Welcome to Real Self-Referentiality

GOOD » All the Web’s a Stage is a fantastic article by Cory Doctorow about his research into the psychological effects of “blended reality”, which seems to be closely related to what I call “Real Self-Referentiality” or RSR (because I like acronyms; shut up).

RSR is my way of describing the fact that real life seems to co-exist with, and to contain, its own reflection; in modern times, or maybe just “in general” for certain people, self-referentiality doesn’t happen in one’s head — it’s everywhere. The point the article makes is how technology can exacerbate this feeling that the world itself is self-referencing:  Twitter, for example, is a giant real-life realtime commentary on real life in real time — it’s like a fortune-telling that happens in the present, with all the attendant fuckeduppedness of talking about what’s happening and what’s being talked about happening…it trips backward and forward over the line between report and self-fulfilling prophecy…it’s been compared to reality fellating itself, palindromic masturbation, and I can totally grok that.  Oh, and to make it more fun, Twitterers (even the non-philosophical of them) don’t shy away from Twittering about Twittering, either.

If you don’t have a headache yet, read on for more about RSR, DPD (it’s apparently Acronym Day), and other maybe-I’m-crazy-and-maybe-I’m-just-right goodness.

I have a long and deep relationship with RSR, myself.   When I was young, I would get stuck on self-referential trains of thought until I felt like I was losing touch with reality, or losing the ability to control my own body — like I, the one pulling the marionette-strings on my real-world puppet, was suddenly aware of being bound by other marionette-strings, and then that I was pulling them too, and then being pulled by more, and so forth…often these bouts of self-reference would make me sick, cause migraines, or induce panics or fits.  The feeling, though I didn’t have the words for it then, was Kafkaesque without the comforting angle of being bound in books or even sourced in the outside world; it was as if Kafka got his pen into your own deepest thoughts and turned them gritty, disconnected and vaguely (or sometimes not-so-vaguely) threatening.

So when I read Mr. Doctorow’s comment about “researchers [who] reported on one individual who was convinced that his entire life experience, including his psychiatric treatment, was a scripted television drama”, and “[a]nother man [who] visited a federal building to request excusal from his life, which was actually a reality show”, boy howdy do I feel those poor guys’ pain.  There but for Grace, mm-hmm.

I often think that in psychology terms, RSR-type thinking is related, perhaps in the sense that when it’s uncontrolled and acute it becomes, a disorder known as Depersonalization Disorder, or DPD.  DPD has weird and very varied symptoms, ranging from depression and unruly behavior to psychosis, compulsion, paranoia, social problems, drug abuse and psychosomatic illnesses.   I imagine it also causes a tendency to become obsessed with certain types of fiction, spirituality and philosophy — areas where the tendency to self-refer oneself into selflessness can actually be useful.  Ahem.  ;)

But the symptoms of RSR aren’t really symptoms, if you ask me, though if they get out of hand and ruin people’s lives they can certainly be viewed as such.  On their own, though, they’re just reactions to an overpowering and disturbing type of realization, that the rabbit hole is real and goes much farther than is compatible with most people’s conception of what’s compatible with a normal life.  Feeling like the world is not what it seems, that you are not as in-control as you think, can be fun sometimes, but when it gets out of hand it sure isn’t.  Keeping it from getting out of hand is a tricky and lifelong endeavor.  And moving through “normal life” when you’re beset by those feelings can be interesting, or draining, or hellish, depending on many factors.

RSR is a kind of thinking that perhaps some people are just more prone to (if so, I’m almost certainly one of them).  But perhaps also, just like if you walk between two mirrors you suddenly see yourself spreading back into infinity, there are things about the outside world that can cause people to zero in on RSR-type thinking.  If it turns out to be epidemic, then maybe that’s where my next book should go:  “Rappeling the Rabbit Hole:  Your Self-Referentiality and You.”

Heh.