Social Media Is Turning You Into an Informant

In the past 10 years there’s been a linguistic shift where instead of saying “Someone told me XYZ,” people now say “Had someone tell me XYZ.” An extension of main character syndrome where people place themselves at the center of everything and think in terms of consumption. “Had.”

One “has” interactions in the same way one “has” experiences or possessions. People increasingly view others’ comments as objects to be consumed and then later exploited for social media content.

We live in a quasi-surveillance state with no private moments. The weird thing is how this is bottom up rather than top down. People voluntarily do this, with no state coercion. Recall that in East Germany and other communist states, there existed people who actually relished the fact that they were deputized to spy on their neighbors and gleefully ratted them out to the authorities.

In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch wrote that, “Modern life is so mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions- and our own- were being transmitted to an unseen audience or stored for scrutiny at some later time.”

In the above tweet, a woman mocks her houseguest for admiring her basic household items. Simple rugs and a budget knife set. It reminded me of how social media offers a platform for people with Dark Triad personality traits to turn small human exchanges into content manufactured for a digital audience.