The Circle: A Glimpse into Our Future

 [vc_row][vc_column][title type="subtitle-h6"]Emma Liverseed[/title][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width="11/12"][vc_column_text]“You know how you finish a bag of chips and you hate yourself? You know you’ve done nothing good for yourself. That’s the same feeling, and you know it is, after some digital binge. You feel wasted and hollow and diminished.”Based on Dave Egger’s novel, The Circle hits theaters April 28th. As a girl who reads the novel before watching the movie, I picked up the book over the weekend and  blazed through it. The Circle is an eerie and thought-provoking read; it illuminates troubling similarities between a dystopian society and our current technology-obsessed environment.The protagonist, Mae Holland, lands a Customer Experience job in the world’s most influential and innovative tech company --The Circle. As she navigates the waters of this massive Internet empire (think Facebook plus Apple plus Google), her existence becomes increasingly tied to her social media presence. The Circle encourages all of its employees to contribute to online sites; they are given a numerical ranking based on how much they post, comment, and interact on social networks. This leads Mae  to spend hours building up her online presence in order to elevate her status and popularity, and leaves her experiencing both euphoria and exhaustion from communicating with thousands of human beings every day. Mae’s contributions and competitiveness help her amass millions of followers, and she is promoted to a higher position by the leaders of the company, The Three Wise Men. It is then that Mae begins to lead a ‘transparent’ life, one in which she records her daily actions with a miniscule camera hung around her neck that allows anyone to tune in to her video feed at any time. The Circle’s ultimate goal is transparency --a movement that urges citizens and political figures to demonstrate complete openness and candor regarding their personal and professional lives.As a user of The Circle, you cannot  delete anything you have shared --nothing is private anymore. Vaguely unsettled by this, Mae buries discomfort under the thrill she receives from being connected to her  followers. At this point, Mae cannot choose to stop sharing, since, as explained in The Circle’s slogan, PRIVACY IS THEFT. Not sharing is tantamount to “depriving” someone else of information, and anyone who does not agree with this notion will find themselves an outcast on the fringes of society. The use of social media can be a negative influence when our self-worth and personal validation rely on how many ‘likes’ and  ‘retweets’ we receive, or when our happiness becomes linked to how satisfied we are with our online presence. Isolation from social media outlets can leave you feeling left out from the rest of your peers. This because Sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat are based on communal participation; that is, if you’re not participating and instead you decide only to  scroll through other people’s posts, you’re not feeling the ‘high’ of contributing. In many cases, the dependence on social media is such, where posting about one’s experience has become just as relevant as the experience itself. Nowadays, one can very easily think “I’m going to take a hike so I can post a picture of the sunset later”, or “I know if I eat at this restaurant I can take an awesome picture of my meal.” We want people to know what we’re eating, who we’re hanging out with, and how we spent our Friday night. If you find yourself feeling slightly disconcerted with the amount of social media in your life, it might help to reflect and evaluate why you’re spending your time scrolling through a slurry of images, comments, and blurbs in the first place. Will logging onto your apps make you feel better or worse, more distracted or more connected? How do you feel after scrolling through your feed, and how is your self-identity linked to social media? When it comes down to it, technology is practical, convenient, and in this age, a necessity. It’s great to be able to communicate with your friends and family, but it can also be difficult to climb out of an Internet rabbit hole. I challenge you to step off the grid, if only for a day. Who knows? You just might like it.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]