[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_32

Cold Intimacies, Eva Illouz, 2007

How do we live our relationships? How do we perceive ourselves and the humanity of others? These are questions that Eva Illouz related to social networks and consumer society in 2007, but her questioning remains open and current. The end of 2000 saw the rise and boom of Facebook, the possibility of comfortably entering the lives of others and shaping one's own in the most effective way possible (that is, in a way that others might like), a total revolution in the interpersonal relationships and for the perception of one's self.

This is not a point that has been overcome but one that is constantly evolving: we get used to social reality, we have moved from Facebook to Instagram, from Instagram to TikTok, and the splitting of the social plan remains an active producer of contradictions. We have our friends with whom we spend time in real life,and then we have another one, inside an APP, that is much more like an audience. Sometimes, it's the same people we hang out with who like our content; sometimes, they're strangers. Most of the time, they are people we pretend to be befriended but whom we barely know or -worse - whom we don't care about. What seems to matter is that the red heart-shaped notification is always lit and pulsating. It indicates that we are liked, people follow us, the confirmation we seek, and our favorite routine is disruption. But it is also what traps, debases, distances. What happens if our friend sees our story on Instagram and doesn't like it? If someone reads our comment but doesn't respond? If other people post dump things but have more followersthan us? Does whatever we publish always seem unfashionable while the contents of the different look so trendy? If other people show a life full of friends, love, travel, and satisfaction while ours is so banal and sometimes sad?

I use “we” because I think it is a collective experience even if not everyone uses the same networks, even if not everyone has networks: we live exposed and immersed in multimedia technology, in the bombardment of information and images, in the immediate communication; the internet is a part of our reality. For example, I experienced the sense of commodification of relationships as well as the split of daily behavior; even if I’ve never had a smartphone and I still use an old dumbphone without a camera or internet connection, I discovered these new feelings in people around me, in their painful boredom towards life when they couldn’t stay away from their phones.

I taught in a small and forgotten village close to Garda Lake in northern Italy a few years ago. This place was not well connected with other cities, and I hadn’t got a car, so to escape the heavy weekly routine, I tooklittle journeys on the lake with some colleagues who liked traveling around (and who had a car). I noticed they spent half of the day taking

selfies and the other half choosing the best picture and the most effective comment to post on Instagram. I remember I was horrified. I also felt very alone because I couldn’t talk with them to not interfere with their activity; sometimes, I ended up helping them take photos just to survive the despair.

Now, I can say that I learned a lot from this. I know all the rules to appear as a sexy bomb in a picture: to pretend to be concentrated on something, watching the infinite while you are uncomfortably posing like a supermodel (no one cares where you are); I also know what the best way if you would demonstrate a more reflexive and intellectual side: to take a picture of yourself in a place of cultural interest, never watching the camera, sometimes showing a deep-sad look to the horizon and always putting a quote from people you’ve never known.

Two of my colleagues, two 24-year-old and 29-year-old male teachers, were very professional: they used to buy last-minute super chip tickets to go somewhere to take as many photos as possible. Once they bought a ticket to Alicante, they traveled from Italy to Spain for 10 hours. When I asked them why, they said,“Because the ticket only costs 30 euros and no one knows that we stay just a few hours”. The aim of the trick was not the adventure of making something meaningless just for fun, nor the possibility of seeing something new without spending a lot. The objective is to collect as much material as possible to shape their Instagram profile as travel influencers: they used the pictures of a single day to create more Instagram posts during the year, pretending to have been in Alicante several times. The purpose was to say: "Look at all the beautiful things I do, and look how cool I am." I also learned from them how quantitative comparison with others makes us lose contact with ourselves and our lives.

In her book, Eva Illouz highlights how the economy has shaped our psychology and how our presentation to others through the digital social platform increasingly resembles a product sale. The writer gives anexample of how the characteristics considered most representative of the person are exaggerated within social media through self-description and through the pictures they use to show themselves: "blonde, nice breasts, romantic"; “macho, mysterious look, lover of luxury”; and so on. Not very dissimilar to the offers in supermarkets: "100% Italian peeled tomatoes, Mediterranean aromas, only for connoisseurs". Her analysis has no moralistic nuances, just underlining that people also tend to promote themselves as a product (a sexy, successful, or exciting product) using the same techniques and language the market uses.

Platforms like Tinder did not yet exist at the time of "Cold Intimacies," so Illouz's analysis appears almost prophetic.