As I’ve opined before, ours is a screen culture. Our predominant orientation, literal and figurative, is toward screens: television, computer, tablet, smartphone. In this sense, our sense of identity comes to include these devices, and it contains the multitude of symbols and images we send and access through their screens.

Clothing, Online

Clothing is used in part as costume for the self we present to others. We dress ourselves online, too. Facebook and Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn: these are places to see and be seen, as “Nevsky Prospect” was for the author Nikolai Gogol.

How clean-swept are its sidewalks, and, God, how many feet have left their traces on it! The clumsy, dirty boot of the retired soldier, under the weight of which the very granite seems to crack, and the miniature shoe, light as smoke, of a young lady, who turns her head to the glittering shop windows as a sunflower turns toward the sun, and the clanking sword of a hope-filled sub-lieutenant that leaves a sharp scratch on it–everything wreaks upon it the power of strength or the power of weakness. What a quick phantasmagoria is performed on it in the course of a single day! How many changes it undergoes in the course of a single night!

Each person outfits themselves and assumes a definite form online. The pictures we choose, the poses we strike (in words and figure), these are all on display. However, we are not in total control; others can alter and affect our image, can imprint themselves upon us. For not only are we on display, but so too are our associates (consider Myspace’s top 8, Facebook’s friend list, or LinkedIn’s connections).

LinkedIn, Ubiquitous and Unremarkable

As far as social media goes, LinkedIn manages to be both ubiquitous and unremarkable. Like its parent company Microsoft (which is still one of the largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization), LinkedIn avoids headlines and think pieces, leaving columnists to debate the societal impacts of services offered by Microsoft’s peers: Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. The critic’s neglect of LinkedIn is unfortunate, as it represents a paradigm shift in the way we project ourselves for others to see.

On LinkedIn, users can share their resumes and maintain their professional networks. The company generates profit by connecting employers and potential employees. And, by aping the content sharing features of Facebook, LinkedIn has become another sinkhole for attention and advertising budgets.

The ability to glance at the resume of anyone you meet (at least, anyone with a LinkedIn profile) is unprecedented. Online, Gogol would not need to guess at or imagine the identity of a passerby. He could quickly ascertain their professional status, figure out who they know and learn about their interests and skills.

Like for Likeness

LinkedIn has applied the “like button” to matters of competence, and the public endorsement of skills has become one of its core services. Desire for esteem and the potentially lucrative effects of receiving endorsements and recommendations have created an ecosystem worthy of at least one dissertation in behavioral economics or anthropology, but I will briefly touch on a few points of interest here.

Of course, the system can be gamed: The easiest way to gain an endorsement is to give one. Beyond that, LinkedIn (despite its pretensions) cannot really discriminate between a reliable and unreliable source. It can’t determine whether two “connections” know each other. And it abets thousands of fake profiles masquerading with invented or stolen identities.

This is all unremarkable. What is remarkable is the way that LinkedIn chooses which skills are valuable and worth endorsing.

Each year, LinkedIn mines user data and publishes a list of the most in demand skills. Last year, the top five “soft skills” were creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and emotional intelligence. The list of “hard skills” was topped by blockchain, cloud computing, analytical reasoning, artificial intelligence and user experience design.

No doubt, LinkedIn’s list of in demand skills has some influence on job seekers. It’s not coincidence that on my own profile, some of these skills are listed. After all, who doesn’t want to be known for their analytical reasoning or creativity?

My Top Three Skills

My top three skills are public speaking, writing and teaching. At least, I think so. Who can accurately assess and rank their abilities?

A few people have endorsed my coaching skill, but judging a coach is fraught, for much of a coach’s success depends on the quality of their team. Even a skilled baker struggles to make tasty pie if the blueberries are rotten.

My next most endorsed skill is persuasion, but this too presents a problem. Presumably, only the people I’ve persuaded will endorse me. Their endorsement may say more about their gullibility than my persuasive ability. Presumably, there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) who find me thoroughly unconvincing, but their votes aren’t tallied.

All this to say that LinkedIn, like any resume, excludes more than it includes. It suggests that life starts with university education and employment, that merit can be expressed on a single page, that ability can be measured as the sum of endorsements, however flimsy.

LinkedIn, Meritocracy and Self-Worth

Spiritually, LinkedIn is the reification and apotheosis of belief in meritocracy. On LinkedIn, value consists chiefly in productive capacity, fulfillment comes through work and man is the measure of all.

The pursuit of virtue in its traditional forms is banished (and if I were to list courage, temperance and prudence as my top three skills on LinkedIn, that would only marry vanity to injustice).

This emphasis on meritocracy could be forgiven if not for the manifest injustice of that system.

Our meritocracy is far from the natural aristocracy of “virtue and talents” envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. Most of the elect owe their success to the unearned advantages of birth. Like Achilles or Hercules, they were blessed with good parents. And even those of humble origin benefit from a society which values and rewards their particular talents.

LinkedIn conceals the fundamental inequality of opportunity behind its parade of success and triumph, its relentless resume-building. And it distorts our reflection, revealing more caricature than mirror image. Our virtues, however limited, are magnified while our flaws are diminished or concealed altogether. On LinkedIn, we prove skilled only in the management of self-image.

Like all tools, LinkedIn starts as an extension of self and then becomes identical with self. We build a resume only to become it, remaking ourselves in the image of that projection. What we choose to include and exclude in that projection becomes fate. But we were never truly free to choose; those decisions were made long ago, probably by someone endorsed for skill in user experience design.

For example, I write this at a coffee shop, where customers are seated on stools and chairs. Of the twelve people here, eight have laptops open in front of them. All have smartphones within arm’s reach. Some divvy their attention between laptop and phone. My hardcover notebook is alone, and only one other person is paying attention to words printed on paper; she appears to be a student cramming for a test.

Many cultural critics have remarked on the effects of screen culture, but I particularly relished a recent observation by Michael Sacasas, author of The Convivial Society newsletter. Sacasas notes that digital culture is always material culture. After all, our digital lives require a material access point: the screen. However, like a chair, the screen recedes from awareness, and we forget ourselves.

Some people sit for the majority of their waking hours, never aware of contact between butt and chair. Similarly, the screen dweller orients toward the screen unconsciously. Even when not physically facing the screen, he lives in anticipation of the next notification, of his next finger flick through the infinite scroll.

One way to think of technology is as a way to achieve a goal, and in the search for efficiency, some technologies displace others. Because new technologies quickly become invisible, their effects are difficult to perceive. Over time, layers of technology are buried deep, like sediment below the ground.

Technological utopians argue that we can mitigate the harmful effects of new technologies. I’m no Luddite, but I somewhat doubt this. After all, we barely understand the effects of “old” technologies.

Consider the skyscraper

By the standards of a smartphone user, the invention of the skyscraper occurred in ancient times. Travel to any metropolis, and you’ll find at least one structure reaching forty stories into the sky. Such buildings are common enough to be unremarkable. But the ubiquitous skyscraper is novel, all things considered. And it relies on other, relatively novel technologies.

To make a skyscraper affordable, you need inexpensive steel and glass, obviously. But you also need cranes. You need electrification and elevators. You need seismic isolation to fortify the tower against earthquakes. You need corner softening, tapering and setbacks to reduce the impact of wind. And, ideally, you want software to simulate the safety of your design, so you don’t make a multimillion dollar mistake or cause a mass casualty collapse.

The skyscraper, itself a result of material innovation, causes its own ripples through material culture. It increases residential density by an order of magnitude. It reconfigures working arrangements. And it literally shifts the perspectives of its occupants: A city observed from a penthouse suite is not the same as that city observed from the street.

This is only a brief survey of the skyscraper, but it suffices. The skyscraper is a confluence of technologies we take for granted, and it affects material culture below the level of conscious awareness. We take the skyscraper for granted and live in its shadow.

A madman’s ethnography

Naive students of anthropology think, “how strange those people are!” The more advanced student realizes that we, as humans, are always weird. We slavishly adopt customs and patterns of behavior and rarely notice how odd they are, how truly strange we are.

As it comes to encompass all the patterns of life, our shared material culture begins to resemble a totalitarian state or theocracy. Its foundational assumptions, its dogmas, cannot be questioned. Why do we sit so much? Why do we fill our rooms with chairs? Why do we have rooms at all?

The task of the cultural critic is to surface these assumptions, to ask unsettling questions. But the critic should be treated with suspicion, as she cannot fully escape her position within culture. Her perspective is indelibly shaped by what surrounds her, no matter how strange she may seem to society at large.

If the cultural critic were truly a stranger, she would be unintelligible. It’s not a coincidence that the most trenchant critiques of culture are scrawled on cardboard, strapped to the shopping carts of the homeless. A broken clock is right twice a day. The madman is correct more often, though equally disregarded.

Is this casual dismissal wrong? Tug on one thread long enough, and you might unravel the whole tapestry. Give the madman his due, and we may need to revise all human relations.

Seduction and destruction

The clean-cut madman (sometimes called prophet, guru or sage) is seductive. He calls attention to what lies beneath the surface. His diagnosis of dysfunction is convincing, comprehensive. If only we walked more! If only we dispensed with the screen and spoke face to face! If only we abandoned our Babel towers and returned to human scale design!

However, the madman’s longing for utopia shades quickly into a desire for destruction. Burn the chairs! Smash the screens! Tear down the tower!

This is perhaps the most damning critique of the madman. He cannot fit into the world. He cannot conform to the pattern of life provided. He will neither bend nor bow before the authority of social order. To be crude, he doesn’t like playing Monopoly. His solution is to flip the game board, so to speak.

We should be wary of the madman, for in the supposed depth of his reflection, he often dives too deep. He cannot see how each thing connects to each other thing. Of course he can’t, for he perceives himself to be cut off from all else. In his feigned aloofness, he suggests that the sea can be divided, that it is not, in fact, one formless motion, subject only to friction, gravity and perhaps the whims of the moon.

When we take profile pictures for truth, we’re as naive as the phrenologists who believed that, by analyzing the slope of a nose and forehead, they could infer the intelligence and character of a portrait’s subject.

The old bait-and-switch (rebranded “catfishing”) is routine online, but it’s not restricted to image. Asynchronous communication allows for engineered irony and carefully crafted wit. There are garrulous folk on Twitter who are quiet in conversation. And without fast cuts and sound effects, many YouTube personalities fall flat.

Online, I’m tempted to present myself as better than I am. More clever, less pedantic. Funny, even.

In a sense, editing this essay is a process of refining a rough first impression. I don’t share first drafts, and I brush my teeth before leaving for work in the morning.

The analogy between grooming and self-presentation is apt. Virtue does not reside in straight white teeth, a pressed shirt or carefully coiffed hair. In other words, virtue is more than skin deep.

Walk through any central business district and observe the tailored suits. Some conceal infidelity, domestic abuse, porn and drug addiction, neglect of friends and family, embezzlement, etc. Sin hides behind closed doors, and each morning it puts on a face for the public.

Social media will always attract those who aspire to project virtue without making the real life commitments that virtue requires. This isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the system working as intended.

Social media is a resume updated daily, a biased record of achievement. But it can also be a stained white shirt, with momentary indiscretion made permanent feature. In either case, our mistake is to judge based on appearance.

In truth, we can only guess at the virtue of others. More is left unseen than shown, even by those we love and live with. Imagine: after decades, a marriage ends in betrayal; or mom’s little angel shoots up a school; or a suicide note is the first sign of depression, found too late to make a difference.

If we seek virtue, in ourselves and others, we will not find it online. We must take off the face we wear for others and confront the mirror. If we don’t like what we see, we can either change our profile pictures or change ourselves. But we should not confuse the two.