Tag, like and share: it will never be enough

The digital era has created a like culture. In search of recognition, we create an endless stream of posts and every apparent highlight is recorded and shared via social media. Why we exhibit such behavior? Because society forces us to obsessive striving for appreciation, the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau already argued more than 250 years ago.

Advancing technology helps us further. Often to unprecedented performance. Communicating via WhatsApp or e-mail goes faster than writing a letter, and online banking is easier than when you have to go to the bank office.

In parallel, we are also developing a digital identity that we largely shape on social media. We post photos on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, share thoughts and videos on Twitter and Steemit, discover music via Spotify. They are wonderful opportunities, but at the same we become more agitated. Life has become one big competition.

The result is that a like culture has developed in recent years. We have an insatiable drive for appreciation. As a result, we capture more, longing for even more compliments. Some scientists even state that a like does something with your brain: the brain shows the same activity as when winning a prize in the lottery or seeing a picture of a loved one.

This is not new information. Much has been written about it and in the meantime the effects of social media are slowly starting to reach many young people.

Yet the rise of the smartphone and the emergence of this culture are more a result of our dependency relationship to material things and social appreciation, than vice versa. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau already described this relationship in the eighteenth century. In ‘A Discourse on Inequality’ he states that man in the beginning, in a hypothetical state of nature, before there are social ties and institutions, is above all good and self-reliant. There is no envy and competition, nor private property.

Jean-jacques Rousseau. In his ' A discourse of Inequality', Rousseau first exposes in this work his conception of a human state of nature, presented as a philosophical fiction and of human perfectibility, an early idea of progress. He then explains the way, according to him, people may have established civil society, which leads him to present private property as the original source and basis of all inequality. Source: Wikipedia

In this natural state, man is free. There is no state that can exercise coercion, nor a group in which you have to compete for your place. You are authentic. Only at the moment when people are forced to form social communities due to circumstances, is goes wrong. In order to survive, people, through the idea of private property, exclude others from the use of what would belong to him or her. There arises struggles for both tangible and intangible goods.

This creates a comparison culture. What do I have I compared to others? That question leads to both admiration and jealousy: the other has something I do not have. The struggle for ownership and appreciation is the result. In fact, you are therefore no longer free: because of the dependence on the other person's appreciation for what you have, you no longer have a complete handle on your own happiness.

In past centuries, material possessions and social appreciation have had different forms of expression. But the obsession with showing off what you have is not a new phenomenon. The smartphone is rather a means that responds to the relationship we already have to things. We post on social media to gain prestige or appreciation from others. 'See me sitting at this beautiful place' or 'see me having a nice time here'. The more likes, the greater the rating. To maintain that, we must continue to feed the image that we create from ourselves.

According to Rousseau, at that moment it is no longer about the intrinsic value of the event itself, but the respect that we get from others. Shooting a nice Instagram picture or making a vlog does not happen because we like to do that, but because we aim for someone else's adoration.

And there is, according to Rousseau, a danger lurking: we are never satisfied. We have become slaves to the attention we generate through the machine. And we also depending on those machines: we submit ourselves to the community. And although the internet was once presented to us as the means to truly free ourselves, with the world at our fingertips, we are no longer free.

Is this bad? Maybe not. What Rousseau can teach us above all is that the smartphone is only a means that responds to an inherent need for appreciation. Awareness of that is already a step towards a freer life. Rousseau's thought experiment about the natural state is a very useful tool in this.