Part of an upcoming talk in Lutherstadt-Wittenberg

Talk in Process 

"Current Issues of American Culture in the EFL Classroom"

Working <aka announced> Title: “A text = a text = a text (unless it's a #tweet): The Catfish Effect in a Culture of Relentless Optimism and Pervasive Deception”

...One of the prime reasons for the great success of Twitter is that we at no point have to be (and this is really the point of opting in or else of opting out of ‘push’ notifications) without or find ourselves lacking a text to read.  We don’t want to miss a possible connection, a possible mention, a possible message. 

To that end, although studies of twitter do not usually highlight this: we arrange to “feed” ourselves tweets as texts, just as we might subscribe, and so arrange to feed ourselves email notifications, to favorite blog posts or updates or directly subscribing to email lists if we are academics sharing a common interest with other scholars. We do this odd thing, when one thinks about it, in order to be sure to have our own inboxes full of potentially interesting messages that might be of value to us and we thus clutter our own inboxes on our own initiative: the result, just like Facebook, just like Twitter, is a vicarious involvement in a virtual (meaning by virtual non-real) fashion with messages exchanged by and between others, posts on their concerns, concerns we take up for our own part, this is how a tweet can become a phenomenon, as our concerns, and all we need do is to favor it, to give it a little star now replaced with a little heart for liking to make this least shared of the Twitter responses more like a kind of sharing and even more and now we are talking about the real heart of Twitter, we can retweet it. 

But what does it take for a retweet?  

When surfing the net, as when using Twitter, this is the metonymic analogue of television channel surfing (itself mediated by the power of a remote control device and the pretended abundance of cable tv programming): anything goes.  That is, anything that catches our attention or still better said, our hope to find something worthy of that attention. Thus if helpful psychology experts may be found to assure us that only narcissist types check Facebook it is worth asking who else but narcissist types (and who is not such in their heart of hearts?) are on Facebook? 
What is it to be “on” Facebook?

There are now a number of studies that explore this 'narcissistic' phenomenon but the problem, as I am suggesting, is that there may not be anything but such users whether to begin with (or else as a result).

A long, long time ago now, by today’s up to the minute standards of currency, Christopher Lasch wrote a book on this very culture, well in advance of Facebook or Twitter, entitled: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations.

Lasch’s book was immediately received and fairly immediately forgotten not least because its thesis was both obviously true and obviously insulting to the American mind. That is: Lasch argued that American narcissism was virulently pathological. 

Nothing that has transpired in the years following the publication of Lasch’s book that would suggest that his diagnosis was incorrect.

Scholars have suggested, and this is always useful to do after de Tocqueville, that Lasch's diagnosis dates back to the 19^th Century but one ought then to add that it may be traced to European origins as such, at least on Nietzsche’s account as we may read in Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols.

Lasch’s points coincide in many respects with Ivan Illich’s critiques of both school and of medicine and thus correspond to the growth of corporate control and that also means, this is the social media effect in general, the corporate control of interaction. 

The need for a cell phone even among young people who are not involved with companions far flung and at distances too great for face-to-face connection attests to this control. This is the point Sherry Turkle rightly makes and it is the point that other scholars tend not to grasp , as we note the terms used in Lasch’s analysis: “the individual” is today “dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies.” These ‘other bureaucracies’ include cell phone manufacturers and “providers” (I find that language intriguing) as well as corporate entities like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Thus Lasch simply takes over what Nietzsche had otherwise analysed in his On the Genealogy of Morals as the reactively slavely moral culture of the 19^th Century in his definition of the so-called  “narcissist” :

Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence. Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror…    -- Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

Notice that Lasch here describes the phenomenon of Twitter and the language of having “followers.” This is the Facebook user (because make no mistake, Facebook 'follows' Twitter) and this is the Twitter user.