Stream of Consciousness and Social Networking

Every early afternoon, I wake up. I eat breakfast, which usually consists of a cup of coffee in which a metal spoon will stand upright. I go about my daily routine, which changes day to day, but never deviates particularly far off course; I write. I watch a movie. I do some more writing, in between playing games and posting irrelevant thoughts to my social media accounts. I'm unlikely to simply work for eight hours, then set work aside; you're much more likely to catch me working for 8-20 scattered half-hour periods, depending on the day, while watching television or playing video games in between.

Currently, my preferred preoccupations are Babylon 5 and the Dead Space series. I highly recommend both. As of this writing, you can stream Babylon 5 for free on go90.com.

I am not being paid to tell you that. That's not because I won't bow to sponsors; I totally would.

At the end of the day, which typically comes about when I can't muster up interest in anything more involved than breathing, I go to bed. As far as I am aware, when I wake up the following "early-afternoon-ish," that only just happened. Unless I should happen to remember a particularly vivid dream in breathtaking detail ("... And that's when my fifth-grade teacher forced me to eat my own ears"), my stream of consciousness ends with my falling asleep.

My stream of consciousness resumes when I wake up. Or, perhaps, a new one begins. Technically, either assumption is predicated on the idea that I'm still the same person I was when I went to sleep, early that morning.

Stream of Consciousness

The phrase "stream of consciousness" was coined by William James, the father of American psychology, in his 1890 book The Principles of Psychology. While originally developed into a psycho-spiritual philosophy by the Mahayana Buddhists, western psychology's view of this concept is simultaneously straightforward and profound. With research demonstrating our inability to focus on more than one "mental event" at a time, our consciousness functions much like a computer engaged in streaming media.

Our focus transitions, quickly, from one perceived snapshot in time to the next. We perceive this from a first-person perspective, with ancient Buddhist practices incorporating the direct recognition of the subjective nature of our own experiences. This phenomenon is most readily noticed when something goes wrong; for example, people with certain types of visual impairment often describe feeling as though they're looking at the world through damaged lenses. In other words, from their perspective, there is nothing wrong with their observational ability; something distinct from their sense of self is interfering with it.

The phenomenon of deja vu results from the brain receiving sensory input out of sync, typically via the senses of vision and hearing. We perceive events individually, so our brain mixes tracks, but it occasionally hiccups, and it takes a moment to correct itself. It's astoundingly good at compensating for its mistakes, but we still feel a curious, potentially unsettling sensation: the brain is telling us that the moment we just experienced is unique, but we can't shake that lingering feeling that something was experienced previously. That sense is thrust outward by our stream of consciousness; we feel it as a foreign influence, which can be difficult to shake.

There is another phenomenon, strikingly similar to the underlying cause of deja vu, though it manifests itself in a very different way. When we communicate by speaking with other people, we do so predicated on thoughts that are occurring within our stream of consciousness. The brain-to-lips filter that so many of us take for granted helpfully crops and edits our thoughts, but this filter is at least as much social influence as it is inherent brain-parts. This is demonstrable through the modern innovation that is social media, which combines the written word with a level of speed and efficiency previously known only to the spoken medium.

The Psychology of Social Media

The idea of stream of consciousness does have a literary parallel. The development of online social networking, however, almost seems to combine these two concepts, much as the medium itself combines elements traditionally unique to written or verbal communication.

Our social media feeds are collections of surface thoughts, largely unfiltered by many of the barriers we take for granted in a face-to-face conversation. This suggests that those barriers are predominantly social, and that the average user of social meda is not accustomed to including them in their writing. Without "a face" for our audience, concepts such as individual respect and courtesy often fall by the wayside -- along with personal dignity.

We treat our social media feeds like private journals. So, why do people get upset when their thoughts come under attack on Facebook, or on reddit? It's because the attacker isn't a "person," with regard to how we see them. They're a much more pervasive influence than that: they're another stream of consciousness, functioning inside of our own headspace. They're something most people couldn't appreciate, prior to the development of social media; the concept is more than loosely akin to the "alien hand syndrome" experienced by epilepsy patients who had the two hemispheres of their brain surgically disconnected.

We reflect our thoughts straight onto the glowing screen, but we incorporate what we see there just as seamlessly. It's not one hand forcibly disagreeing with the other (potentially to the point of physical violence), but it is something that we perceive as being no less a part of us. Or, perhaps more accurately, as being "inside" a place where only our stream of consciousness is supposed to reside.

A dissenting voice, conveyed via the internet, is something we automatically credit with more knowledge about ourselves than it could possibly have. That voice, meanwhile, belongs to someone who is assuming more knowledge of you than they could possibly possess. Chances are high that you're guilty of the same misconception, whether or not it's something you've ever directly intended.

The social networking medium is already recognized as being a terrible platform for serious conversation and debate, despite having most of the fundamentals of communication, because it lacks a few things that most of us take for granted. Key among those elements of communication is respect: not only for one's conversational partners, but for oneself.

As a society, we are going to have to re-learn the rules for civilized conversation, and learn how to retain a healthy and objective sense of self within a medium that feels much more personal. If history has shown us anything, however, it is that the human race is supremely capable of adapting to overcome any challenge, within spans of time that -- from a global perspective -- require only the blink of an eye.

Would You Like to Read More?

I'm new to Steemit, and still getting used to the platform. However, if you liked this post, I've written a closely related blog (on my desperately neglected website) which just might capture your attention. Fingerthink delves into ideas such as groupthink and superorganisms; it's just my own conjecture, but I hope you'll find it interesting enough to merit further thought.