Under neon loneliness: living in an age of social anxiety

First, gentle reader, a confession: in case you didn’t already know, I’m a bit weird. If you were to pass me in the street, you’d probably wonder, why is this person walking so quickly? Why does he look so tense, and why does he appear to be avoiding eye contact with everyone?

I’ve never been formally diagnosed with social anxiety disorder; though, ironically, it’s probably my affliction that has prevented me from going to a doctor to talk about it. In fact, this is the first time I’ve even written about how being in public makes me feel. At any rate, I’ve read and heard enough from other people suffering from social anxiety disorder to know that I suffer from a similar condition.

I suppose at heart it’s a fear of judgement from others. When I’m in any public space, whether it’s walking down the street or standing alone in a pub, I’ll begin to worry that people are staring at me, or taking in my strange silhouette and thinking ominous things.

It’s something I’ve suffered from all my life, though it’s only in recent years that I’ve understood the true nature of it, and how limiting it’s been. I used to think it was a form of agoraphobia, since I’d often feel tense and uncertain in crowded places (I still avoid tunnels or tube trains wherever possible), but I now realise that it’s not whether the place is indoors or outdoors that’s the problem, but how many people there are around me. The more people there are, the worse I feel.

I can only describe my anxiety in these situations as being like a pressure on my chest. At the same time, my head will swim, as though overloaded with information. If you’ve ever been in a situation where things are happening too fast, or on the brink of spinning out of control – during a car accident, for example – it’s not dissimilar. In extreme cases, I’ll feel as though I’m about to suffocate.

As I’ve come to understand my anxiety, and gradually work out how to control it, I’ve also begun to wonder whether the emotions I feel have begun to bleed out into the rest of society, too. In both my work and my leisure time, I use Twitter and Facebook, a form of interaction with the outside world which is peculiarly modern. Since the advent of social media, we’ve begun to compare ourselves with other people in a way that was once reserved for celebrities, and the criteria by which we judge ourselves and others has gradually changed.

Social media gives us more opportunities to promote ourselves and our work than ever, and more chances to connect with people with similar interests. But at the same time, it also makes us constantly aware of how we rank alongside others. We can tell with a single click how many followers one celebrity has on Twitter versus another, and how few we have by comparison.

Money and popularity have become the major yardsticks of success. And just as the amount of cash we earn can be quantified, or at least hinted at by the size of our house or our jobs, by the same token, popularity – or a narrow definition of it – is easily gauged by how many followers we have on Twitter, the number of friends we have on Facebook, or how many hits we’ve acquired on our latest blog post.

Similarly, we can receive instant feedback on everything we post on the Internet, whether it’s someone clicking ‘Like’ beneath an off-the-cuff Facebook update about what we’re having for dinner, or leaving a comment on a post we’ve written for a website. Everything we say or do in this virtual environment is subject to instant approval or condemnation.

Secretly, I suspect that every user of social media has had similar feelings as I have at one point or another. We quietly crave the quick burst of acceptance that a retweet or two provides on Twitter, and dread those occasional moments when someone clicks unfollow.

This constant monitoring of public approval was something Charlie Brooker highlighted in his unsubtle yet very good Black Mirror, which aired on Channel Four on Sunday. In it, the British Prime Minister (played by Rory Kinnear) finds himself in the middle of a peculiarly 21st century type of humiliation. In order to satisfy the demands of a kidnapper who holds a member of the royal family hostage, the PM must debase himself on prime time television.

As the clock ticks down to the deadline, the PM’s advisers constantly monitor public opinion on the Internet, which wavers from approval to disapproval with each moment that passes. Although elevated to comically grim levels, the scenario presented in Black Mirror is similar for almost every web user in the modern age. We’re all watching our words and subtly modifying an outward version of ourselves for public consumption.

Even that old dinosaur of communication, the television, has modified itself to conform to the social media age. Progammes such as Big Brother, X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing are only nominally about living in a house, singing or prancing about in a sequin dress; they’re popularity contests, where the public can decide at the press of a button who it loves and who it chooses to hate.

This is perhaps why those programmes are all so perennially successful – they encapsulate everything we fear and desire from our peers on the Internet. We’ve all seen how the web can make celebrities and billionaires out of those it favours, whether it’s the creator of the latest meme on YouTube (as I write this, people everywhere are screaming “Fenton!” at every given opportunity), or the creator of one of social media’s soaring pillars, Mark Zuckerberg.

At the same time, we’re also aware of what happens when the terrible eye of Internet hatred trains its gaze on one person or entity – just look at the derisive comments that followed in the wake of Rebecca Black’s song, Friday. (Free hate sample: “Dear Rebecca Black, we don’t hate you because you’re famous. You’re famous because we hate you. Sincerely, Everybody.”)

The Internet has therefore created a virtual form of social anxiety. Just as I feel a horrible sense of dread in my stomach when walking down a crowded street, a paranoid feeling that the people walking the other way may be smirking inwardly at the way I look or act, so the web has, to varying degrees, made everyone anxious about how they’re perceived by the outside world.

So if social media has inadvertently resulted in the spread of anxiety, what can we do about it? I’ve no idea. Probably nothing. Most of us would no sooner cut off our web connection or delete our Facebook account than we would cut off our own water supply or stop using electricity.

The Internet and social media has become an integrated part of our modern life, and there’s no going back. I suppose it would make for a dramatic conclusion to this post if I were to suggest that we start an anti-Web 2.0 revolution, a deletion of Twitter accounts and blogs, a smashing of Internet servers and a William Morris-style retreat into a pre-industrial age. But I don’t believe that’s the answer.

Rather, I think social media anxiety has to be handled in a similar fashion to my own neuroses. Every day, I try to remember that I’m more than the bumbling, awkward chap that people see shuffling up and down the Euston Road most weekdays – that socially anxious bit of myself is just one aspect of my personality. Similarly, we’re all so much more than the avatars, posts and updates we put up on the web every day.

The Internet may make it appear that our entire world is a glass cage where everything’s on public display, but this isn’t the case. There’s still the private aspect of ourselves that grows cress on bits of tissue paper, or sneakily watches Eastenders whenever it’s on the TV, that looks forward to ringing up mum and dad at the weekend, loves a Sunday roast, and wants to one day travel the world in a hot air balloon. Whether we’re weird and awkward, or lucky enough to be outgoing and confident, these are the bits of us that are truly special – in an environment that requires conformity, our individual eccentricities are more important than ever.

Our online society tries to force us into hierarchies, and  rank us according to social reach and retweets, but we’re so much more than that. To paraphrase Tyler Durden, we’re not our websites or our Facebook walls. We’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the earth.

Advertisement