Escapism Part One: Social Media & Hyperreality
The pot noodle of escapism.
Hello friends,
I’m so sorry this newsletter is horrendously late. I didn’t fall off the planet, I promise. I just started my phased return to work and it threw me off balance for a while. When I haven’t been working, I’ve been taking long naps to recharge for the next day, so there’s not been room for much else in my diary.
Thankfully, those wonderful 23.5 degrees mean that summer has finally arrived in this part of the world, which means longer days, warmer weather and lots of sunshine to solar-power-up on.
This post is Part One of my Escapism series. We’re talking about social media as a form of escapism, and I definitely pulled a brain cell or two trying to handle Baudrillard’s hyperreality.
Social Media & Hyperreality
I wish I could trust myself to use social media. Almost everyone of my generation is on it and the FOMO is very real.
It’s particularly annoying that I’ve had to self-impose a ban on having any sort of social media account because social media is such a useful tool for networking. If you want to find readers and connect with other writers, social media provides a forum to do that. If you have fairly niche interests and want to find a community to share your passions with, then the internet is where the fandom party is at.
The other reason I’m constantly tempted to ignore my better judgement and join the social media community again is because I feel massively out of the loop sometimes. News tends to hit platforms on the internet first and phone lines second, so I’m often the last to know that someone has got engaged, had a baby or landed a new job. Or that aliens have landed and started harvesting humans for food. If I was on Instagram or Facebook, I’d be a bit more up-to-date on what’s happening in my wider social circle. And more likely to survive an impending apocalypse.
Sadly, however, I’ve learnt from experience that I can’t be trusted with something as powerful as a social media platform, which means I’m permanently under a ban until I can afford to pay someone else to manage such accounts for me.
It took a couple of attempts to learn this lesson. I joined Facebook when I was a student, back in the days when it was still mostly a network for universities and the idea of writing on someone else’s wall felt like some type of permissible vandalism. I left it a couple of years later mainly because people I didn’t want to be friends with, even virtually, kept friending me and there’s probably nothing more irksome than forced fake relationships when you’re an anti-social introvert. But then I got major FOMO and re-joined again for a little while before eventually dumping it for good about a decade ago. Several happy, social-media-less years after my Facebook break-up, when I was starting out as a self-published writer, I created a Twitter and Instagram account for promotional purposes. Eventually, I gave those up too and have been social-media-sober for about three years now.
Before I get onto the main reason why I escaped the domain of Social Media, wriggling under the barbed-wired fencing of hashtags, likes and followers, and hightailing it across the internet wasteland for freedom, sanity protectively clutched to my chest, let me tell you the two things I miss about it—because social media isn’t quite the spawn of the devil it’s often made out to be and there are a few things about it that are pretty good.
The Good Stuff:
Firstly, the nerds. I have interests that most of my friends don’t share, so if I want to geek-out over something, I have to go to the internet. None of my friends are going to sit and analyse every frame of the latest Marvel or Star Wars film with me. They just don’t have that level of obsession. I’m also not going to gush over coffee to them about the plot of the latest Webtoon or manga I binged or the animation quality of my new favourite anime, because I value my friendships and would like to keep them please. For that level of geeking-out I have to get on the internet and head to YouTube, the home of all my favourite nerd channels; or to a Twitter hashtag (you don’t even need an account for this) to find other people also losing their minds over the latest season finale cliff-hanger.
Nerds need other nerds, and we’re most at home in a virtual space where we can rant on infinite threads and share obscure references and in-jokes through memes and gifs.
Secondly, the humour. People are funny. Sometimes unintentionally so, but still, intended or not, there are many people out there who are genuinely hilarious. If I feel like I need a cry-until-I-die laugh, I go online. Social media seems to be the medium for all the closet comedians out there. If my friends send me anything from their social media feeds its always something acerbically witty or clownishly amusing… or just lots of videos of cats being cats. Because cats are funny too.
Unfortunately, humorous nerds and nerdy humour, and, no, not even cats, are enough to get me signed up with a profile on social media. There are a number of reasons why I left all the posts, reels and feeds behind me, but the main one in this: I have no self-discipline when it comes to escapism, whatever form that may take. And social media is the pot noddle of escapism. Because it’s right there, at your fingertips, in your pocket, interrupting your day with its siren song of notifications. Here’s a new post from your friend. Someone liked your status. You have a new follower. Here’s a video of a cat in a box. Here’s something else to distract you from the mundane task you’re working on or the moderately tolerable company you’re in. Hurry! Quickly! Come and get your next dopamine hit before you’re forced to experience a single second of boredom.
The problem with social media is that it’s also addictive beyond belief. It’s designed to be. It wants your attention and will do anything to get it. If you fancy an insight into exactly how this works, I recommend watching the docudrama The Social Dilemma.
You need a strong will to resist the temptations of social media. And adjusting notification settings, or not downloading the app on my phone, just doesn’t cut it for someone with my level of compulsive escapism.
The Pot Noodle of Instant Escapism
First off: social media as escapism?
On some level, it probably sounds wrong to say that social media is a form of escapism. If it’s about anything, social media is about reality, surely? It’s real people, expressing their real selves and sharing their real lives online through photos, statuses, hashtags, memes and other signifiers. Isn’t it? When you hop onto a social media platform, you’re just engaging with the realities of thousands of other real people. How can it be escapism?
I don’t think anyone needs more than one braincell these days to know that what we see online obviously isn’t reality: it’s a representation of reality, made up of a collection of carefully selected signifiers.
As such, it’s not exactly accurate. Essentially, when we log on to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or Twitter, we’re escaping actual reality in order to engage with a curated and heavily edited version of ‘reality’ that we have co-created. And there’s not really anything wrong with that, provided we remember that what we’re presenting or viewing isn’t really real. The problem arises when we forget that and lose the ability to distinguish between the real world and the version that exists online.
Social media is a prime example of what Jean Baudrillard calls hyperreality.
What is Hyperreality?
Okay, bear with me and my lingering brain fog here—it’s been a while since I (very briefly) studied post-structuralism. And before we get on to hyperreality, I should clarify that ‘reality’ in this scenario is technically termed ‘consensus reality’, meaning a reality that is generally agreed on, by consensus (since one could argue that reality is subjective and no objective reality exists, and therefore one can never be certain of what is real, but let’s not have an existential crisis over it right now). Hyperreality is a term introduced by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, so if you enjoy having your brain melted by post-structuralism, I recommend going straight to the source for a more thorough and intelligent explanation.
Full disclaimer: I’m not going to give the theory full credit here. The simplest definition I can manage is that hyperreality is a recreation or simulation of consensus reality that is distorted to the extent it actually doesn’t much resemble the reality it’s supposed to represent; or a recreation of a reality that actually doesn’t exist but has nonetheless become a ‘reality’ in its own right. Or, perhaps in other words, hyperreality is a fantasy version of reality.
Disneyland is one example that Baudrillard gives of a hyperreality. Disneyland is supposed to be a representation of a medieval past, with its fairy-tale-like castle, quaint little streets and houses, and population of princes, princesses and mythological creatures. But such a reality no longer exists; in fact it never existed in the idyllic form that Disneyland presents. I doubt anyone would really consider medieval Europe with its plagues, poverty, inequality and constant warring an ideal family holiday destination.
Disneyland, however, is real. It has taken the fantasy of a fairy tale past and manifested it as a reality, so that now Disneyland is a place in its own right with its own laws and ideology and expectations. The original reality no longer exists, but the representation (however idealised) has replaced it and is now the reality we experience. The reality of medieval Europe has been replaced by a series of signs or simulations (castles with towers and flags fluttering from their turrets; knights in shining armour on white steeds; princesses with long tresses and flowing gowns). Disneyland therefore is a hyperreality. Luckily, it’s a hyperreality that is aware it is such. It is a place designed for escapism and that is its main appeal.
The same can’t necessarily be said for social media, which presents itself more easily as reality because, instead of being populated with people dressed up in character costumes, it’s the online home of real people, sharing their real lives.
Except of course, it isn’t.
Social Media & Hyperreality
Social media is its own special kind of hyperreality. It is a representation of reality made up of signs, symbols and signifiers (images, statuses, hashtags, reels etc.) that doesn’t necessarily correlate with the offline world but is still received as reality because that’s supposed to be the point. It’s supposed to be a way of accessing the wider world, sharing experiences and knowledge; connecting with real people who are out there, somewhere, on the same, very real planet.
But of course, that’s not actually how it works. On social media we are both receivers and creators of hyperreality. Everyone online is making choices about how to present their reality to others; everyone curates a version of their reality to put out there on the world wide web. In return, we receive the version of reality that others want to project about their reality and accept it as actual reality. The line between consensus reality and hyperreality blurs because we engage with what we see on social media as if it’s actual reality, creating a type of online consensus reality that has the potential to impact our offline consensus reality. Social media is perhaps hyperreality at its most interactive and immersive. It’s freaky, really, if you think about it too hard. And all of that online activity creates one of the most powerful forms of escapism.
So, in what way is Social Media escapism?
Social media offers us an escape from our own consensus reality to a fantasy version of that reality. It does this by allowing us to be both creators and consumers of its hyperreality.
On the one hand, we get to create our own version of reality. We can reinvent our lives and ourselves with a few photos, a few lines of text and the click of a few buttons.
In extreme cases, you can be anyone you want online.
Like. Literally. Anyone.
I could be Larry, a fifty-year-old lorry driver and troll doll collector from Norfolk, if I wanted. Larry is a sweetheart who helps his elderly neighbours with their chores and is unaware that his crush on the landlady of the local pub is reciprocated.
Or I could be twenty-eight-year-old Sally, who is a successful hand model and influencer. Sally’s kind of catty and impatient with people, but she’s donated a lot of money to animal rescue charities.
I could choose to be either of these people on social media and no one could stop me.
On a less extreme note, social media offers us the opportunity to be our own spin doctors. We don’t have to make anything up… we just have to present our reality in a particular way.
For example, I could choose to be a thirty-something struggling writer with chronic fatigue and severe nerdism.
Or, I could choose to be a thirty-something experienced educator and writer living an uncompromised life indulging her passion for all forms of storytelling.
Just depends on how I want the world to see me, I guess. How much do I want to edit, filter, and polish the life I present to the world? What do I want people to know? What do I NOT want them to know? Even if I determine to ‘be real’, I’ll still inevitably make choices on content that will highlight some facts and omit or minimise others.
This isn’t, of course, much different from how we manage life offline. Human communication is ultimately a performance and we’re all, consciously or unconsciously, making choices about how we present ourselves to others. It’s just that social media makes it a bit easier to put a greater distance between real life and our preferred version. It makes escaping the less glamourous or downright awful aspects of reality so easy… and tempting. I can have a much better life online: a more interesting, witty, successful and popular life—a life constantly affirmed by likes, reposts and increasing follower counts. A life I can control by changing my colour scheme, adding filters, manipulating algorithms, following the right people, mastering photoshop (if I really wanted to go that far). Much harder to photoshop real life, you know.
Or, of course, you can choose a passive approach to social media instead: just set up an account and sit in the cyber shadows, consuming content as everyone else fills up the space with their stories, opinions and creative efforts.
This is the second type of escapism social media offers us. We get to be entertained, amused, inspired or even horrified by how other people live their lives without having to leave the house. It’s like an infinite reality show where we not only get to be voyeurs, but also get to interact and perhaps even exert some influence with minimal effort. Like this post, dislike that one. Leave a comment. Rate, repost, retweet. Share, follow, subscribe, click the link… Armed with just a phone and decent Wi-Fi connection, we can shape hyperreality whilst simultaneously consuming it. That kind of instant gratification and power is addictive. It can certainly offer a welcome escape from a reality in which we are unsatisfied and disempowered.
Is social media a healthy form of escapism?
I think, as a society, we’re still figuring out the answer to this. Plenty of research in recent years has focused on the negative impact social media can have on our mental health, but there are also arguments to be made on the good social media can do in connecting people who would otherwise struggle to form connections in the offline world and risk ending up isolated. The pros and cons could fill many research papers and journals and we still might not come to a definitive conclusion any time soon—especially since social media and the way we use it is constantly and rapidly evolving.
Personally, for me, social media is not a healthy means of escapism. That’s partly because of its instant and addictive nature, but mostly because of my lack of discipline, extreme suggestibility and obsessive tendencies. I am the sort of person whose plan to spend five minutes catching up on my feeds will spiral into two hours falling down rabbit holes into multiple Wonderlands, picking up new obsessions as I go.
It’s a problem.
I’m also pretty achievement orientated and so for me social media risks becoming another means to measure my own meagre achievements against the much greater successes of others.
This is also a problem.
And both those problems can only be solved with self-exile from all social media platforms.
Hence why I am social media abstinent.
And so far, I’m surviving pretty well without it—thriving, even.
Although we haven’t had an alien apocalypse yet…. not as far as I’m aware. But then maybe my neighbours have already fled the village and there’s an extra-terrestrial at my door right now…
Next time: virtual reality. This one will be much shorter. Probably.
If you have any comments, stories or feedback you’d like to share, click the button below and leave me a message! I’d love to hear from you!
Also, there’s a little book promotion below for my Divinity Laws series, which is going on sale on Smashwords for the month of July. If you’re looking for a summer read, check it out using the link provided.
Take care friends!
PJ
I’m excited to announce that all three books in my trilogy, The Divinity Laws, will be available as part of a promotion on Smashwords for the month of July as part of their Annual Summer/Winter Sale! This is a chance to get my books, along with books from many other great authors, at a discount so you can get right to reading.
You will find the promo here starting on July 1, so save the link:
https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/
Please share this promo with friends and family. You can even forward this email to the avid readers in your life!
Thank you for your help and support!
Happy reading!
PJ