The Objectifying Gaze of Social Media

Theodore Robert Bach, Assoc. Prof. of Philosophy, BGSU Firelands Consider three exhibits, each made possible by advances in social media and recording technology.One: The majority of attendees at a pop star's concert are preoccupied with capturing the show on their phones. Many concertgoers post pictures to Facebook and Twitter throughout the concert.Two: A group of friends visit a new restaurant. They use their phones to take pictures of the restaurant and their entrees, posting these pictures to Yelp, Instagram, and Facebook before they leave.Three: A wedding DJ introduces a newly married couple, and friends and family become a tangle of outstretched arms with smart phones that record the couple's entrance and first dance. Friends and family send these pictures to the married couple and post them online.The exhibits share a common feature. People now place increasing emphasis on recording an event rather than experiencing that event fully in the moment. In managing their experiences this way, people swap present experiences for future experiences. Unfortunately, this swap may be more complex and damaging to subjective well-being than is at first apparent.Pictures, tweets, and posts are digital artifacts increasingly specialized for an audience of others. More than just vehicles for reminiscing, they are designed to be consumed by others who in return can confer valuable social capital. In this way, even a visit to the aquarium becomes an opportunity to proclaim to others that "I was here" or "I am the type of person who goes here." Instead of fully investing into our actual enjoyment and experiences, we are increasingly preoccupied with how best to digitize and showcase our mere presence at events. Teenagers – the group who may be engaged in the most competitive and treacherous version of the social capital arms race – seem particularly liable to this form of thinking and behavior.For those heavily involved in this game of digital appearances, it may not come as a surprise that there could be repercussions for subjective well-being. Here, I think, it is important to learn from a widely accepted empirical research program on how objectification affects women's mental health. As Fredrickson and Roberts describe in their important paper "Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women's Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks," there is an all too swift causal route from being objectified (where one is treated and rewarded by others on the basis of one's appearance), to self-objectifying oneself (where in order to succeed in the objectifying environment one treats oneself as an object of appearance), to the onset of various mental health problems like shame, diminished focus, and depression. Simplifying things greatly: objectified women are a well understood case study in how living one's life with a goal of packaging the right appearances can lead directly to a variety of mental harms.Several recent studies indicate that extensive social media use correlates with negative feelings. One explanation for this finding is that because people tend to post online only their "greatest hits," those who browse these sites are subject to feelings of jealousy and inadequacy. But the experience of the spectator is only half the story. To understand the other half, we need to examine the hardworking sources for these greatest hits – we need to investigate what it is like to be the spectacle. When we do so, we may uncover a causal relationship between self-objectification and mental health that is similar to, or perhaps on track toward, the one described by Fredrickson and Roberts.The digital game of social capital is not without its casualties. We know that the social structures that press self- objectification upon women are unjust. It is time to take more seriously the possibility that the social structures that press self-objectification upon social media users – particularly teenagers – are also unjust.