At times, when a compulsion grows in oneself to virtually document one’s life, one’s experiences, one ends up in missing experiencing the present itself, reality itself that is being documented for whom I know not. One becomes almost unable to reflect upon his own life, his own experiences, and to live them, without thinking of the virtual space—with its divers dwellers—and its right to share him his own life. It happens that, the more you want to archive your present and capture its constituting moments, the more you lose your sense of it and of its real place in your life and your memory (and this is always felt with lucidity when you find yourself free to sift through the old posts, photos, likes, comments, ironically searching for yourself, as it were, ending up with posing this question on yourself: Who is this person, really? It doesn't feel at all the same way it feels when you page through, say, an album of your old photographs, or an old diary of yours. There is almost always felt something fake about it, something artificial, something embarrassing.)
On social media, almost every account starts as private, as modest, so to speak, only to end up being nothing less than a ‹melting pot› in which everything is thrown and gathered together, if at first discriminately, then there always remains that temptation of its turning indiscriminately. One finds on it: posts and photos of different periods of one’s life; «friends» who are representatives almost of every period in one’s life, still sticking around whether with or without any purpose at all; conversations or mere messages with people whom you either know or know not, and with whom you remember exchanging messages or you don’t even know why you had ever exchanged anything; etc. Just everything wants to come together in one single place, trying to pose itself as one’s life, or the mirror of one’s life, and demanding to occupy you just as much as your «real» life does, if not more. Social media, as humans are (and mythology, before life itself, has taught us much about this since the dawn of time), has its own húbris.
In German there is ‹Erlebnis›, and then there is ‹Erfahrung›. In the first we speak of «merely incidental lived experiences,» experiences that are almost totally outer, non-conceptualised, like a stream that comes and then goes, only that it is even a disconnected stream (somehow!). We are speaking of mere images and incident thoughts; of half-impressions that could barely linger for a while; of a stream of sensory data, hardly understood and hardly registered, that barely last more than the time of seeing or receiving it, and then maybe of sharing it here and there on the spur of the moment, which is something akin to what is done by a person who, instead of experiencing the world around him, leaves everything to the camera to capture it and spare him the burden of real experience—he captures everything even before experiencing it and contemplating it, and by capturing it he is driving it out of his mind and his inner world. This kind of ‹Erlebnis› has nothing to do with Gadamer’s. While in the second, viz. ‹Erfahrung›, we speak of longer-term experiences; of experiences that went past the merely sensory into being interpreted by oneself and digested within, in the totality of one’s life; of coherent, integrated experiences that leave every possible trace on oneself; of experiences that accumulate with time, not for the mere and sole purpose of accumulation, but for cultivating knowledge and gaining some wisdom; of experiences that make up a real narrative of one’s own life, that can be felt and narrated and fathomed as part of oneself; etc. Now, apply this to your time on social media, and your way of dealing with it, and ask yourself with what kind of ‹experience› you’re being bombarded everyday, constantly, until you're almost sucked dry.
At last, social media is something either to be grown out of, or at least limited to a great extent.
