Will the Internet Destroy Us All? On Franklin Foer’s ‘World Without Mind’
When I was in graduate school, a professor introduced me to a documentary called The Century of the Self. Directed by BBC journalist Adam Curtis, it follows the rise of modern public relations, whose Austrian inventor, Edward Bernays, exploited Americans’ innate self-centeredness to sell us on everything from psychoanalysis to cigarettes. It’s an eye-opening piece of work, and one I used to rewatch once or twice a year. Last time I did though, it occurred to me that it might not be all that relevant. Because we aren’t living in the century of the self at all anymore, but the century of the crowd.
It would be easy, I guess, to argue that the self is still ascendant since social media gives people more ways to think about themselves than ever. But a hashtag can’t go viral with just one user, nobody cares about an Instagram photo no one likes, and does a YouTube video that doesn’t get watched even exist? Even as users do the self-focused work of updating LinkedIn profiles and posting on Twitter and Facebook, they do it in the service of belonging, at the back of everyone’s minds, an ever-present audience whose attention they need if their efforts aren’t to be wasted.
In his new book argues that this shift from individual to collective thinking is nowhere more evident than in the way we create and consume media on the Internet. Because tech companies like Facebook and Google make money off the sale of our personal data to advertisers, they depend on the attention of the masses to survive.
