Everyone wants to be found, to be discovered. This seems to be an innate feeling in all of us and it goes back to the childhood game, “Hide-and-Seek.”
I’ve been reading, How To Disappear: Notes On Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, by Akiko Busch, and it’s making me think about how we long to disappear and how we long to be found, both online and off.
In the book, Busch cites psychotherapist David Anderegg who says:
In hide-and-seek, the fun is in finding the sense of power when one is hidden and the conviction that you live in the mind of the other… You are being desired. And you are being searched for. And then being found is confirmation.
There is excitement in being both the searcher/discoverer as well as the one who is sought/found. But what if you don’t want to be found? What if you want to disappear?
I think about this a lot in online spaces. Would I be happier if my online presence failed to exist? Would I be calmer if, when people searched for me, they would find nothing?
Busch writes,
It is time to question the false equivalency between not being seen and hiding. And time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuse, but as a condition with its own meaning and power? Going unseen may be becoming a sign of decency and self-assurance. The impulse to escape notice is not about complacent isolation or senseless conformity, but about maintaining identity, propriety, autonomy, and voice. It is not about retreating from the digital world but about finding some genuine alternative to a life of perpetual display.
I want to be sought after. I want to be found. I want to be seen. But do I only like that because it’s what society tells me is valuable? Do I like being seen, because I equate it with being valuable and valued?
In our current world, and with the help of social media platforms, existing in digital spaces is of utmost importance, especially if you want yourself, your work, your ideas, your voice “out there.” We are taught that if we don’t exist online, we don’t exist offline. There’s a feeling of invisibility when you aren’t online. There’s a feeling of the world continuing without you, even though just existing means different worlds are constantly continuing without you. You are not in everyone’s world after all. This feeling is sometimes nice and welcomed. Other times, it can cause major FOMO and concerns of being forgotten. But Busch writes, “Becoming invisible is not the equivalent of being nonexistent… it is nuanced, creative, sensitive, discerning. Above all, it is powerful.”
In one chapter, Busch mentions the ice library that was built in Baikalsk, Russia in 2017. It “was a maze of walls constructed of ice blocks, the 420 books in its archive expressions of the wishes and dreams of people around the world; scored into the frozen surfaces in January, the words melted by April.” The ice library disappeared, but it didn’t become nonexistent. The ice became water; fluid. A transformation took place. Disappearing does not mean you don’t exist. Disappearing is a shift; a transformation.
Disappearing is more about change than anything. Change for the person or thing that is disappearing and change for those who continue, as is, in their spaces.
So, how do you disappear online? You disconnect. You spend less time inundated by commentary on social media. You don’t concern yourself with the waterfalls of likes, hearts, retweets, and follows. You resist the urge to post something new because it’s been 24 hours. You stop flinging your trauma in captions because your trauma doesn’t deserve that and neither do you. You begin the process of un-digitization. You come back to your self—the self that isn’t projected on screens.
You leave.
You touch something real.
You disappear.
Here’s a poem by the always excellent Naomi Shihab Nye called “The Art of Disappearing” that’s mentioned in the book:
Wow I love this. It made me think about the relationship between hiding from ourselves and hiding from others. Sometimes we hide from others in order to hide from ourselves and sometimes we hide from others because we know ourselves. And I’m sure there is an in between and constant evolution to this. This shift in visibility feels important.
This made me think of Andy Warhol's prediction that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
What he didn't tell us -- or maybe what he didn't think about -- is that not everyone wants that fame...
Un-digitizing is becoming more and more common, I think. I know people who take "social media vacations" and similar tactics. But maybe all it takes is realizing that the digital you isn't the real you, and that you can separate them if you want.
In some ways, that's an even sneakier way to hide. Don't let your true "self" be digitized in the first place. (Though I imagine easier said than done for some...)
Technology always brings some bad along with the good, doesn't it? lol
~Graham