Hmmm I don’t really think so. Everyone has always tried to have a perfect public image since the days of yore (unless you have fuck you money). It might seem that way if you spend a lot of time on social media though, I don’t have anything other than lemmy and I’m pretty happy with it.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘fake.’ Do you mean people have a different public persona than a private persona? Because I think that’s been true for most of the history of civilization.
Older than that. I, as a layman, suspect it might be one of the points that indicate the development of conscious thought.
Because Chimps, Cuttlefish and Crows can and do lie to each other in the wild.
Chimps will cheat on each other(i.e. a non-dominant male in a group will pair off with a female chimp, but the female chimp remains paired to the more dominant male of the group. Even going so far that the "other guy" will shield his erection from the first guy to avoid a beating.
Large Cuttlefish males will create and defend "harems" of female cuttlefish during their breeding periods. Smaller male cuttlefish are known to pretend to be female to sneak into a harem and mate with them.
Crows will make false caches of food if they suspect they are being watched by another crow.
Oh for sure. We already had complex social relationships that involved lying when we were only homo erectus and likely incapable of speech and were hunting full grown elephants and hippopotami(yeah, simple stone tools against those monsters required some serious teamwork). I think that creating a social face for those you DON'T know, though, had to come about once we were in a situation where there were people we interacted with that we didn't know. Hunter/gatherer societies generally still operated with too much of a cohesion for you to truly be "fake".
I think no. On social media, yes, sure. But otherwise no, the past was more tightly controlled societies. Fashion had less freedom, behavior was controlled from top down more, there was way more conformity to styles and in enforcement of all sorts of things. There was always makeup, foundation garments, heeled shoes, etc.
I do think the technology has improved though, people can get closer to their ideal look. But I don’t feel like I have to participate in that world, nor do my kids. One of my sisters, and her daughter and family do live that “highlights reel” life but not many people I know do live like that, and I guess the main difference to me is I don’t feel like I have to.
Meh, social media has been fake for years. To be sure, recent increases in advertising enabled the whole "influencer" activity to become profitable and thus capitalistic, but everyone online has been faking their social media presence since Myspace.
For instance, if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the ‘tribal’ stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety. But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker’s conclusions.
Over the last several centuries, there have been numerous occasions when individuals found themselves in a position to make precisely this choice – and they almost never go the way Pinker would have predicted. Some have left us clear, rational explanations for why they made the choices they did.
Graeber goes on to give a couple of these accounts. They tend to mention a loneliness associated with “western civilization,” as well as a feeling that I think lines up very well with what Marx described as alienation.
Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.
Later in the book, and I apologize that I can’t find the reference right now, he comes back to this topic for a little bit, and talks about the depths of relationships that these people describe, and how their relationships in the “civilized” world are more shallow and less satisfying. Deep human relationships are the opposite of fake, so I think here we have a point in favor of “yes.”
Add to that that the concept of “privacy” as we know it is relatively new. It’s been 10+ years since I read a book about this, the title of which I can’t even remember, but it argued that the expectation of domestic privacy, even from one’s own family, is a phenomenon from the last few hundred years, especially outside the elite. People lived far, far more communally, with the expectation that they just were in each other’s business more. I’d argue that it’s a lot harder to be fake if you can’t hide who you really are.
Between those two things, I think it’s reasonable to argue that yes, society has gotten more fake.
What if, let’s say, that person has something to hide… nothing dangerous or that might cause harm to others, something that society frowns upon. My reasoning is that, it would be OK to be “fake” in those circumstances.
Anyone can watch videos of some african villages being visited by outsiders and how happy the local population generally appear. There’s a ton of negative stuff for those people to deal with, but I think there’s something to be said about the benefits of communal living no matter how much I try to convince myself it’s fine being by myself.
I think social media has the ability to make things impossible to ignore, things that previously people were able to ignore.
Things such as police brutality, mass shootings, for instance, probably were just as common back then as it is now. But now we’re paying attention to it. I think it’s the same thing here. People have always had a different public and personal life. It would be incredibly odd if someone didn’t. But social media is making people pay attention to the fact that there’s some people whose private lives are ugly, but who try to project a perfect public life anyways.
Nah you’re just struggling with mental gymnastics. I like to call it “who” and where reconstruction… It’s normal to feel that way with social media, vs real life normal conversations
You check your newsfeed, you read or see something, then get emotional, you feel like you need to rationalize a response to something that is like explaining to someone why you jumped to try to pull binoculars to see something when you’re basically just seeing funny symbols through a window.
Because that’s what looking at internet comments and arguing with people on the internet often if is. Your brain sometimes actively needs to stress test your adversity chunking models and agency detection.
Agency detection, is what you’re observing sentient or a potential threat? If so can you detect the window or scope that your looking through, can you rationalize potential bias, and adversity chunking, check to chunk what potential threats there are together into one big lump and act racist to make things easier and de-stress yourself from the imaginary threat
If you took this borderline narcissism and paranoia to the extreme you could just become a conspiracy theorist, but you could also just get a wicked sense of humour and have a better degree of self awareness, I get it because I have in the past sometimes felt the same, it’s how we are when we feel that we’re stuck in a response cycle and get a kind of emotional “decision fatigue” I dunno, that’s just my take, and I could be entirely wrong, feel free to speak your mind or challenge me, but that’s just my two cents for now and part of why I prefer not to doomscroll too much these days.
Just consider that the average person probably has heaps of compressed and distorted subconscious memories that can be further distorted, deleted or hidden entombed in lies, misunderstandings or dreams, and that from the perspective of a silicon based chip, the human mind usually knows itself better than outsiders however the landscape of a mind is a dangerous place and doubly so because if a chip or even bacteria entering the brain could inadvertently screw things up and destroy or corrupt memories it’s a wonder anyone can remember a beer or brief conversation they’ve had several years ago but forget what they ate for dinner just last week. If the human brain was to detect a silicon chip attempting to act on it, we really have no idea what would happen,…
Okay, goodnight guys hope you enjoyed reading my dumb sci-fi long ass post (my lame attempt at humour here)
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