We are passive consumers of our friends’ lives.
Researchers have been writing about the effects of passively consuming media on Instagram and Facebook for a while now, but I didn’t realize how I was consuming another part of my friends’ lives—their reading lives—until I deleted my Goodreads account.
Goodreads is a “social cataloging” website and app of books, quotes, annotations, and reviews. Users can catalogue their own books and observe and participate in a social feed that shows which friend started what book, how far along they are, their rating of the book compared to your rating, their review, among other elements.
As I kept trying to figure out what bugged me about Goodreads—other than it being a subsidiary of Amazon and encouraging reading in a it-benefits-capitalism kind of way—I kept going back to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle.
Debord’s fourth thesis in Society of the Spectacle says “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Let’s look at the blocks of texts and reading updates on Goodreads as “images.”
One of his theses that jumped at me for this conversation was his 18th thesis:
Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly) naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most justifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society […] It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.
I love to cherry pick my texts, so I want to focus on the following words from the section above: “specialized mediations,” “opposite of dialogue,” and “independent representation.”
*Goodreads* mediates social relationship between people. These updates are not dialogue. They are not thorough discussions about the text. Even reviews are a block of text for one to read while scrolling and then keep scrolling. There are agreements and disagreements in the comments, maybe, but no active dialogue.
What does Goodreads represent? Discussion of a book? Personal library/bookshelf? It is a representation. Furthermore, there is an illusion of unity when friends are together on an app and you can see all their updates on one feed. The spectacle ensures that we remain as isolated spectators. Now for the next theses, Debord’s 28th thesis:
The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds”…
And the following thesis, the 29th:
What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.
I would like to repeat: the spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it 👏🏼 as separate 👏🏼 *Goodreads* reunites us, the separate, but we are still separate.
***
As I mentioned earlier, I deleted my Goodreads account. Going forward, I am going to intentionally ask my friends about what they’re reading. I was doing this before, but an update on Goodreads was often the catalyst for that conversation.
Slowly, I am finding ways to be a more active participant in life.