Individualism is at its peak. Social media now allows the individual to create a personal individual story of themselves on facebook, twitter and instagram. The king is dead, God is dead, big ideas are dead; the only true authority is the self.
With the breakdown of religion and the disbanding of previous social bonds, humans seem to have taken on the existential philosophy of 20th century. Existentialism states that the only authority is the self and it is down to self to choose what gives him meaning in the 20th century. Yet it seems that the thing that the self chooses to give itself meaning is in fact, itself. We have become our own gods, with our own sacred texts; our Instagram and Facebook pages. Our personal social media now tells everyone our personal myth and we treat our followers as disciples, eager to hear the latest message or photo from the ‘ME’ god.
Everyone has become their own messiah and nearly everyone is doing it. Like all polytheistic religions, some gods are more popular than others, and we can tell exactly who the popular ones are, not by amount of prayers, but by seeing the amount of likes, friends and followers the particular god has. The god of the self seems to have just as much power as was previously projected upon the monotheistic god; we are told constantly that if you work hard enough we can achieve anything, the conservative party it Great Britain constantly talks of being the party of ‘aspiration’ and millionaires and celebrities are celebrated for their individual success, with no regard for luck and environment as explanations for their grand success. Indeed the president of America, a man born into absolute wealth and privilege is celebrated as a successful businessman rather than someone who was born with significant advantages in life.
Marketing also plays a huge part in the myth. Making a person desire a certain product, telling them that they can become more liked, more popular and ultimately more godlike if they buy a commodity is such a simple way to mass market anything. Slogans such as ‘be good to yourself’ and ‘because you’re worth it’ really speak to this individualism myth. Indeed the first thing that most people do when they buy a product is post it on a social media account to show their followers there latest purchase.
Social media becomes a place of good memories, expensive products, many pictures of yourself, many expressions of your personal individuality and your infallible godlike personality. The problem is of course, unlike the monotheistic god, that the human is imperfect. We are bound to make mistakes and fail at certain things yet because of everybody performing a perfect example of the self on social media, we feel we the only people who are imperfect, producing a great sense of insecurity and disappointment in ourselves after all, we should be able to do anything…
This creates a feeling of unworthiness in the self, a feeling of non-comparison to the 1000s of perfect selves on the internet, which will make the person strive harder to come across as perfect online, a cycle that everyone is in. The truth is, social media is no more than a poor reflection of reality; it is a signifier of the self, but a completely untrue and unauthentic.
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