In yesterday's post I had great fun picking apart the imagery provided in Michael David Wilson's new novella The Girl in the Video. The recently released novella follows the first person narrative of Freddie, who along with his wife Rachel is a British expat living, working, and planning a new life in Japan as an English teacher. Freddie's life is comfortably normal, until he receives an anonymous video download on his smartphone. Opening that first video will be for Freddie the start of a long and rapidly increasing spiral through anxiety, helplessness, and a detached sense of guilt.Yesterday's post suggests that with the first of the bizarre videos the anonymous "girl in the video"is
cleverly using hypnotic techniques to put Freddie into a trancelike state that will leave him more open to recognizing the two warnings that the girl is giving him. The first warning is that while she hides her identity, the mysterious girl claims to have had some sort of relationship with Freddie. The second warning is that for whatever reason, the girl in the video sees herself as a powerful predator and Freddie is her prey.
With today's and tomorrow's posts I am looking at the possibility that The Girl in the Video betrays an anxiety that social media can have negative psychological repercussions for its users. For Freddie, even limited social media exposure weakens him and encourages his private insecurities. Tomorrow I will argue that social media and connected surveillance technologies, as portrayed in The Girl in the Video, are responsible for unbalancing his stalker's psyche, preventing her from learning social norms about privacy and pushing her into a terrifying psychosis in her yearning to control and even crush Freddie.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Freddie has “a strange relationship with social media.” His
regular habit of “cycling through” Twitter, WhatsApp, Hello Talk, Instagram,
Facebook, Pinterest, and Line leave him feeling “anxiety and despair,” though
his narration betrays something more akin to anger and frustration over what he
perceives as the mundane and inane aspects of his friends’ posts. He also expresses a sense of meaninglessness
in maintaining the thinnest degrees of “contact” with people he has neither
seen nor been friends with since childhood.
At the start of this novella, Freddie’s self-esteem and confidence are already under stress as he and his wife Rachel contemplate whether or not to buy a home in Japan, where they have satisfying careers as English teachers. Their plans are further affected by their decision to have a baby. Given these stresses, Freddie’s forays into Facebook fail to bring him any pleasure, and inexplicably leave him feeling angry at not only his social media contacts, but himself as well.
At the start of this novella, Freddie’s self-esteem and confidence are already under stress as he and his wife Rachel contemplate whether or not to buy a home in Japan, where they have satisfying careers as English teachers. Their plans are further affected by their decision to have a baby. Given these stresses, Freddie’s forays into Facebook fail to bring him any pleasure, and inexplicably leave him feeling angry at not only his social media contacts, but himself as well.
Social studies researchers have over the past decade
confirmed a link between social media usage and poorer self-esteem, even
depression and anxiety. The slapdowns that social media platforms such as
Facebook give to individuals’ self-image is often a result of seeing and assuming
that others are upwardly mobile, and by comparison feeling far less
“successful” in terms of career, social status, and personal fulfillment.
Those who come away from the social media platforms feeling good about themselves are often people who “upload and run,” sharing something that portrays themselves in a good light and not reading or engaging with other people’s posts. Freddie is not one of these “hit and run” social media users. He pays attention to the selfies, the meals, and the vacation photos that others upload, and responds with exasperation at the inanity of their shares and perhaps frustration at his own sense of normalcy that comes from the comparisons.
What he does not realize is that despite his limited presentation of himself across various social media platforms, Freddie is nevertheless an open window.
Those who come away from the social media platforms feeling good about themselves are often people who “upload and run,” sharing something that portrays themselves in a good light and not reading or engaging with other people’s posts. Freddie is not one of these “hit and run” social media users. He pays attention to the selfies, the meals, and the vacation photos that others upload, and responds with exasperation at the inanity of their shares and perhaps frustration at his own sense of normalcy that comes from the comparisons.
What he does not realize is that despite his limited presentation of himself across various social media platforms, Freddie is nevertheless an open window.
“A sentence, any sentence, is a passage of thought,” says
essayist and novelist William H. Gass.
Even in his simplest posts, Freddie is revealing himself. His experience
of disrespecting what he sees as the inanity of some friends’ posts and his
jealous distaste for others’ public image-building campaigns leaves him
vulnerable to thinking of himself as invisible on social media. His assumptions
about the smart phone screen are similar to his attitude toward the window in
his home. After a shower, as he struts clothed only with a bath towel around
his shoulders, Freddie is admonished by his wife: “The curtains are open,
people can see straight through.” Freddie doubts whether anyone on the outside
is looking in, and goes one step further in this denial by giving action to his
low self-confidence: “Who’s going to be impressed by this, anyway?” he asks as
he does a little dance, naked, in front of the window.
In his contemplation on his own reliance upon the symbolic
richness of windows, William H. Gass points out the false security that comes
from thinking of windows as one-way apertures of sight. Gass speaks of windows
as visions provided through distortions of a glass encircled by pane. “…when as a character of mine looks out through a window … it’s the idea of ‘glass,’ of
separated seeing, of the distortions of the medium … that dominates and
determines the eye.” For Gass, the window emphasizes “the fragility of
knowledge,” even as all windows serve sometimes as display cases that provoke
reflection by outside viewers who gaze upon the momentarily visible inner world. The window/screen instills an ambiguity to the words “inside” and
“outside,” an ambiguity that Freddie is too late to comprehend.
The shocking revelation for Freddie is the realization that
he has not been the one who, through his limited use of social media, has been
pulling back of the curtain to reveal himself.
Those curtains have already been tossed aside by the girl in the video, the masked hunter. This dawns on him when he receives the same message across multiple platforms: “Tell me what you like.” A quick check of his privacy settings does nothing to stop the barrage of messages that feel like “a full-on fucking assault.” The crisis only deepens with the next barrage of messages: “I know what you like.”
Those curtains have already been tossed aside by the girl in the video, the masked hunter. This dawns on him when he receives the same message across multiple platforms: “Tell me what you like.” A quick check of his privacy settings does nothing to stop the barrage of messages that feel like “a full-on fucking assault.” The crisis only deepens with the next barrage of messages: “I know what you like.”
Videos continue to arrive in Freddie’s in-box, one a faked
snuff film, the other a compilation of images from places Freddie had lived and
worked, from London to Lisbon, and ending in Tokyo. With an overwhelming sense
of horror, Freddie realizes that even his limited social media use has been
enough to provide anyone on “the outside” with a clear view to the inside of
his private life. But, he wonders, “Who in the hell would go to such trouble?”As more violent videos and threatening texts barrage his phone, Freddie emotional strength spirals downward through panic, anger, and helplessness. "Paranoia playing tricks on me, blurring reality," he realizes. He is so shaken that when a fellow rider on the train asks if he needs help, Freddie cannot speak: "I tried to reply but no words came out, just incomprehensible grunts, tears streaming down my face."
Unnerved, Freddie realizes that he has a stalker, a psychopath whose sickness finds strength in the social media even as her target grows weaker with every unwanted message.
--------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment