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The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

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Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#21

Post by AnimalMuppet »

nahimn wrote: post #8

Call me unempathetic, but how would this be any different in a non-digital era? You’ll still have a market (albeit significantly smaller, IE: lets say a small locale or village). But you could have easily said the same thing in a non-digital age, with just more rudimentary metrics and a market that is a community that either values or doesn’t value your work. Much like the proverbial school playground (which could al…

It's not different, it's just worse. Online there are more people, interacting more shallowly (and therefore judging more superficially and less empathetically), and presenting a more fake version of their own self for you to compare yourself to, and we spend more time wading in it.

It's always been going on. But it has changed, not in kind, but in degree, and it does more damage.

Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#22

Post by zztop44 »

23B1 wrote: post #19
jakubmazanec wrote: post #11

> a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers Does this really happen? Or maybe just in the USA? Why would I, as a customer, care about server's follower count? Is it somehow correlated with their performance?

It happens everywhere in marketing, at all levels. Strippers, movie stars, ballet dancers. Anyone whose job it is to reach eyeballs and build a 'brand'. It is nigh on impossible to get a literary manager these days unless you have a sizable social media following, for example. It's absolute brain rot.

But that simply follows on from a shift in consumer behaviour. It’s nigh impossible to sell literary prose at any significant volume unless you have a sizeable social media following. The only exceptions are people who have a sizeable traditional media following and a specific personal reason for not being on social media.

Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#23

Post by [deleted] »

jakubmazanec wrote: post #12
nahimn wrote: post #8

Call me unempathetic, but how would this be any different in a non-digital era? You’ll still have a market (albeit significantly smaller, IE: lets say a small locale or village). But you could have easily said the same thing in a non-digital age, with just more rudimentary metrics and a market that is a community that either values or doesn’t value your work. Much like the proverbial school playground (which could al…

> how would this be any different in a non-digital era I would argue that the scale and the ease that comes with the digitalization and algorithmization is what makes the difference: eg. only literary critics can publish review of your book in a newspaper vs. everyone on the internet can post one.

[deleted]

Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#24

Post by toomuchtodo »

jakubmazanec wrote: post #11

> a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers Does this really happen? Or maybe just in the USA? Why would I, as a customer, care about server's follower count? Is it somehow correlated with their performance?

Businesses live and die by Google Maps reviews and social now. I am familiar with a Kentucky pizza chain that gave instructions that if each server did not meet their Google review quota, they would be let go or moved to hosting.

https://ibb.co/MBcJhZW https://ibb.co/kG1bddG

Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#25

Post by 73kl4453dz »

I guess i am orthogonal to this article because:

(A) i don't visit sites that have "Followers"

which i can probably afford to do because:

(B) unlike writing or waitservice, where one's market is huge numbers of people who each are only willing to pay a little, my skills interest few, but those few are willing to pay a lot.

Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#26

Post by elorant »

skissane wrote: post #4

The other day I was talking to a psychologist about [difficult personal situation which I am unable to discuss publicly] and she said to me “This must be really damaging to your self-worth.” And, my honest internal reaction to her statement (although I didn’t say it out loud to her) was “Self-worth, what is that?” Because I’m not sure if I have any? I don’t mean that in the negative sense that I think I am worthless…

How about integrity? Do you find that relevant? Usually people with integrity have high self-esteem because they adhere to a certain set of ethics. I'm not trying in any way to pass judgement, just to give you a different perspective.

Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#27

Post by InkCanon »

IMO the least known, yet most powerful, driver to understand the world in the next century. The commodification of everything - including deeply personal and abstract things like attention and love - have been commoditised. Not in the abstract, rhetorical sense that Marx and other such people mean, but in the engineering sense where liquid exchanges with sub millisecond latency are trading such commodities. Everyone is constantly playing a game against a quasi omniscient, unblinking entity, trading everything from fragments of attention to romance. And humans are hopelessly outmatched as the entity has orders of magnitude more information, computational power and vast ability to restructure the market to it's advantage.

Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#28

Post by card_zero »

graeme wrote: post #6
skissane wrote: post #4

The other day I was talking to a psychologist about [difficult personal situation which I am unable to discuss publicly] and she said to me “This must be really damaging to your self-worth.” And, my honest internal reaction to her statement (although I didn’t say it out loud to her) was “Self-worth, what is that?” Because I’m not sure if I have any? I don’t mean that in the negative sense that I think I am worthless…

One way of looking at it is how you assess yourself in things and take pride in or feel regret about that. For example, you wrote this comment. It is a well written comment. You likely have some belief roughly along the lines of "I write reasonably well". You have probably received feedback along those lines throughout life, and that reinforces that belief. This is perhaps mildly pleasing or at least seems correct. N…

This begs the question because it starts with "how you assess yourself". Why assess yourself, the self, the whole person, at all? So, you're not good at writing. Perhaps you're not good at anything. In that case, you probably shouldn't attempt things except as practice. But why give yourself an overall score as a person, what are you even supposed to do with that information? You can't be anybody else, so it's useless. Work with what you've got, fuck 'em.

Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#29

Post by InkCanon »

23B1 wrote: post #19
jakubmazanec wrote: post #11

> a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers Does this really happen? Or maybe just in the USA? Why would I, as a customer, care about server's follower count? Is it somehow correlated with their performance?

It happens everywhere in marketing, at all levels. Strippers, movie stars, ballet dancers. Anyone whose job it is to reach eyeballs and build a 'brand'. It is nigh on impossible to get a literary manager these days unless you have a sizable social media following, for example. It's absolute brain rot.

The main hack these commodification entities makes seems to be to disrupt the traditional flow of information and valuation, then create a new marketplace it controls. For books, I imagine many centuries ago the literary class wrote and read books largely from the social and intellectual forces at the time. The smallest unit of these interactions would be a member reading a book, liking it and recommending it to his friends. The net aggregation of such would slowly produce a trend, communicating to writers that there was a higher chance of being read if you followed it. Now such exchanges have been consumed by digital marketplaces. The sheer size means writers have to make a Faustian bargain to bend to it's needs, while readers have a curated list of books for them. Any well reading writer and reader have an impossible time communicating because the main flow of information has been hijacked.

Re: The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age

#30

Post by DavidPiper »

nahimn wrote: post #8

Call me unempathetic, but how would this be any different in a non-digital era? You’ll still have a market (albeit significantly smaller, IE: lets say a small locale or village). But you could have easily said the same thing in a non-digital age, with just more rudimentary metrics and a market that is a community that either values or doesn’t value your work. Much like the proverbial school playground (which could al…

> with just more rudimentary metrics

I think this is actually the answer: the word "just" is doing a lot more heavy lifting here than first meets the eye.

The digital era has brought a lot more quantifiable data, and with that has come a much easier (and in many cases automated) comparison, value-attribution, calculation of the probability of success, etc. The article speaks to this in the second half.

Previously this was largely impossible outside of government and other organisations with dedicated statistic collection. The author talks about how even sales numbers for authors were very imprecise and easy to exaggerate or fudge.

You could argue that the Digital Era has turned some of "life" (or at some of "art") into one big Goodhartian[1] parody.

That said, it does feel like the author has stopped believing that art has intrinsic value - and that its value might be different for different people, including the author. That is pretty much the mental step you need to take to end up in the parody to begin with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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