How Real is Social Media? - Author L. E. Henderson

Words have no value in the wild. If you show your fictional masterpiece to a starving lion, it will still eat you. Confronted with the most scandalous comment by a politician, a cat will not care, nor will she rave over your oil painting.

The reality of certain things is determined by a lot of people agreeing that they exist, and if all but one person disappeared, symbols such as money or artistic representations would lose all of their power.

But few measure reality from the point of view of a cat.

In fact, people keep finding new ways to detach themselves from a nature-based “cat perspective” of reality. We have built a world of text accessible by computer. Even the tactile surface of solid paper is going away, and books with physical heft are becoming a thing of the past.

This trend toward abstraction has been denounced by many who declare that the warmth of real human contact has been replaced by superficial textual exchanges on Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media.

But this disembodying began before personal computers. Arguably, it – and social media – began not with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates but with writing.

Writing lets people escape from communicating in real-time to recording thoughts for later deciphering. It is also a way to reach an undefined audience rather than a specific person. But to onlookers, writers appear detached from the real world.

But as a writer I am tempted to defend against criticisms of a text-based existence. For someone like me, disembodied communication is not a disease but a lifestyle.

While I feel free to be myself with family and close friends, I have generally felt lonelierin groups than when I was alone. In reading I found the honesty that was missing in face-to-face encounters. I could know a fictional character more intimately than my own family.

Attacks on social media usually assume that face-to-face encounters are always more real and honest than anything you will ever find written on a computer, and that text is a shoddy substitute for real human voices.

But part of my impulse to write came from feeling that I could never be fully understood in situations where I was limited to speaking. Writing let me plumb below the surface and say honest things that would be too strange to say at parties.

But writing is ultimately not about withdrawing. No matter how solitary a writer plucking away at keys in his attic may appear, writing is in the end a social activity, spurred by a drive to connect — to understand and to be understood.

Writing is fundamentally social. Without readers to “listen,” writing has no meaning or power, any more than a painting would mean anything to a lion beyond, perhaps, the toxic chemical scent of oils.

Readers do a lot. They are as active in any written exchange as the writer, and just as much creators.

For readers to make sense of text, they must form meaningful images from various combinations of 26 letters. From those abstract symbols, readers imagine, feel, and plumb the depths of their memories; without all of that, writing would be a jumble of meaningless symbols.

Since reading is creative, no work of fiction is the same for any two readers. Even meanings of common words like “dad” or “brother” vary according to personal experience. The assumption that words mean the same to everyone leads to a lot of communication misfires and is part of why art is subjective.

Still, language works well enough that I can read a novel written by someone who lives across the ocean in a country I have never visited and still grasp what it must be like to live there.

The internet has pushed readers into even more active roles: reviewing books on Amazon, commenting on blogs, sending emails, and posting to Facebook. Most readers are now writers – whether they call themselves that or not.

But are detached, text-based interactions a mentally unhealthy phenomenon? Are they even real?

This may sound like a strange question, but to illustrate, I used to do some freelance writing on the web-based forum “Elance.” I never saw my clients, heard their voices, or shook their hands. My only knowledge of them came from deciphering variations of a 26 character alphabet in emails.

As abstract as the communication was, I felt like I knew my clients. When their text indicated that they liked my writing, I was happy. When their text “disapproved,” I fretted. When it made irrational demands, I felt annoyed.

Working for these clients was a “life experience,” as real as any land-based job. But all I knew of them came from marks on a screen. My imagination created a model of who they were from variations of 26 letters.

Sometimes I went too far in interpreting what lay behind those letters, reading emotions into them where none existed. For example, when emails were terse, I worried that my client was irritated.

My practical husband Donnie cautioned me not to read anything into the text beyond the literal words on the screen. Otherwise I would be building an illusion which had nothing to do with the true feelings of my client.

But as a reader I was already creating my own working mental models of my clients. Given limited textual information about them, I had no choice but to imagine them. Where then, did my imagination leave off and reality begin?

Others struggle with this problem, too. Donnie told me about a former boss who interpreted every email as being angry, but when Donnie looked over the same email, he could never find any evidence of ire.

“Email is the worstform of communication,” Donnie says. “Most people are bad at it, they rush it, and because tone of voice and facial expressions are missing, the reader has nothing to interpret.” Donnie insists that emoticons like smiley faces are essential to web based correspondence.

But as a die-hard writing chauvinist, I am unable to believe that speaking is a more effectiveform of communication than writing. Writing lets me reveal more complex thoughts and feelings than I ever could in speech without seeming insane.

Writing captures fleeting expressions, vivid sensory details, and sophisticated re-creations of emotional states that would be impossible to pull off in a casual conversation.

But how sane is living a text-based world? Writing isan abstract and disembodied way to communicate. And no self-respecting mountain lion would agree to participate in such an unnatural activity even if it could.

Social media forces us to redefine what we mean by reality, as we drift more and more away from nature, distancing ourselves further and further from a practical “cat” definition of what is real.

But cats do not know everything. What goes on in cyberspace comes from real people with real feelings, drawing from a world of experience and knowledge residing beneath the ice burg tips of the text they send.

Whether a text-based existence is mentally “healthy,” on-line interactions are real – as real as anything that is written; as real as Helen Keller drawing a model of reality from mere taps and touches.

Computer based interaction, whatever its drawbacks, has created new avenues for personal expression. With only 26 letters, we manage to troll, befriend, inform, complain, persuade, anger, flatter, and disappoint. Social media – like writing – is complex, emotion-driven, human.

Though undeniably strange.