Framing events, like Facebook, can make people vulnerable so that they think themselves as victims.
It used to be that only special people, like St. Augustine or Rousseau, thought they needed to explain themselves by recording themselves, but that seems, over time, to have become a prominent feature of contemporary consciousness, perhaps augmented by Kodak cameras which every person could record their family growing up and so not restricted to rich people who people like John Singer Sargent could portray of their daughters or portraits painted by Gainsborough of beer barons. Computer technology allows everyone to write and publish a memoir. But recordings predated advanced technology. Yes, people had diaries but with rare exceptions those were not meant to be made public. Tombstones had inscriptions of dates, family and epigrams, but those were not from the dead but from the living. Pharaohs followed the traditional idea that only singular people deserved being remembered in gigantic tombs.
The best example of this being an age of self regard is Facebook, a phenomenon only some twenty years old and yet to seem essential to many of its ardent participants. People post their everyday activities, such as pictures of friends and cats and homes and brief videos of jumping into the lake and announcing what of the voluntary community events in which they participate. The purpose is not to create art because no standard of proficiency is required or applied but to make one’s personal activities visible just so as to make these public and therefore a record of one’s activities rather than a list of accomplishments as one might find in a vita offered to a possible employer. That display allows a person to communicate with others in a harmless way and simply to be present in that they are part of the digital world, and so different from personally addressed letters where an attempt is being made to communicate a particular fact or feeling to the addressee. This is a pure example of being neither artistic nor practical even if part of the membership is trying to do just that. Rather, Facebook contributors are just trying to be recorded and vindicated as that by their posts.
The greatest technological development for self recording might seem to be its opposite in that computers and iphones are just the extension of newspapers or, since a hundred years ago, news broadcasts that told what was going on up to the minute but basically a passive process whereby the reader or listener consumes data rather than reflects on it as part of the person’s self. But that is not the case because people nowadays can choose or to use the contemporary term “curate” the incoming information and so sculpt the kind of view about themselves: whether they are victims or mean spirited or selfless or joyous, assembling what they gather so that they do not act as people in different silos but as cultivating a point of view about o ne’s own life and situation. The contemporary person is not the auditor of command central heard from 30 Rock or 30 Hudson Yards but the expressor of a point of view. Nor does that mean that people have given up logic so as to seek their own facts but rather that they assemble a narrative of their own lives from differently found facts, some true and some not
It isn’t that people who indulge in social media and iphones are superficial or self-indulgent or have nothing else to do with their time. They engage in the usual activities of ordinary life: they go to work and have relationships. It is just that they also do this other thing like planting tomatoes in your garden patch on your little piece of property. It is an assumed obligation done only because it is satisfying, like owning a pet or joining a church group, rounding out a satisfying life. What is different and notable as far as the society is concerned is that these participants are out to record trivial or non artistic things unjust for the pleasure of doing that, of having some way by which these recordings become transcendental, even metaphysical. I record; therefore I am. And that is the way, for some numbers of people in which they exist and that carries some weight in the quality of their lives.
Most of the mental changes that are going on are not consequential. Yes, people tweet a lot, which means that these short messages are able to communicate assertions rather than arguments, a form of reasoning (or the lack of reasoning) familiar with Donald Trump. But slogans have been around for a long time to summarize an argument. There was “Remember the Maine” and “Better Red than Dead”. And there are any number of longer and long form writings that allow people to make a case. What is significant about recording as an end in itself is that it provides a fresh way of providing a frame story into which a person can dip in or retreat from ordinary life and the depth of the involvement can vary from the trivial to the overwhelming, people nuanced about how to regard this alternative reality. Is posting a substitute for reaching an audience? Is it interesting only to friends and relatives and so extends their mutual bonding? Or is it that an entry is a passing glance at fame and significance? People will differ on their relationship to the frame even while all of these mechanisms allow the recording of something short of art or biography, which assumes a complete and objective accounting, as with Augustine, rather than the present memoir form, which deals with incidents so as to establish a theme, as in J. D. Vance’s recent “Hillbilly Elegy”, rather than an “official” and complete account.
Frames have in common that people enter more or less an engagement with the frame even though frames also differ in their significance. Baseball fans perk up when they anticipate when pitchers and catchers will show up merely for spring training and that the season has its climax at the World Series but some people also keep daily updates on the batting averages of their home team but only some few can claim to be able to tell whether a pitch is a strike or a ball. The U. S. Constitution is a frame by which to understand law and politics and people can or do not attend to Supreme Court decisions except when they are involved personally, and so emphasize either the First or the Second Amendment. Laymen with a passing interest in the Constitution can fall into legal reasoning when an issue comes up that prompts talk one would not fall into otherwise.
Religion is a particularly significant frame and also abides to the variability of engagement. Jews can decide to be more or less Kosher; Evangelicals are concerned about the personal rectitude of their leaders but might exempt Trump from that standard. All Christians think everyone suffers from original sin, whatever that might mean, while also thinking most people lead pretty moral lives and that some sins are just human as when Catholics claim that lust is evil but just an abundance of what is natural and so not disqualifying themselves as part of the frame.
The frame of recording is distinctive as a frame about, as said of “Seinfeld”, about nothing, though it was about pettiness, but that leaves open a frame which is just about itself, a frame about the idea or need to have a frame, and that can read to interesting conclusions, which are to find everywhere a frame needed to understand what is happening in actuality. If people need to have a frame as innocuous as recording, then framing can be supposed to be very deep down in the psyche, a part of human nature rather than a fad or fashion or foible. People can be understood to grasp a frame even if it means giving up their agency or free will by becoming subject to the dictates of the frame, whatever they might be, people preferring that authority to their freedom, however much people say they prefer freedom to control, and so religion is what Christopher Hutchins says it is: God like the Dear Leader of North Korea who comes to love obedience just so as to have that relationship of being controlled.
A good example of a frame that pleases when it claims to control us, our fates in our stars rather than in ourselves, is presented in John Le Carre’s “The Little Drummer Girl”, the artfulness of the author’s fiction that it is even remotely plausible, so audacious are the ways Israeli intelligence is able to make the world different than it is. First, there is a stratagem whereby an English girl is seduced by an Israeli operative to fall for her and run away with her and then confronted with the Israelis who, in short order, and in one of LedCarfre’s signature confrontations, gets the girl to become an Israeli agent, just as happens in “Smiley’s People”, where the chief Soviet antagonist, Karla, is convinced to switch slides, betraying all his ideals. The mechanism in the interchange with Charlie, the actress, is done by showing her own life was that she was not a victim of her family but rather that she was an ordinary girl who never amounted to much and wouldn’t she want to be a real actor and make a difference? That psychobabble would not seem to go very deep but the setting is persuasive and the girl is of weak character, and because the point of it all is that people want to be real by acing, which means impersonating noble figures, and so a rhetorical ploy is enough to get her on board. Then what follows is a Palestinian who is captured and is convinced to write letters which show his intimate relations so Charlie can be briefed on him so she can pose as his ex-girlfriend when approached by the Palestinian operatives. And then, arranging an explosion of an Israeli house that hurts no one but convinces the Palestinians that Charlie is the real deal and so the real Palestinian super-operative can approach her. Nothing is what it seems because everything has been staged by overarching and secret powers.
Some people believe it is easier to believe a frame theory, such as Qanon or space lasers, no matter how contorted and unlikely it may be, all those state supreme justices all in cahoots to let Joe Biden steal the 2020 election, rather than that independent institutions like election boards wee on the up and up, because they are ignorant or have prior commitments to their cause, but also because finding a frame is a satisfying way of appreciating life no matter what a gloomy ;prospect it imagines., all of us victims except for the sinister perpetrators. We are back in Manicheism, whereby the rivalry between good and evil is all around us but does not engage us as actors.
It is audacious to try to characterize a society with a single trait that constrains behavior and consciousness in a very practical way that becomes transcendent, even existential. I record; therefore I am. Sociologists engage in this endeavor and have their explanations remain controversial. Turner’s Frontier Thesis remains controversial in saying that the westward expansion across the plains and the mountain states in the second half of the Nineteenth Century provided democracy and adaptability and contested with the older idea that democracy and equality were fostered at the time of the Constitution on the Atlantic coast or by the influx of immigrants that occurred just when the westward expansion ended. Which is the real America? The poorly populated states or the populous ones? And, of course, Weber’s idea that Western modern capitalism descends from Protestantism remains a controversial thesis a hundred and twenty years later. Some of these single variable theories strike a mark as when David Potter’s 1954 book “People of Plenty” note that affluence is not just the product of America but it's driving them: being affluent is a birthright and so people today are annoyed that there is any slackening of the economy even though it seems to be getting along quite nicely. Robert Putnam’s 2000 book “Bowling Alone”, however missed its mark by generalizing too much out of a metaphor and is not nearly as nuanced as David Reisman’s 1950 book “The Lonely Crowd”, which consults numerous independent institutions, just as in Lynd’s “Middletown”, and Riesman concludes rather modestly that some people are inner- directed, exploring culinary arts or some other hobby to achieve self satisfaction, while others, maybe most people, are other-directed, which means conformist, to use that term of the Fifties. But here I go again, harping on one prevalent trend as the secret not only of America but of the Non Authoritarian West: this age of self recording.
Recording the self is radically different from the prior dispensation, whereby, from Marx on, writers and people thought they were liberated through the objectification of work and so creating art. Labor is stultifying rather than liberating when work does not create some worthwhile object, whether a buggy to be drawn by a horse, or a sculpture created.Ishiguro imagines clones are people because they draw designs on paper as well as love one another Joe Biden, sharing that general message, thinks that work provides dignity in that it makes people self reliant on their incomes as well as making a contribution. Dewey thought all of art is the objectification of the skills and the objects found in ordinary life. But the new dispensation, just emerging and therefore thought self indulgent rather than liberating, is to see the objectification of self reflection, one’s own biography,. As an end in itself in that people each matter because each of them can be recorded. The liberation of Freud is not just to uncover the unconscious but to think that every life matters because each one has a complex dynamic that might be difficult to access and doing so, reflecting on it, makes you free, even if Freud thought there was a therapeutic benefit, while La was satisfied with self exploration as an end in itself.
Think of this profound difference. People once thought, from the stone age on, that dead people would become alive again. From Marx on, people thought that their productions and artifacts, whether works of art or trinkets, wouj;ld linger on past death. Today, a personal story lasts as long as family can remember their lives and deeds and dead people can’t recount their exploits and so don/t exist except for the metaphysical trick of saying good deeds remain as a celestial record of whatever happened even if people don't read the book. That inevitably diminishes what has been accomplished, but that's the way it is.