A Mindful Avatar in the Generation of Authenticity

By Gitta Amelia

There are three types of people in this world: those who long for the eyes of many, those who long for the eyes of only people they know, and those who long only for the eyes of one. Which one are you?

Nowadays, most millennials fall into the first group, while Gen Zs would tell you that they have three versions of themselves, one for each bucket. However, both generations share a commonality that Gen Xs will grapple to understand. Both Gen Zs and Millennials are collectivists by sharing in the individual, lived experiences. They intrinsically understand their shared circumstances and recognize a shared consciousness. While both generations are increasingly individualistic, they sympathize with each other’s individuality. Especially the younger generation, are becoming more and more accepting of one another’s unique differences. Members of the millennial and Gen Z groups are less communal, but they share in that perspective. This is how certain content trends can catch on so quickly through social media. People watch a video or see a photo are quick to be inspired to recreate the content but not without adding their own twist to it. During the CoVid 19 Pandemic, a huge number of these trends circulated the internet. One such challenge was the mirror selfie challenge, which was to take out a mirror from your house outside into the garden, have it face towards the sky, and take a selfie in front of the mirror. It made for one striking photo, and many people, girls especially, jumped on the bandwagon.

Millennial and Gen Z communication relies on a level of empathy that is unprecedented before Social Media became the primary way for people to connect. Gen Zs and millennials are able to empathize with one another through a subliminal language of hashtags and memes. Search up the hashtags #mood or #vibes on Instagram and you’ll know what I mean. Through these images, they convey a complex emotional understanding that will be understood by other people born after the year 1980 who sees the picture.

Because Gen Zs ‘live’ as much, if not more, online than they do offline, it becomes essential for us to bring mindfulness in our online selves. We must be constantly aware of what we are posting and who we are posting it for. Not only our posting behavior, we must also be aware about what we are doing on those platforms and the changes in behavior, mood or thinking as a result of the time we spend on social media.

On January 2020, a viral challenge emerged on Tiktok called the #skullbreakerchallenge which. The skull-breaker challenge involves two people kicking the legs from under a third, making them fall over. The challenge has caused serious injury among teenagers in the UK and US and prosecutors have charged two teenagers in the United States with aggravated assault over the prank. This prank, and many others on TikTok, have since been banned, but not before cases of hospitalizations due to the prank have already been reported. This is the dark side of the internet. Youngsters want to feel connected to other people through social media by participating in various challenges and posting about things that are relevant to trends. But when you are not mindful of the implications. In challenges that involve physical discomfort, the implications are much clearer, but even so, we are a generation that is too quickly absolving our mindfulness on social media by simply responding to ‘interesting’ or ‘exciting’ trends. If we can’t see through something so obvious like this, imagine how many subliminally-emotional discomforts slip through our consciousness and into the fabric of the internet.

When we look at content on social media, the platform simply recommends content that, according to their data and algorithm, believe we might find interesting. It only has one mission – to get us engaged and addicted to using the platform longer, so that it can extract more data about who we are. Everything about social media was designed for it to be addicting. Every single button, every single push notification, and every single piece of the user experience was iterated a million times over to give us a buzz of dopamine when we use it, and withdrawal when we don’t. It’s crazy to think that a group of computer programmers, stuffed into a room in Silicon Valley, are controlling the thoughts of billions of people. But it’s the reality we live with today.

Over the last decade, computers have gotten at least 100 times faster (according to Moore’s law, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years). Humans have stayed relatively the same, neither significantly smarter nor faster, although we would like to believe we are at least moving in the right direction. With every single passing day, computers are on their way to bypassing us in every single way.

For every single one of us, there exists an exact replica of who we are in the cloud. This replica feeds off of the information we provide by interacting with digital screens and the internet. It takes that information and processes it into an algorithm that can predict our behavior online. Sometimes, it knows us better than we know ourselves. It can recommend us items to buy, ideologies to explore, or even people that we may find an interest in getting to know. The more we migrate our lives online, the more the algorithm knows about us. The more it knows about us, the more it is able to control us.

There is an old saying in the tech and venture capital world, “if the product is free, then you are the product.” The product, as Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley whistleblower and author of “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” puts it, is really the ability to gradually move behavior or opinions in increments, without people even realizing it. Social platforms are able to stay alive as a business, by selling your data to corporations or people such as politicians, who find an interest to control the population. The best way to control a population is to do so without them even knowing it.

The CoVid 19 Pandemic, has exploited the good and bad of social media. On one side of the coin, I still feel relatively connected to my friends. We are able to see what each other is up to through bits and pieces of the stories they share online. When they post a new photo or video, I give it a like and a comment, the conversation might take off from there. We might be living alone and in isolation during these difficult times, but we are bonded by the collective experience that we all share. At times, we are also able to catch up over video-conferencing. I still feel in tune to the news and current global affairs, for which 2020 has not been short of.

On the flip side of the coin, I find myself turning to social media more than I have prior to 2020. Most of the purchases I have made over the last few months have been due to what has been popping up on my screen. 

The cost to social media is our privacy and democracy. We are impressionable creatures. Most often times the stimuli that pass into our brains seep into our unconscious. Only a small fraction of what we experience is processed in our pre-frontal cortex at any given time.

But telling ourselves to unplug completely is unrealistic. There are many positive aspects of Social Media that we can still glean. The most important thing we can do for our humanity is to raise our consciousness and constantly be mindful enough to expand our awareness when we are on the platforms. We can allocate hours in the day, such as before bedtime, to commit to turning off all of our screens. We can follow people or accounts that have different opinions or beliefs than ours to make sure we are not creating digital silos for ourselves. When we are mindful, we can be responsible to ourselves, but we can also be socially responsible. We can think twice about posting a photo of ourselves in a crowded restaurant in the middle of a Pandemic. If we are able to make mindfulness a habit, the same habit will carry through to our presence online.