Mary Harrington on scrolling as the return of Charles Taylor’s unbuffered self:

[W]e should also pause for a moment on how post-print selves are now formed, in practice. Specifically: as selves are growing less buffered, many are embracing this new state of affairs with remarkably little discrimination on how external influences may contribute to the formation of mental habits…. [A]nyone who simply absorbs whatever the scroll throws up, without discernment, will end up being formed by discourses often optimised less for truth, or wisdom, or human flourishing, than for maximum immediacy in playing on intense emotions, good or bad.

On occasions I have an eerie sense that thought has me, rather than I the thought — only to realise that this is true, because the thought is a mental groove worn in my inner reflections by a specific online discourse. When you meet this in someone else, it comes across as that person treating everything they encounter as a data point for their epistemic tribe, whether that’s “gender discourse”, or Palestine, or whatever. I’ve come to think of such individuals as partially or wholly occupied by a kind of collective self, formed and consolidated by a hybrid human/machine dynamic.

This isn’t entirely new; television got us partway there decades ago. But Taylor’s buffered and unbuffered selves is a useful model, or hook. To riff on this observation: People who traditionally were unreflective about the external forces that created their selves were formed by local nature and community, and taught to be wary of evil spirits. Then came reading, and readers know and (can, should) reflect on what they’re reading, weigh it as something external to themselves, and are apt to remember their influences. Scrolling on the internet (let’s please stop calling it social media, ok? nothing social about it) has undone that awareness and reflection, without putting humans back in the context of local nature and community: so that everyone is babes in the woods, but babes who think themselves learned and wise.

Now ask yourself whether “democracy” is possible in such a condition, or what used to be called civil society. Both require selves that can be argued with, and we’re erasing them.