Course MCM 0230: Digital Media

Bucher’s assertion that social media platforms threaten us with invisibility begs the question, why then do we fear invisibility. Is this a novel and new fear, or is it just that the internet has recently given us a readily available platform to exploit this fear. Certainly the psychological implications of becoming obsolete are substantial, and newsfeeds that inundate with examples of your friends communicating without you only exasperate this problem. The fear of invisibility is much more complicated than this though. We not only fear it for ourselves, but we also fear it in our enemies. Invisible attackers with unnoticeable surveillance are the fuel for nightmares and mayhem, as we saw tonight in Citizenfour. This invisibility of the “bad guys” is starkly contrasted with a similar but distinct principle we desire for our heroes– anonymity. It’s not that they aren’t visible, rather we can see them as they defend us, it’s just that we don’t know who they are. We see this in the case of activist group, Anonymous, as much as we do in considering Batman and his mask. We hope for privacy to rescue us from invisibility, for the freedom of fully occupying our personal spaces to save us from being confined in isolation.