong arguments need time to lay the groundwork–premises and context–for the following conclusions. Combine this with the fact that social media platforms, because of their need to profit, incentivize sensationalized, easy-to-digest content, and the result is a mode of communication that is ill-suited to facilitate discourse.

Furthermore, arguments on social media are tied to personalities in a way that other forms of communication aren’t. Platforms generally reward boisterous, entertaining creators with prominent personalities over more measured, thoughtful and “boring” creators. If the creator wants to continue to climb the YouTube or TikTok ladder, they mustn’t disappoint their audience by abandoning the clear and straightforward viewpoint they’ve been habituated to espouse. The incentive, then, is not to provide the complete picture–not to produce well-rounded and considered arguments. Instead, the incentive is to cut the full picture into pithy, forceful ideas that viewers will find plausible and convincing. 

Inauthenticity

The context-stripping that images undergo through their reproduction is central to social media—we’re able to share images of reality and spin them to suit our ends. Thus, authenticity on social media becomes almost hopeless. The images and videos we see have been distorted, prepped, vetted and modified to be exhibited. To be sure, is the actor in the play or movie authentic? The question barely makes sense. If they are “authentic,” in what way? Perhaps their performance is brilliant, their emotion realistic and moving–yet their behavior is tailored to elicit those emotions from us. And so any claim to authenticity on social media can’t bear its existence on social media. Perhaps this explains the dominance of irony in the online sphere–we must constantly remind ourselves, however warm we feel seeing the stranger give away an iPad, that the act only occurred to be displayed to us. We account for this by acknowledging the act’s inauthenticity. The movie “Barbie” (2023) is a particularly concentrated example of the ironic self-awareness that draws our attention away from a piece of media’s inauthenticity. 

Still, we must believe a speaker possesses a certain level of sincerity for us to seriously consider what they’re saying. My central assertion here is that social media fundamentally undermines our ability to believe that what people are saying is sincere. This has to do with the fact that everything posted is tied to our profiles, which are firmly situated within a power structure that demands that we distort ourselves to climb the ranks. Put another way, the context we give the content we produce reflects the power-seeking that social media incentivizes. Even if our intentions are pure, sincere and authentic, the people viewing our content have reason to doubt that we actually are. 

Now, this isn’t the whole of it. Someone may make a great argument and not believe the conclusion they’ve come to. However, this isn’t exactly my concern. Imagine you go to a car dealership to look around, though you don’t intend to buy. Seconds later, Tom, the greasy car salesman, sniffs you through the door and stomps out of his office. Before you know it, you’re behind the wheel of a 2024 Subaru Crosstrek. He’s a wonderfully convincing salesman whom you’ve come to trust. He’s told you everything you need to know to buy the car–nothing more. Tom isn’t going to tell you that the car’s “front driveshaft assemblies’ outer race may develop cracks and break.” He has an agenda: to sell you the car and earn his commission. He may be making a good argument, but his job entails withholding crucial details from you, the unsuspecting buyer. 

All of this has to do with belief-formation, direction, rhetoric and presentation. Erving Goffman, in his book “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life,” discusses the performativity of the politician who, like the content creator, must balance both their perception in the eyes of the public (audience) and their political rivals (like other creators, whom they are pitted against within social media). He says

“The political and dramaturgical [performative] perspectives intersect clearly in regard to the capacities of one individual to direct the activity of another. For one thing, if an individual is to direct another, or others, he will often find it useful to keep strategic secrets from them…Power of any kind must be clothed in effective means of displaying it, and it will have different effects depending upon how it is dramatized.”

What we’re sold on social media is this limited authenticity; we have good reason to suspect we aren’t being told everything we ought to know, even by people we come to trust, by virtue of their participation in social media’s power struggle. There are a few ways to respond to this. We can doubt everything we see on social media, which seems absurd. Alternatively, we can doubt nothing we see on social media, which also seems absurd. What most people do, I think, is doubt content from creators they don’t trust and believe things from creators they do trust. However, the conclusion I’ve been working towards in this section is that our very way of coming to trust creators online is flawed because sincerity and authenticity on social media are flawed. If creators on social media are indeed like actors, then our coming to trust them could be a mistake. Like having a thespian friend who never breaks character, we may thoroughly enjoy their perpetual performance, but we’d be making a terrible mistake if we came to really trust them—we’d be trusting a caricature.

And yet, we have reason to throw ourselves into the partial reality that social media offers. As former Orator writer Ramiro De Los Santos beautifully puts it in his “An Addiction to Reality:”

“To exist in the real world is to be confused, but on Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat, all at once, the narrative is complete. We see peers with inhuman grins, arms around other perpetually joyful creatures, and with only a glance, we understand happiness, camaraderie, dancing, scandalous gossip and embarrassing antics. Whether or not these images honestly depict our friends’ realities doesn’t matter. A lack of context makes them as good as true.”

However well put, I disagree. It has to matter whether social media honestly depicts reality; if it doesn’t and we act as if it does, we’re lost. Indeed, if what we “understand” on social media doesn’t “honestly depict” reality, then we really don’t understand anything at all! Here’s one way to think about it: social media shows us little fragments of reality that we order into “mosaics.” These mosaics are representations of the world that, at a glance, seem right to us. They allow us to make sense of everything. But once we scrutinize our mosaics, we see them for what they are: fragments. They aren’t “stable” depictions because one fragment can just as easily be switched out for another. In other words, you could just as well have seen a motorcyclist successfully doing a wheelie at 120 mph rather than maiming themselves. Yet, consciously or not, we believe in these representations of the world because they consist of real people’s experiences that can’t, in themselves, be discounted. 

True, it isn’t a coincidence that people seemed to lose their minds during that dream-like COVID lockdown period. It isn’t a coincidence that political dogmatism seemed to intensify. Those Trumpian sycophants have seen the evidence we haven’t. The 2020 election was clearly stolen! For those of us who vehemently disagree, we’ve seen the evidence they haven’t! Though there’s a truth to the matter (the election wasn’t fucking stolen), it’s still peculiar how we go about bridging that social-media-psychosis-induced gap. We can at least say this: not through social media. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, we all, in one way or another, take our experience on social media and the online sphere and apply it to politics. I hope I’ve shown that, intentional or not, it’s a profound mistake. We’ll never have a clear, objective picture of the world; we’re always just one person among many. However, we further confuse ourselves by taking social media as a more objective representation of the world. However appealing it may be, the world through social media is fragmented, unstable and hyper-subjective, containing algorithms that intensify our preconceived notions rather than helping us revise them. The question this article has been building towards is this: what should we expect from social media? Should we expect it to support a healthy political discourse? Is it possible to “fix” social media’s non-facilitation of discourse? By looking at reproducibility, structure, incentives, and authenticity,  I hope I’ve shown that the answer to both questions is no. However, we shouldn’t be discouraged by this. Insofar as we recognize the untreatable faults of existing social media platforms, we start to imagine the creation of something new that addresses the alienation and inauthenticity inherent to contemporary modes of communication. The biggest question is how that can be done when each mode of communication has hitherto emerged under the auspices of capital, of power, to reproduce capital and consolidate power. I’ll leave that question to you. 

END