distorte: In Gary Shteyngart’s near-future dystopian satire Super Sad True Love Story, online social networks and real life have blurred beyond distinction. Everybody is on TeenGlobal, and everyone’s profile is rated in two defining categories: Personality and Fuckability. The complete dominance of the network and its ubiquitous presence in people’s lives, via their äppärät (mobile phone), has given these numbers real weight. Society has bent around them. A man comforts his sobbing, post-coital girlfriend by reassuring her that her Fuckability is 800+. Friends gossip over the stat changes of those who’ve misbehaved at parties. Information is shared freely, every image and act by, and reference to, an individual is tagged on their account. A desire for privacy is something suspicious. At a bar, everyone opts into a local network where each individual ranks the others present. Our protagonist knows that he is the least attractive person in the place. The girl he ogles knows how highly he has rated her attractiveness. His friend films the evening’s conversation, broadcasting it live as a feature for his web show.The cut of Shteyngart’s story is that nothing he depicts is beyond current technology. We are already there technologically and almost there socially. It scares us because we see the untempered embrace of social networking by the generation rising beneath us.An ad running for a mobile network in Ireland right now features common social scenes that are imbued or built upon by the phones in everyone’s pockets. People swap flirty texts across a crowded pub. Gossip in full view of the gossip’s subject. At a house party teenagers record their friend’s antics and upload it straight to YouTube. The scenes are, without exception, pretty horrifying as an indicator of where social interaction is going. But my opinion must be a minority. These are pretty “safe” ads from a large corporation. I trust they know what works better than I do.Remember Tumblarity? It’s gone now, but putting a public, obligatory, secret-algorithmic number on your Tumblr popularity is the most obvious real-life example of Fuckability. But while Tumblarity was done away with, Tumblr’s structure of approval-seeking is still there. There are follower counts. There are notes, likes, reblogs. You don’t get a single, reductive number churned out at the end, but you know what you have to do to stay popular. Social feedback features clearly designed to encourage more use, more commitment, more pageviews. Facebook doesn’t rate you, but it also has popularity indexes: friends, likes and tagged images. And the spillover into real life continues. My real friends joke about my absurd number of Tumblr followers, or joke that my personality has been affected by my hoards of teenaged American admirers. And perhaps my personality is affected? The lines between my online and offline personas blur.My friend was walking in our home town a few months ago. He passed an acquaintance he knew from years past, nodded, and said hello. They didn’t stop to talk. Two minutes down the street his phone buzzed, alerting him to a Facebook friend request from the girl he’d just not spoken to. We are living in very strange times.

distorte:

In Gary Shteyngart’s near-future dystopian satire Super Sad True Love Story, online social networks and real life have blurred beyond distinction. Everybody is on TeenGlobal, and everyone’s profile is rated in two defining categories: Personality and Fuckability. The complete dominance of the network and its ubiquitous presence in people’s lives, via their äppärät (mobile phone), has given these numbers real weight. Society has bent around them. A man comforts his sobbing, post-coital girlfriend by reassuring her that her Fuckability is 800+. Friends gossip over the stat changes of those who’ve misbehaved at parties. Information is shared freely, every image and act by, and reference to, an individual is tagged on their account. A desire for privacy is something suspicious.

At a bar, everyone opts into a local network where each individual ranks the others present. Our protagonist knows that he is the least attractive person in the place. The girl he ogles knows how highly he has rated her attractiveness. His friend films the evening’s conversation, broadcasting it live as a feature for his web show.

The cut of Shteyngart’s story is that nothing he depicts is beyond current technology. We are already there technologically and almost there socially. It scares us because we see the untempered embrace of social networking by the generation rising beneath us.

An ad running for a mobile network in Ireland right now features common social scenes that are imbued or built upon by the phones in everyone’s pockets. People swap flirty texts across a crowded pub. Gossip in full view of the gossip’s subject. At a house party teenagers record their friend’s antics and upload it straight to YouTube. The scenes are, without exception, pretty horrifying as an indicator of where social interaction is going. But my opinion must be a minority. These are pretty “safe” ads from a large corporation. I trust they know what works better than I do.

Remember Tumblarity? It’s gone now, but putting a public, obligatory, secret-algorithmic number on your Tumblr popularity is the most obvious real-life example of Fuckability. But while Tumblarity was done away with, Tumblr’s structure of approval-seeking is still there. There are follower counts. There are notes, likes, reblogs. You don’t get a single, reductive number churned out at the end, but you know what you have to do to stay popular. Social feedback features clearly designed to encourage more use, more commitment, more pageviews. Facebook doesn’t rate you, but it also has popularity indexes: friends, likes and tagged images. And the spillover into real life continues. My real friends joke about my absurd number of Tumblr followers, or joke that my personality has been affected by my hoards of teenaged American admirers. And perhaps my personality is affected? The lines between my online and offline personas blur.

My friend was walking in our home town a few months ago. He passed an acquaintance he knew from years past, nodded, and said hello. They didn’t stop to talk. Two minutes down the street his phone buzzed, alerting him to a Facebook friend request from the girl he’d just not spoken to.

We are living in very strange times.