Many of us college students come in looking for brighter futures, a stimulating education and a fresh start. I was certainly one of those hopefuls, and my first two years at The Chronicle have given me insights like no other. As we send off our wonderful and intelligent seniors into the great beyond of post-graduation life, there comes a need for reflection. The end years of their college experience have been hampered by the pandemic and its consequences, and our generation’s unprecedented yearning for connection might have us looking in all the wrong places.
The internet is very parasocial, meaning that it replicates an intimate relationship between consumers and producers of content. Our attraction to social media influencers is a parasocial bond, basing itself in a resonance between the ideality and unique flair of influencers’ media and their consumers. This has its consequences, as parasocial relationships are not typical bonds between regular people – they’re isolated, curated snapshots of influencers’ lives. In a sense, an influencer only exists as an idea, a halfway constructed psychological schism within the brain. The “socialization” between a consumer and an influencer is highly limited, if not completely fake.
Lacan, a French psychologist, created the principle of “manque-a-etre,” which roughly translates to “want-to-be.” This is the manifestation of desire through void, or “lack.” It is the barest form of human functioning. As humans, we strive towards an ideal beyond our shadowy Freudian id, sifting through arcane or animalistic emotions deep within our psyches to behave within the boundaries of social conditioning. To draw simple conclusions, the internet has plagued our brains with new norms and boundaries. We are divorced from the desires of the past. When the internet became parasocial through individualized profiles and interaction, we entered a new era of communication, breaking down the boundaries of existing social law. Instead of abiding by the norms of real, human conversation, we are gradually shifting to communication with profile interfaces, built with misconceptions and loose connections to vaguely defined archetypes. Camille Paglia, a controversial writer and public intellectual, defines these concepts as the Freudian “family romance.”
When it comes to politics, this shift is hard to miss. Culture wars rage and ideas of accountability and progressivism are at constant war with establishment liberalism, projecting contemporary issues into the public eye through Twitter spats and tabloid reporting from sites like the New York Post and Daily Mail. The dirty underbelly of power has always been exposed through gossipy socialites and invasive media, but when the borders between contrived personality and actual personhood are blurred, politics becomes divorced from material condition or liberation and gravitates to a politician’s cult of personality – reflected in many people’s idolization of figures like Vice President Kamala Harris or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Acts of legislation become worthless beyond their codified media narratives. Feasibly, the New York Times has more political power than most members of Congress.
While my fellow members of Gen Z like to think of ourselves as the anecdote to our predecessors’ problems, I find it hard to be so optimistic. To consider ourselves uniquely qualified healers – especially through the internet and its adjacent mosaic of counterculture – is missing the point.
