A man meets an old lover at a party. Months ago I had stopped following him on Instagram. Because? He doesn’t know it very well, he doesn’t remember it and, at the time, he didn’t give it much importance either. He simply didn’t feel like continuing to see photos of that person with whom he had a fleeting relationship: photos of his vacations, his pets, his family, his successive partners… How long could that last? Surely, until that social network disappeared or was replaced by another. However, at the party she wants to say hello and chat for a while because nothing bad happened between them. He finds no good disposition from the other party, only reproaches. “Why did you unfollow me?” But why not?
We often say that we live in a society of increasingly ephemeral ties, of relationships that are broken as soon as they are established; a society individualistic —what wear and tear this adjective accumulates—that prevents us from looking beyond ourselves. And yet, more and more we join people we have just met or don’t even know in person through friendship or following on social networks, we witness hundreds of other people’s lives every day and we are barely able to say goodbye. or simply end a conversation. It may be that phenomena such as ghosting (the most radical and harmful form of farewell, along with its younger brother: leaving in sight) have to do with this and, of course, as Leonard Cohen would say: “Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.” But is it possible to say goodbye or walk away from someone without doing or harming ourselves, or are we losing the tools to do so?
The narcissism that unites us with others
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet writer who was very critical of the USSR, said that when Stalin was applauded there, the first to stop applauding ran the risk of being retaliated against, so during that regime the applause was prolonged to absurd limits. Leaving aside, something similar may be happening with our interactions: from a flirtation to something more serious, from a group chat to a work mailing list, no one wants to be the first one who doesn’t answer. Communication expert Carlos Scolari, author of The laws of the interfaceconfirms it: “Closing a communicative exchange is always a question of power or arrogance.” To further complicate things, Scolari continues, we should add that many exchanges begin in an email, continue on Zoom and may end, if they end at all, on WhatsApp. “As the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri said, true alternative communication is that no one has the last word,” he recalls.
So today hardly any last words are said. On the other hand, for psychologist Bruno Martínez, part of the Observatorio Deseo collective, there is another problem that limits our ability to say goodbye as much or more than issues related to etiquette and the laws of communication: the notion that relationships fail. If they don’t last forever. “This notion is very problematic because, when it appears, we can force ourselves to extend a relationship, despite experiencing it as something unsatisfactory, despite knowing that the other person or we are hurt… We have to start removing these very notions. turbocapitalists of success and failure of our relationships and start thinking about mutual satisfaction and the time when we were happy. That would be, in any case, success: that a relationship makes us feel good for as long as possible, but not infinitely or in terms of victory or defeat, success or failure,” says Martínez.
In cases in which a breakup (love or friendship, anthropologist Robin Dunbar, “friendship expert,” considers them equivalent) is more painful, the issue of social networks becomes tricky and, as Martínez states, , “at this moment, making someone else disappear, something that may be necessary, is very complicated.” “There are specific circumstances that call for distancing, to be able to mourn in which the other is not present. We have to be aware that this mourning is not only for the loss of the other or the loss of the relationship, but also for those who were with that specific other, because each of us is in a unique way along with each subject. When we are in a relationship, there is also a version of ourselves that exists only there. Part of the mourning has to do with that person who we were and will no longer be. For people who need a duel in which the other is not present, continuing to see each other on social networks is very difficult. It is necessary to develop a non-harmful form of communication that allows this need to be expressed,” explains the therapist. But we do not even have to consider the most extreme situations: in the era of scroll infinite, establishing any limit becomes complicated.
Interfaces for infinite presence and conversation
Éric Sadin is a pessimistic philosopher. At least, with respect to the effects of technology and social networks, tools that, as he develops in all his essays, would have ruined the way we look at the world and relate to others. For example, in The era of the tyrant individual writes precisely about how the forces that push us to come together (“associate”) or distance ourselves from each other have changed: “We see with the greatest desolation that what was cut down at the roots is the experience of life in common, based on the free expression of subjectivities and their mutual association with constructive purposes. Its absolute investment occurs in a kind of joyful and permanent collective party (which we attend, however, in solitude, behind the screen) based on self-satisfaction and generalized good conscience. This gives evidence of the triumph—perhaps definitive—of vanity over responsibility.”
It is difficult to know if the situation is so serious, but, as Scolari and Martínez already pointed out, when someone does not put an end to a harmful relationship (or that simply does not contribute anything or is not constructive) it is common for vanity (those desire to have a follower or an attentive contact more) has something to do with it. And what the philosopher is definitely not wrong about is how much the interfaces of the technologies that we use daily influence all of our behaviors. If in MSN Messenger conversations started and ended at two very specific times (you had to “log in” and “log out” each time; often this also involved turning the modem on and off), the permanent availability of means such as WhatsApp generates a very different type of conversation, without borders or schedules.
“As McLuhan said, all media or technologies are extensions of some human function or capacity,” says Scolari. “But these media,” continues the Argentine author, “end up creating environments that transform us on an individual, social and institutional level. That is, technologies look like us and we look like them. It is not a simple or linear relationship. I like to talk about coevolution. It is a rather slow process, of structural coupling, Bateson would say, that develops over time and that affects us in ways that are difficult to perceive immediately.
On a psychological level, Martínez is concerned that, when presence and conversation become something permanent, what disappears is intimacy (not to be confused with privacy): “Where is the subject’s intimate space? Why does everything have to be told, named, shown or narrated? In this sense, people who are a bit of Michel Foucault see that we are in the era of confession: we must continually confess who we are, what we do, who we are with, what we desire, what we like… It is necessary to have a space of privacy, to which others do not have access. And that is not a disadvantage, it is that we need places where we feel comfortable without the gaze of the other, which is sometimes very judgmental,” explains the psychologist.
This “age of confession” sometimes, when looked at closely, gives rise to absurd situations. If you take a look at the feed on Twitter, Instagram or WhatsApp statuses —yes, there are those who use them— you may find things you didn’t want to know about one of those friends who party and break up later, about a hookup from the summer of 2011 or about a former coworker you haven’t seen in seven years. But, even higher up, a conversation may appear that you have been carrying on for too long with reluctance and inertia; some questions that, without hardly realizing it, you have left unanswered; or a sent message whose response did not reach you either. They are the loose fringes that remain when technology imposes a presence on-line permanent and uninterrupted and when we have lost the ability to walk away politely, to ask “a moment, please” or to simply say goodbye.