Passive Surveillance is Not Intimacy

On social media, belonging, and intentionality.

Technology, specifically apps like FaceTime or WhatsApp, have made the world smaller. Despite having moved around lots, (Aish having immigrated three times in the last three years and Preetha moving to two different small towns) neither of us have felt too lonely because we have kept in touch with people in our personal networks. Somewhere along those moves, though, we lost touch with each other and our friendship became relegated to liking each other’s posts on Instagram until we each, for unrelated reasons, deleted our accounts. We got back in touch after a random phone call and started thinking about friendships, intimacy, and social media.

Making friends as an adult in the age of social media is hard.

When people primarily use social media as their way to establish and maintain new friendships, the resulting friendships lack intentionality, and therefore intimacy. Let us imagine Instagram as a modern day piazza [1]. In a traditional piazza in the 1700s, if someone wanted to become friends with another person, the process of doing so might involve asking about them through the local gossip channels, but the act of befriending them probably started by going up to them and saying hello. The modern corollary of this is that people will first find their prospective friend on Instagram to “sus out the vibes” and subsequently send them a follow request. This removes the personal interaction from the process and as a result, leads to more passivity in the friendship. The same goes for romantic pursuits. People will “swipe up” on your stories to express interest. It's a virtual piazza without the human element. And, more often than not, these friendships and relationships don’t end up going anywhere. Next thing you know, you’re still following that one girl you met in a club bathroom 7 years ago or the guy you matched with on Hinge and went on a couple of dates with – just passively surveying their lives, as they do yours.

Social media, however, legitimately does lower the activation energy required to put yourself out there and face potential rejection. Seeing “no” on a screen without the person watching you is a lot easier than being rejected in person. It then follows, though, that this lowering of activation energy leads to the use of social media to avoid accountability in established relationships. You’ll see people slow fading from relationships, ghosting after dates, or breadcrumbing potential love interests to avoid commitment. This lack of accountability is also present in interactions with strangers online: more seriously, you’ll see racial or gender-based harassment hiding behind a veil of relative anonymity. People who would not say slurs to your face on the street feel more comfortable typing them to you on-screen because of the separation from human interaction.

What we’re trying to say here is that relationships of any kind on social media are not inherently intentional in most cases. That lack of intentionality leads to a lack of intimacy. People may try to address this lack of intimacy through increasing their passive consumption of social media, creating a never-ending feedback loop. This could be one factor contributing to the correlation between social anxiety, loneliness, and social media use [2]. 

Authenticity becomes tough to build in relationships without intentionality. Whether a relationship is romantic, platonic, or professional, it’s important to build a sense of trust and closeness to strengthen a bond between two people. It requires a conscious effort to be honest and vulnerable, to be intentional about communication, making time for each other, and creating a safe space. 

Passive surveillance comes from a place of curiosity rather than caring. Social media is a great way to “keep in touch” and offers a way to promote professional connection but there is no depth to friendships. Even close friends stories provide curated snippets of gossip that the poster wants to circulate rather than true vulnerability. Everything is curated. #BeReal is not real. No matter how many stories you swipe up on, relationships maintained solely on social media lack depth and meaning and have an element of parasociality [3] to them rather than being truly reciprocal. Why do we care to still follow our lab partner from freshman year? It’s exhausting and unsustainable. No matter how many friends we have in our close friends story, are they really “close” if the only thing keeping the connection is passive surveillance of each others’ lives? 

Contrast this with the below quote from Walden:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to face only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau

In other words, intentionality is essential to living in the moment of one’s own life. The historical significance of Walden as a piece of literature and a reaction to the Industrial Revolution seems especially poignant considering the current technological expansion. We’ve tried to avoid “digital minimalism” as a buzzword and have been successful so far but we would be remiss to not mention the movement entirely. Intentional use of technology is becoming a talking point more and more. 

We’ve come across “digital detox” trends or “I quit social media for 30 days” challenges because people clearly know that it’s having a negative impact on their lives, specifically their interpersonal skills. This concept of digital minimalism was first popularized by author and professor Cal Newport in his book “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.” The essence of the book is that technology should be used to enhance one’s life, rather than being consumed by it. 

Digital minimalism is an excellent solution to social media and technology overuse, but everything we’ve experienced points to a larger systemic problem. People want true connection; they want to feel loved and wanted. Social media becomes an avenue to seek connection, but people get caught up in likes and comments and making boomerangs of themselves having brunch together. Loneliness ensues. The end result is that people exist in a constant sphere of individualism and therefore isolation.

Walden and other transcendentalist works heavily prize individualism, or self-reliance as they call it, and ignore community. While transcendentalism paints an idyllic picture of solitude and retreat from a world where people are disconnected, the importance of community in creating a world where people are connected is lost. Disconnecting further from a disconnected world does not do anything to build and nurture relationships. Returning to these ideas should be done with the knowledge that community is part of the solution, if not the ideal solution. Going offline and being intentional about technology should be paired with engagement in the world around you.

Community is being involved in each other’s lives in a way that is impactful and creates intimacy. It’s not having brunch every few weeks for the sake of posting a boomerang on your Instagram story. Showing up for people in their worst moments as well as celebrating their highlights is a hallmark of true community-building. Parasocial relationships, for all their merits, are not intimate community-building endeavors because they lack shared vulnerability.

At risk of being preachy and saccharine, the takeaway from all of this is that we’d like to imagine (and be part of creating) a world where the focus of intentionality is less on touching grass and more on hugging our friends. 

[Notes]

1. A piazza is an open space in Italy, widely used between the 16th and 18th centuries as an open public square, surrounded by buildings. It was the physical center of the community.

2. Emily B. O’Day, Richard G. Heimberg. Social media use, social anxiety, and loneliness: A systematic review. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, Volume 3, 2021:100070, ISSN 2451-9588, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2021.100070. 

3. A parasocial relationship is a one-sided relationship that a media user engages in with a media persona.