Record ourselves, create “content”, express ourselves online… People often say that nowadays everyone is obsessed with sharing everything online and, sometimes, they feel like they should share more. I believe we take this position not because “Society and Capitalism make us feel this way” but because we’re isolated.
Sometimes, the Other is responsible for acknowledging what we’re doing/experiencing. If the Other is absent, we feel like things are not actually happening. The Other is responsible for our sense of reality.
What I’m saying is nothing new.
Speech seeks a response of the Other. What constitutes me as subject is my question – Lacan, Function and Field of Speech and Language
In this world, where we find ourselves working from home and living isolated on our phones, the sense of what’s real or not becomes weakened.
Living alone, I find myself posting a picture of what I’m eating, not because I feel like I should post it or overshare what I’m doing. But because there’s no one here to say that it tastes good. The same way we need a mirror to see how we see ourselves, we need people to see what we are.
What scares me is that, little by little, we’re delegating this acknowledgment of reality to things that are not real.