Simmel’s ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ and The Internet

I’ve not read Simmel before now, but looking at fragments of his theories on the metropolis and the individual got me thinking about internet communities. Although writing for a series of lectures around 1903, many of Simmel’s points about the influence of the modern city – the metropolis – on the way we understand ourselves and everyday existence seem to me applicable to the Internet age. The initial premise of “The Metropolis and Mental Life” suggests that “the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, or external culture, and his technique of life.”  It goes on to establish that modern urban living is a novel and intense ‘psychological condition” full of “onrushing impressions” and multiple unfamiliar interactions. As a result of these conditions, the modern individual evolves a greater intellectual awareness, or perception, to cope with constant change, and the ‘depth of emotion’ that Simmel appears to imply is integral to an unique personality appears subordinated:”The reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of personality”.

I would suggest that the ‘remoteness’ of individual personality is implicit in communication mediated through the internet, and that a ‘depth of personality’ can never be fully realised through the web; however graphic the detail on your blog, however constantly you update your Facebook status, it will always exist as a version of your person, as opposed to an emotional part of you.

Simmel also goes on to suggest how the metropolis breeds the “highest impersonality”, through the inculcation of the values of “Punctuality, calculability, exactness” in the general populace, via the environmental structure as well as the economic one. I would map similar values onto web browsers and social networking interactions – there is an expectation of shared knowledge, shared aptitude and technological competence (even in something mundane like typing in a response to MSN messenger). It’s a rather obvious example, but Google is as important a social mechanism in 2011 as a train running on time, the post office delivering efficiently, hospitals having the ability to treat patients. It is an inextricable aspect of modern life, synecdochic of the Internet.

Simmel’s self-proclaimed ‘most profound’ point is this -

The individual is reduced to a negligible quantity… the metropolis is the genuine area of this culture which outgrows all personal life… On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that simulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry a person as if in a  stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself. On the other hand, however, life is composed more and more of these impersonal contents and offerings which tend to displace the genuine personal colorations and incomparabilities.

The individual, in the face of a kind of oblivion, is forced to “exaggerate” his most “personal element(s)” to preserve his core. Two forces are seen to establish urban life – “individual independence” and the “elaboration of individuality itself”. In this, the value of man’s existence is transferred from any sense of universal humanity to ‘man’s qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability” The irony is that such value appears to arise from the structures which condemn and pressurise the individual, although Simmel is careful to point out that  we are not to “accuse or pardon, but only to understand” the influence of the metropolis on society and the individual, for it is – and has been – the new foundation of modern day society.

It seems to me that such structures that simultaneously destroy and ‘elaborate upon’  the individual are manifest in social networking sites – one million profile pages could almost be guaranteed to have exactly the same version of the individual shown, in terms of the kind of information, the structure of that information etc… but the individual themselves believes there are asserting their identity in as unique a way as this necessary modern day structure allows. The continual struggle to establish your own identity is actually an acceptance that such identity is part reliant on the infinite structures of urbanity – or technology – around you.

These are not new observations – there is a multitude of literature about how the ‘society’ of the internet is constructed – but I suppose I wanted to show my admiration for Simmel;  his understanding of the way human beings react to social structures which challenge them , but are essential to the way of living into which they have evolved, still seems utterly pertinent.

(…Says the author, posting to his personal blog – and his Facebook feed – trying to write a part of himself onto the Internet. )