FEED
In the fall of 2019, as I anticipated moving from Colorado to New York for grad school, I found myself in an uneasy YouTube void. I was watching “Sorority Girl Move In Vlogs.” Adamantly, I have never been in nor wanted to be in a sorority, so this was no form of nostalgia. Ten years ago when I was in college, I lived alone and my social time was spent at coffee shops, student plays, poetry readings, and watching the Golden Globes on my best friend’s couch. My interests lay elsewhere and living with a bunch of girls was quite literally, my nightmare. But for some reason I was satiated by watching 14 minute videos of, mostly, bouncy white girls and their moms unpacking paisley suitcases and plastic bins filled with clothes into 100 sq. ft. dorms, nesting like animals, string lights glinting behind their young, elated faces.
Why did I find those videos appealing if they were so unrelated to my personal experience? I recently started reflecting on those vlogs, and that time in my life, after I read Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (which I HIGHLY recommend). This book of essays covers a lot of cultural ground, but I found the first essay “The I In The Internet” to be especially arresting. In this essay she plots the increasingly chaotic points of the internet, surveillance, and capitalism—among other things—and how these factors intersect to obfuscate our selfhood. She contends, “As we move about the internet, our personal data is tracked, recorded, and resold by corporations - a regime of involuntary technological surveillance, which subconsciously decreases our resistance to the practice of voluntary self-surveillance on social media” (14). The above emphasis on voluntary is Tolentino’s, not mine, and it strikes me as important. What does it mean to voluntarily self-surveil oneself on social media? How can I make the unconscious conscious? How can I increase my subconscious resistance to the influences of social media?
The answer is complex and I don’t fully understand it yet. But I suspect some of the depth work I’ve done in therapy might be a guiding tool. In simple terms, Depth Work is the process of uncovering the shadowy, repressed material of the unconscious and compassionately working to grow from it. This therapeutic approach has taught me to recognize where in my life I have subjugated my own hunger. Not just physical hunger, but mental, spiritual, and emotional hunger. True Desire. The internet promises an “All-You-Can-Eat-Buffet” of entertainment and opinion. The primary starting point on any social site is literally called a “feed.” But is the internet actually feeding our desires, or is it fooling us with replicas? A velcro-backed, wooden apple from a children’s play-kitchen when we actually want a succulent, fresh Honeycrisp. Tolentino explains this phenomena as such: “In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the Internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak” (18).
So while the “Sorority Move In” vlogs were strangely entertaining—satiating some part of me—the material was less important than what it represented. The vlogs stood in as cheap substitutes for my greater yearning: a longing to love change, to be spirited in the face of transition, to go back to school with ease, to nest and feel at home. At the time, I was anxiety ridden by the pressures and change of starting grad school. Nothing about driving 2,000 miles with a hitch on my car, hauling everything I owned to a place where I knew almost no one, seemed appealing to me. Even though I genuinely wanted to go to grad school, I was paralyzed by the reality of moving. It was a temporary, auxiliary satisfaction to watch the unabashed enthusiasm of young girls, so freshly independent, broadcasting excitement at what I considered the tedious physical, emotional, and spiritual work of moving.
I regularly interrogate my habits on social media because I do not want to spend my life malnourished by the internet's counterfeit nutrition. I don’t suspect this is exactly what Tolentino meant when she coined voluntary self-surveillance, but the practice works for me. When I find myself scrolling through TikTok for “productivity inspiration,” “skin care products” or whatever heinous thing has infiltrated my unconscious, I pull myself back into my body with a breath and ask the following.
Is this what I am truly hungry for or does this represent a deeper longing?
What does this image, video, thread, etc. satisfy digitally that does not exist in my life?
Does it need to exist in my life or am I forcing something that does not serve me?
Our lives on the internet create constantly shifting reflections that influence our desires; these often subconscious actions may compound to a dangerous point if we do not interrogate ourselves and the content we consume. Even if conglomerates are tracking our data to refine a profit-driven algorithm, we have the agency to cull our digital spheres on behalf of our own humanity.
So the next time you are scrolling-scrolling-scrolling through your feed, I hope you will pause, if only briefly, and ask yourself: is this nourishing my actual hunger?
