Personalization and Depersonalization

Recently, commentator Rod Dreher posted a thoughtful consideration of "Modern ‘Love’ in the Age of Tinder." He quotes at length from an essay which won the "Modern Love Essay Contest." One of his quotes struck me, and I use it as the jumping-off point for this essay:

“Everyone in college uses Tinder,” she said, referring to the wildly popular dating and hook-up app. “You can literally swipe right and find someone just to hang out for the night. There’s no commitments required, and I think that makes committing to someone even harder, because it’s so normal, and so expected even, to not want to commit.”

I think that what the internet has done, as part of it's massive personalization effort, is to depersonalize everything, including relationships. Let me explain.

First, I do not think there is a great deal of dispute that the internet is one great engine for personalization. As the internet became more and more ubiquitous, many an technology guru hinted that it might become a medium for global peace. A paper hosted by the "Progress & Freedom Foundation" proclaimed:

It is clear, however, that cyberspace will play an important role knitting together in the diverse communities of tomorrow, facilitating the creation of "electronic neighborhoods" bound together not by geography but by shared interests.

Thankfully, some were more realistic, arguing that the growth of the internet would be a mixed bag of positives and negatives.  Others were even more pessimistic, noting the failure of many of the hopes surrounding the internet. More recently, we have seen the rise of books dedicated to the problems which our interaction with technology has produced. For example, Nicholas Carr's article (now turned book) in the Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" pondered the effects that technology has on reading, and noted about Google that:

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

With this view in mind, Eli Pariser wrote his book called "The Filter Bubble." In sum, Pariser argues that:

[A]s more and more people discover news and content through Facebook-like personalized feeds, the stuff that really matters falls out of the picture. In the Darwinian environment of the hyper-relevant news feed, content about issues like homelessness or climate change can’t compete with goofy viral videos, celebrity news, and kittens. The public sphere falls out of view. And that matters, because while we can lose sight of our common problems, they don’t lose sight of us.

This becomes even more poignant when we consider that in  Google's "personalized search," which became de rigueur for users of the search engine in 2009, "the search results are not only based on the relevance of each web page to the search term, but also on which websites the user (or someone else using the same browser) visited through previous search results." Essentially, therefore, every online experience (web searches, web content, news) is rapidly becoming exactly what we want to see, no more - call this hyperpersonalization, perhaps? 

Hyperpersonalization, it seems to me, is both a result of, and an inducement of, narcissism. After all, if one can (and does) tailor one's internet world (as well as one's music, etc.) precisely to one's tastes, without some external control or restrain, one will increasingly expect one's entire world to conform to one's self. Jean Twenge, author of "The Narcissism Epidemic, and others interested in this subject area, have well documented increasing levels of narcissism among the younger generation, as well as associated traits. Twenge notes:

Traits related to narcissism have also increased, such as extrinsic values, unrealistic expectations, materialism, low empathy, agentic (but not communal) self-views, self-esteem, self-focus, choosing more unique names for children, less concern for others, less interest in helping the environment, and low empathy.

And so, it is unsurprising that Tinder, which matches people based on geographical location, mutual friends, and interests, is both popular and problematic. If one is inclined towards hyperpersonalization, what better way to meet people than to find those who will not conflict with one's worldview in any way - in short, oneself in another person. And, if one is inclined towards narcissistic personality traits, then the low empathy, lack of concern for other, and unrealistic expectations will, without too much doubt, produce precisely what the essayist in the New York Times stated:

And what we have together becomes intangible. And if it’s intangible it can never end because officially there’s nothing to end. And if it never ends, there’s no real closure, no opportunity to move on. Instead, we spend our emotional energy on someone we’ve built up and convinced ourselves we need.

Human beings are social animals. The more we use social networking, social dating, etc., to replace (not supplement) face-to-face human interaction, the more we will experience a form of split-personality depression. We believe that we are engaging in interaction, but it's more like interaction with a deliberate lack - like attempting to date in a sensory deprivation tank - we are missing sight, smell, touch, body language, etc. Is it any wonder that increasing use of social networking results in depression, in passive acceptance, and so on? 

I posit that, because social dating necessarily lacks the complete interaction of face-to-face dating, but purports to connect one with someone who is already, in a way, intimate to you (being somewhat a clone of oneself), then one using social dating is engaged in a form of false emotional bonding, where one has an expectation of intimacy and acts physically with the other as if it is there. However, the expectations are built up by oneself, without much actual discourse with the other, and therefore some sort of emotional dystopia results, where the physical acts gallop far ahead of the emotional bond, and what results is more or less meaningless sexual activity, because it is not under-girded by the emotional support needed for healthy sex. 

It is hardly to be surprised, in some ways, that one would see an increase in claims of rape where neither party has used physical force, or in some cases, even claimed lack of consent. A classic definition of rape is forced sex without consent. While this is not the same, one could posit a new term - call it "unbonded intercourse," where one party neither cares or desires the other beyond the immediate satisfaction of sex, but the other party is convinced of an emotional bond, a papier-mâché bond, which when discovered to be false, generates anger, depression, sadness, and other emotions erupting from the false pretenses of the intercourse. And lacking a better term, some might call this a form of rape, this unbonded intercourse.

One might even turn to the recent lawsuit against Columbia University by one Paul Nungesser, who argues that the school failed to protect him against false accusations of rape by a consensual lover. In reading his Complaint, one is struck by the amount of time these two lovers spent communicating electronically, the "friends-with-benefits" relationship, and the reaction of his former lover when he elected to discontinue the "FWB" relationship and eventually, all communication with the lover. She lodged charges of rape against him, which were dismissed. However, I think it is clear that she, at least, was falling in love with Nungesser, or perhaps more importantly, the idea of Nungesser, and when the sexual activity they shared became revealed as unbonded, then she cried foul. I have no doubt that her feelings were those of anger, depression, and sadness, that she felt that she had sex under false emotional pretenses, and that rape was the closest thing she could find to describe her emotional wreckage.

While others have similar experiences, to a greater or lesser extent, not all believe they have been raped. However, many apparently have experienced the dystopia produced by this disconnect between emotion, bond, and physical relationship, and I suspect that many more will. And we will see increasing numbers of men and women shaken by feelings that the sexual activity, while physically satisfying, leaves a gap created by the narcissism and self-focus, the hyperpersonalization, of their partners.