Over the last few years Scott had vacationed to countries like Thailand, Nepal, Cambodia and other destinations in Asia. He hunted out new vistas like a man possessed. Not long after returning from one journey, Scott was buckled up on the tarmac, ready to take off once more.
Scott’s parents didn’t think much of their son’s travels abroad until they stumbled upon his social media page and newly-minted profile shot. Scott’s friends liked and favourited his new profile image, but made little comment other than “nice robe”, and “what happened to the hair?” Scott’s parents were perplexed.
In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain lampoons the sensitive traveller who returns to his hometown decked out in strange foreign fashions and unable to pronounce his own name correctly. “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad,” he writes. Twain believes that our desire for travel is largely grounded on petty one-upmanship. “We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can ‘show off’ and astonish people when we get home,” he writes.
It could well be argued that people like Scott, insurance sales guy one month and Buddhist monk the next, aren’t so rare anymore. I recently met a young woman, born and bred in Australia, who’d not only acquired the dress and mannerisms of a French actress after just one year away, but also the voice to match (“eer, wot is zee eengleesh werd fur eet?”).
It’s easy to ridicule such behaviour as phony, as if Buddhist monk or actrice is a sham, a disguise temporarily shrouding the real self that lies beneath. But professor of psychology Kenneth Gergen disagrees, arguing that such populating of the self is rife in postmodern society. Our belief in an essential self erodes as we become aware of the myriad ways personal identity can be created and re-created.
“In the traditional community, where relationships were reliable, continuous, and face-to-face, a firm sense of self was favoured,” Gergen writes in The Saturated Self. “One’s sense of identity was broadly and continuously supported. Further, there was strong agreement on patterns of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour. One could simply and self-consciously be, for there was little question of being otherwise.”
But technological developments in travel and communication – railroad, telephone, radio broadcasting, motion pictures, printed books, and more recently the internet – have expanded our relationships to others the world over; to ideas, ways of being, dress, mannerisms, voices, actions, and belief systems. Eastern philosophers, Irish golfers, Wall Street stockbrokers, Jenny next door, Russian peasants…
“Emerging technologies saturate us with the voices of humankind – both harmonious and alien,” writes Gergen. “These relationships pull us in myriad directions, inviting us to play such a variety of roles that the very concept of an ‘authentic self’ with knowable characteristics recedes from view. The fully saturated self becomes no self at all.”
Gergen argues that with social saturation, each of us comes to harbour a vast population of hidden potentials. “All the selves lie latent, and under the right conditions may spring to life.”
But how instrumental are these ‘others’ in shaping the self? Can news hounds, celebrities, and the axe murderer in last night’s movie really affect the self?
Social psychologist Mary Gergen asked a group of college students to complete a survey entitled, ‘Remembering Persons’. The questionnaire asked students to name three people who entered into their thoughts during day-to-day activities: in other words, an imagined interaction with a real or fictitious person, a concept Mary Gergen terms “social ghosts”.
“Many developmental and clinical psychologists have suggested that only people with very unsatisfactory social lives and those who are mentally or emotionally disabled or immature would report experiences of interaction with absent social figures,” Mary Gergen writes in Feminist Reconstructions in Psychology: Narrative, Gender, and Performance. Normal people just don’t carry out imagined relationships and interactions with internal voices, it was believed.
The survey found evidence of the contrary: out of 76 college students surveyed, all respondents bar one admitted to having imagined interactions with at least one person. “The majority of respondents wrote about three relationships… although some people added more experiences,” Mary Gergen writes.
So who are these social ghosts populating the inner worlds of college students? According to the survey, past friends, family members, and former teachers are often present. But so are – in 29 per cent of cases – people the students had never actually met, such as celebrities, fictitious characters and religious figures. “Among the famous social ghosts unknown to the respondent, entertainers were chosen over 80 per cent of the time,” she writes. Students revealed that continuous imagined interactions with these “rock stars” or “celebrities” led to changes in their existing beliefs and values.
The findings suggest that personalities from books, movies, television, and figures from the internet can populate the self in profound ways. As movie and television executives titillate, novelists inspire, and media personalities reveal all, we are wrenched from familiar patterns of existence. As philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset once said: “Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
So, if we return to Scott, which selves are harbouring inside the young man? If we project into the film of Scott’s mind we’re bound to recognise some familiar scenes and faces: game show hosts, sitcoms, J.D. Salinger, news hounds, the Mona Lisa, Elvis Presley, sports stars, Big Bird, blockbuster scenes, makeover shows, travel guides, news on the hour, Jack Kerouac…
Host to so many significant others, Scott today is unrecognisable even to his parents. Haunted by his social ghosts, he attempts to flee by plane once more, and once airborne, behind the din of the engine, a robed man chants, “I have no self, I have no self…”
