More Judging, No More Privacy

I once judged a classmate of mine who I was in a U.S. history project group with entirely on her Facebook profile before we ever had a full conversation.  I saw many photos of her at parties and assumed she did not take school seriously and would be a detriment to the group.  Technology ended up giving me the wrong assumption of her; she worked hard and helped us earn an A on that project.  The pictures, videos, and wall posts people upload to Facebook reveal more about a person than most people would care to admit to, something I now am mindful of whenever I add anything to my profile.

Whereas my goal on Facebook and on other social media sites is to keep the personal details of my life as private as possible, in Gary Shteyngart’s novel, Super Sad True Love Story, many of the characters like to share everything about their lives online.  This breeds a culture numbed by a lack of privacy.  For example, Hartford Brown’s stream of the Chinese central banker’s reception to America had occasionally cut in shots of him having sex with another man (Shteyngart 155).  In addition to that, the people viewing the stream, specifically Lenny, were totally fine seeing the extremely intimate details of Hartford’s life in the middle of major world news.  It appeared that society as a whole was encouraging people to share their entire lives with the rest of the world.

The current social media scene has enabled people from across the globe to live in a more connected world.  I believe that Shteyngart intended to demonstrate in his novel what he would envision happening if we took our interconnectedness a step further.  I view his stance on emerging technology as being certain about the loss of privacy and the objectification of people that would come about as technology advances.  Already, we can observe the online world encroaching on our privacy.  In Meher Ahmad’s article, “Sex Yelp,” an app called Lulu, which scores men based on ratings submitted by women who know them and may have also had sexual relations with them, is examined (Jezebel.com).  The article reveals the app’s objectification of males as details of their lives slowly make their way online.  Lulu summarizes men by aggregating the reviews and computing a man’s “Bests” and “Worsts” (Jezebel.com), not accounting for the possibility of a woman viewing one of his “bad” qualities as a positive.  In a similar sense, in Super Sad True Love Story, a person’s Fuckability is rated as a fixed number, although in the real world many people would judge the same person at different levels of physical attractiveness.  Lulu appears to be a bridge between the modern world and Shteyngart’s dystopian society, deciding for the user the good and bad qualities of a man.