Adolescence was officially “discovered” in the United States in 1904 by G. Stanley Hall, and even then, Hall, the first doctor of psychology in the country, located the challenges of youth in the rapidly changing context of “our urbanized hothouse life that tends to ripen everything before its time.”18 While writing about teenagers in 1904, he observed that adolescence is a period of extreme orientation toward the peer group: “Some seem for a time to have no resource in themselves, but to be abjectly dependent for their happiness upon their mates.”19 He also pointed to the potential for cruelty within the peer group, a phenomenon that contemporary psychologists refer to as “relational aggression.” Decades later, the central challenge of adolescence was famously characterized as “identity formation” by the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, who did much to explain twentieth-century adolescence. Erikson emphasized the adolescent struggle to construct a coherent identity from the mutual “joinedness” of the adolescent clique. He described the “normative crisis” when fundamental questions of “right” and “wrong” require inner resources associated with “introspection” and “personal experimentation.” The healthy resolution of that conflict between self and other leads to a durable sense of identity.20
Today, most psychologists agree that our longer lives combined with the challenges of an information-intensive society have further lengthened the time between childhood and adulthood. Many have settled on the notion of “emerging adulthood” to denote the years between eighteen and the late twenties as a new life stage: emerging adulthood is to the twenty-first century what adolescence was to the twentieth.21 And although contemporary researchers embrace a diverse range of methods and paradigms, most concur that the essential challenge of emerging adulthood is the differentiation of a “self” from the “others.”22
There is a broad consensus that our extended life spans often require us to revisit the core questions of identity more than once during our lives, but researchers agree that psychological success during emerging adulthood depends on at least some resolution of identity issues as the basis for the shift toward full adulthood. As one research scholar writes, “A prime challenge of emerging adulthood is to become the author of your own life.”23 Who among us does not recognize that call? This existential challenge is enduring, a source of continuity that links generations. What has changed are the circumstances in which young people today must meet this challenge.
III. Proof of Life
Emerging adulthood is “ground zero” in the struggle for the “relational autonomy” that prepares young people for the transition into adulthood, as Notre Dame psychologists Daniel Lapsley and Ryan Woodbury characterize it.24 By “relational autonomy,” they mean to underscore the idea that autonomy is not a simplistic cliché of “individualism,” unencumbered by attachment or empathy, but instead it strikes a vital balance between the cultivation of inner resources and the capacity for intimacy and relationship. Emerging adulthood requires “hard bargaining” to establish a self that is separate from but still connected to others, and the quality of this inner bargain “gives emerging adulthood a sense of anticipation and urgency,” aiding a successful transition to adulthood.25
Even with these insights, it remains difficult to fully grasp the felt experiences of young people who, as Hall aptly described more than a century ago, “seem… to have no resources in themselves.” Perhaps the most difficult quality to capture is that in this period that precedes the hard bargaining, an “inner” sense of “self” simply does not yet exist. It is a time when “I” am whatever the “others” think of me, and how “I” feel is a function of how the “others” treat me. Instead of a stable sense of identity, there is only a chameleon that reinvents itself depending upon the social mirror into which it is drawn. In this condition, the “others” are not individuals but the audience for whom I perform. Who “I” am depends upon the audience. This state of existence in the mirror is pure “fusion,” and it captures the meaning of a thirteen-year-old girl anxiously awaiting the appearance of the little notification box as a sign of her existence and her worth. The young person who has not yet carved out an inward space exists for herself only in the viewpoint of the Other-One. Without the “others,” the lights go out. Anger is out of the question: one dare not alienate the others who are one’s mirror and thus one’s proof of life.
In this most elemental sense, the young person who feels compelled to use social media is more truly and accurately described as hanging on for dear life, alive in the gaze of others because it’s the only life one has, even when it hurts. As developmental psychologist Robert Kegan described the adolescent experience long before the advent of Facebook, “There is no self independent of the context of ‘other people liking.’”26 This is not a moral or emotional shortcoming but a fact of life in this developmental moment, and it entails certain predictable consequences. For example, one tends to operate through social comparison. One can be easy prey to manipulation, with few defenses against social pressure and other forms of social influence. The fixed belief system of an established group can all too easily fill the inner void, substituting an externally sourced identity for the work of self-construction.27
Moving on from “fusion” means a transition from being someone who is their relationships to someone who has their relationships. It entails a deep reconfiguration of how we make sense of our experience. In Kegan’s language, this means a shift away from a “culture of mutuality” to a more complex “culture of identity, self-authorship, and personal autonomy.” This shift depends upon encountering people and life experiences that demand something more than our reflection in the mirror. It requires individuals and situations that insist on our first-person voice, provoking us to carve out our own unique response to the world.
This is an inner act that eludes rendition or datafication as we begin to compose an inward sense of valid truth and moral authority. This is the reference point from which we can say, “I think,” “I feel,” “I believe.” Gradually, this “I” learns to feel authorship and ownership of its experiences. It can reflect on itself, know itself, and regulate itself with intentional choices and purposive action. Research shows that these big leaps in self-construction are stimulated by experiences such as structured reflection, conflict, dissonance, crisis, and failure. The people who help trigger this new inward connection refuse to act as our mirrors. They reject fusion in favor of genuine reciprocity. “Who comes into a person’s life,” Kegan observes, “may be the single greatest factor to influence what that life becomes.”28
What are the consequences of the failure to win a healthy balance between inner and outer, self and relationship? Clinical studies identify specific patterns associated with this developmental stagnation. Not surprisingly, these include an inability to tolerate solitude, the feeling of being merged with others, an unstable sense of self, and even an excessive need to control others as a way of keeping the mirror close. Loss of the mirror is the felt equivalent of extinction.29
The cultivation of inner resources is thus critical to the capacity for intimacy and relationship, challenges that have become more time-consuming with each new phase of the modern era. And while young people are bound as ever to the enduring existential task of self-making, our story suggests three critical ways in which this task now converges with history and the unique conditions of existence in our time.
First, the waning of traditional society and the evolution of social complexity have accelerated the processes of individualization. We must rely upon our self-making and inner resources more than at any time in the human story, and when these are thwarted, the sense of dislocation and isolation is bitter.
Second, digital connection has become a necessary means of social participation, in part because of a widespread institutional failure to adapt to the needs of a new society of individuals. The computer mediation of the social infrastructure simultaneously alters human communication, illuminating individual and collective behavior, as refl
ected in the undulating waves of tweets, likes, clicks, patterns of mobility, search queries, posts, and thousands of other daily actions.
Third, surveillance capitalism dominates and instrumentalizes digital connection. “What is different as a result of social media,” writes researcher danah boyd in her examination of the social lives of networked teens, “is that teens’ perennial desire for social connection and autonomy is now being expressed in networked publics.”30 It’s true that for the sake of connection, the travails of identity are visible to a wider group. But the notion of “networked publics” is a paradox. In fact, our visibility is magnified and compelled not only by the public-ness of networked spaces but by the fact that they are privatized. Young life now unfolds in the spaces of private capital, owned and operated by surveillance capitalists, mediated by their “economic orientation,” and operationalized in practices designed to maximize surveillance revenues. These private spaces are the media through which every form of social influence—social pressure, social comparison, modeling, subliminal priming—is summoned to tune, herd, and manipulate behavior in the name of surveillance revenues. This is where adulthood is now expected to emerge.
Whereas casino executives and slot machine developers can be garrulous and boastful, eager to share their “addiction by design” achievements, the surveillance capitalist project relies on secrecy. An entire discourse has thus sprung to life, trained on decoding the stealth design that first deters users from ever looking away and then makes them incapable of doing so. There are chat groups and endless query threads as people try to divine what Facebook actually does. Relevant design practices are discussed in journalistic accounts as well as in books with such titles as Evil by Design, Hooked, and Irresistible, all of which help to normalize the very methods they discuss. For example, Evil by Design author Chris Nodder, a user-experience consultant, explains that evil design aims to exploit human weakness by creating interfaces that “make users emotionally involved in doing something that benefits the designer more than them.” He coaches his readers in psychic numbing, urging them to accept the fact that such practices have become the standard suggesting that consumers and designers find ways to “turn them to your advantage.”31
If we are to judge coming of age in our time, then we have to understand something of the specific practices that turn social participation into a glove that doesn’t simply embrace the hand but rather magnetizes and paralyzes the hand for the sake of economic imperatives. Facebook relies on specific practices that feed the inclinations of people, especially young people, to know themselves from “the outside looking in.” Most critical is that the more the need for the “others” is fed, the less able one is to engage the work of self-construction. So devastating is the failure to attain that positive equilibrium between inner and outer life that Lapsley and Woodbury say it is “at the heart” of most adult personality disorders.32
For example, Nodder highlights Facebook’s precocious mastery of “social proof”: “Much of our behavior is determined by our impressions of what is the correct thing to do… based on what we observe others doing.… This influence is known as social proof.”33 The company instrumentalizes this aspect of adolescent nature by using messages from “friends” to make a product, service, or activity feel “more personal and emotional.” This ubiquitous tactic, much admired by Pentland, was used in the Facebook voting experiment. It fuels young people’s needs to garner approval and avoid disapproval by doing what the others are doing.
Facebook’s single most momentous innovation in behavioral engineering is the now equally ubiquitous “Like” button, adopted in 2009. According to contemporaneous blog posts by longtime Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth, the “Like” button had been debated internally for more than a year and a half before Zuckerberg’s final decision to incorporate it. He had rejected the idea more than once, fearing that it would detract from other features intended to lift monetization, such as the controversial Beacon program. Significantly, the founder embraced the button only when new data revealed it as a powerful source of behavioral surplus that helped to ratchet up the magnetism of the Facebook News Feed, as measured by the volume of comments.34
Facebook’s leadership appears to have realized only gradually that the button could transform the platform from a book into a blizzard of mirrors, a passive read into an active sea of mutual reflections that would glue users to their news feeds. On the supply side, the “Like” button was a planet-size one-way mirror capable of exponentially increasing raw-material supplies. The more that a user “liked,” the more that she informed Facebook about the precise shape and composition of her “hand,” thus allowing the company to continuously tighten the glove and increase the predictive value of her signals.
The protocols at Instagram, a Facebook property, provide another good example of these processes. Here one sees these tight linkages as compulsion draws more surplus to feed more compulsion. Instagram rivets its users with photos that appeal to their interests, so how does it select those photos from the millions that are available? The obvious, but incorrect, answer would be that it analyzes the contents of photos that you like and shows you more. Instead, Instagram’s analytics are drawn from behavioral surplus: the shadow text. As one manager describes it, “You base predictions off an action, and then you do stuff around that action.” Actions are signals like “following,” “liking,” and “sharing,” now and in the past. The circle widens from there. With whom did you share? Who do they follow, like, and share with? “Instagram is mining the multilayered social web between users,” but that mining is based on observable, measurable behaviors moving through time: the dynamic surplus of the shadow text drawn from its own caches as well as Facebook’s, not the content displayed in the public text.35 In the end, the photos you see resonate with strange relevance for your life. More begets more.
On the demand side, Facebook’s “likes” were quickly coveted and craved, morphing into a universal reward system or what one young app designer called “our generation’s crack cocaine.” “Likes” became those variably timed dopamine shots, driving users to double down on their bets “every time they shared a photo, web link, or status update. A post with zero likes wasn’t just privately painful, but also a kind of public condemnation.”36 In fact, most users craved the reward more than they feared humiliation, and the “Like” button became Facebook’s signature, spreading across the digital universe and actively fusing users in a new kind of mutual dependency expressed in a pastel orgy of giving and receiving reinforcement.
The “Like” button was only the start of what was to be an historic construction of a new social world that for many users is defined by fusion with the social mirror, especially among the young. Just as gamblers chase the zone of fusion with the machine, a young person embedded in the culture of mutuality chases the zone of fusion with the social mirror. For anyone already struggling with the challenge of the self-other balance, the “Like” button and its brethren continuously tip the scales toward regression.
The short history of Facebook’s News Feed is further evidence of the efficacy of the ever-tightening feedback loops that aim to shape and sustain this fusion. When News Feed was first launched in 2006, it transformed Facebook from a site where users had to visit friends’ pages to see their updates to having those messages automatically shared in a stream on each person’s home page. Hundreds of thousands of users joined opposition groups, repelled by the company’s unilateral invasion of privacy. “No one was prepared for their online activity to suddenly be fodder for mass consumption,” recalled the tech news site TechCrunch on News Feed’s tenth anniversary in 2016, as it offered readers “The Ultimate Guide to the News Feed,” with instructions on “how you can get your content seen by more people,” how to appear “prominently,” and how to resonate with your “audience.”37 Ten years earlier a TechCrunch reporter had presciently noted, “Users who don’t participate will quickly find that they are falling out of the attention st
ream, and I suspect will quickly add themselves back in.”38
Playing to the fear of invisibility and abandonment worked in 2006, when Facebook had just 9.5 million users (and required a college e-mail address to sign up), and it has driven the acceptance of every subsequent tweak to News Feed as Facebook has amassed more than 2 billion users. News Feed grew to become the “epicenter” of the corporation’s revenue success and “the most valuable billboard on Earth,” as Time magazine stated in 2015, just three years after Facebook’s IPO.39
News Feed is also the fulcrum of the social mirror. In the years between revulsion and reverence, News Feed became Facebook’s most intensely scrutinized object of data science and the subject of extensive organizational innovation, all of it undertaken at a level of sophistication and capital intensity that one might more naturally associate with the drive to solve world hunger, cure cancer, or avert climate destruction.
In addition to Facebook’s already complex computational machinery for targeting ads, by 2016 the News Feed function depended upon one of the world’s most secretive predictive algorithms, derived from a God view of more than 100,000 elements of behavioral surplus that are continuously computed to determine the “personal relevancy” score of thousands of possible posts as it “scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked,” writes Will Oremus in Slate. “The post you see at the top of your feed, then, has been chosen over thousands of others as the one most likely to make you laugh, cry, smile, click, like, share, or comment.”40 The glove tightens around the hand with closed feedback loops enabled by the God view, which favors posts from people with whom you have already interacted, posts that have drawn high levels of engagement from others, and posts that are like the ones with which you have already engaged.41
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