Originally Written 17 November 2016
So, I was talking to a co-worker (I won't call her out here, but she can comment if she wants) today, and I floated an idea by her that has slowly come to me.
I teach literature (among other things), and we were discussing Gilgamesh, and his search for immortality. We also discussed the Greeks, and the movie Troy (yes, a movie.. sorry) has an important scene in which Achilles' mother tells him that if he goes to Troy he will die young, AND be remembered forever, but if he stays home he will have a wife and children, but be forgotten. He chooses a short life, and immortality in the spoken and written word.
It seems to me that Facebook, YouTube, all these social media, are really our new Pyramids, except, instead of the sands, we are building our personal memorials in the "Cloud". People wonder why so many people are always snapping “selfies,” completing "viral challenges," etc., and then wonder aloud if we are creating a narcissistic culture. I would say, yes and no.
There have always been people who considered themselves of great importance, or those they loved. They built the Pyramids, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Taj Mahal, etc. These individuals had the opportunity to grab a piece of immortality by creating great enduring monuments, and harnessing the resources of entire nations to do so. Most of humanity was not able to do so, and lived lives in which their immortality consisted in the strands of DNA they passed down through their generations; the particulars of their lives have disappeared.
In a real sense, social media is democratizing the attempt to create memorials, a reality that Facebook seems to have embraced by appending "Remembering" the names of Facebook pages for those who have died. These pages become place of shared memory for a deceased love one's family and friends, creating a virtual meeting space to keep the memory of that person alive, to grant them a sliver of immortality, as Achilles or Cheops sought. We seem to be grasping for immortality, through memory. Our way to deal with the existential crisis, and the fear of what happens when we die is to create great virtual temples to ourselves, and our lives, up in the “Cloud.” We leave behind videos, photos, thoughts, blogs (LIKE THIS ONE), and feel compelled to share this evidence of our existence far and wide. It seems that our mania for this is because we grasp that this is our chance to shape our own legacy, to shape the way that we will be remembered. We might be getting carried away, but so did Cheops, when he built his great Pyramid.
It is the Democratization of the Existential crisis.
We can create our own great epics, and leave behind some shadow that we existed, and that we mattered. I am not sure we do this consciously, but it definitely seems to be a part of it.
What do you think?
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