That sort of attention constitutes us as a particular kind of sharing subject, confirming that we are “being ourselves” when we produce data, validating the primacy of documents over immediate lived experience.
Political theorist Jodi Dean derives this from the demands of neoliberalism for flexible, self-starting subjects willing to convert all of life into capital:
“Neoliberal ideology does not produce its subjects by interpellating them into symbolically anchored identities (structured according to conventions of gender, race, work, and national citizenship). Instead, it enjoins subjects to develop our creative potential and cultivate our individuality. Communicative capitalism’s circuits of entertainment and consumption supply the ever new experiences and accessories we use to perform this self-fashioning — I must be fit! I must be stylish! I must realize my dreams. I must because I can— everyone wins. If I don’t, not only am I a loser but I am not a person at all. I am not part of everyone. (Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 66)”
Once this sort of documentation takes hold, life becomes a pretense for recording, and social being becomes alienated as “communicative capitalism.” Lives are lived merely to be confessed and monetized on social media, which confer significance to otherwise meaningless seeming events. Getting likes on a photo of a meal is more “significant” than eating it.
Nathan Jurgenson calls this “the Facebook eye”: we experience the “present as always a future past” as we process experience in terms of how we can rebroadcast it in social media. “Our brains always looking for moments where the ephemeral blur of lived experience might best be translated into a Facebook post; one that will draw the most comments and “likes.”
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