Most academics are familiar with lament about modernity in some form or another. We have read about the Nazi critique of modern art, or explored Martin Heidegger’s critique of the “rootless, technology-obsessed, confor-mist society, out of touch with the fundamental rhythms of Being.”91 I do not wish to participate in Heidegger’s pessimism. In fact, I wish to oppose it dia-metrically. At least part of his analysis, however, is arguably accurate. We are certainly obsessed with technology, we do certainly search for roots, and one might well argue that the desire for personalized individuality has become our new conformism.
Popular culture reflects the desire for personalized individuality in mani-fold ways: through expressively non-conformist postmodernism, through rougharound-the-edges hipster culture, through digital self-branding and biographical self-management. A wonderful example for this is Susan Chrit-ton’s popular book Personal Branding for Dummies, helping you to “distin-guish yourself with an authentic personal brand”, to “build a strong online identity to showcase your brand” and to “evaluate and evolve your personal brand over time”.92 Beautiful, is it not?
We can also see the cult of personalized identity by analyzing the direction that social media technology is headed. The selfie application Snapchat is do-minating tech media and has journalists producing headlines like The Social Media Messiah, Geek—God—Gary, and Gary Saw That It Was Good about an expert who pre dicted Snapchat’s rise a few years ago.93 Whereas most hum-ans had never even seen a detailed mirror reflection of themselves up until a few centuries ago, our lives are now flooded with images of ourselves, and we reinforce this through technology every day.
91 David J. Rosner, “Anti-Modernism and Discourses of Melancholy,” E-rea 4:1 (2006), ac-cessed October 17, 2016, http://erea.revues.org/596.
92 Susan Chritton, Personal Branding For Dummies (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2014).
93 Stefan Dörner, ed., “The Social Media Messiah,” t3n-Magazin, August 23, 2016, accessed October 17, 2016, http://t3n.de/magazin/t3n-nr-45-social-media-messias/.
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The personalized individuality trend is also visible in our general media consumption. Algorithms determine what we want to hear and produce a news feed to our liking. Google created a built-in fact check tool to combat its unintended consequences on their news site.94 Facebook has rolled out a similar feature. At the same time, buzzwords like “consumer centricity” and
“user needs” are everywhere in the tech sector and create aggressive compe-tition for the most customizable, personalized user experience on the web.
And the digital market is growing: Recent data from the Pew Research Center shows that “only two in ten U.S. adults often get news from print newspapers,” down from 27% in 2013. Broken by age, the data makes future developments looks even more drastic: “Only 5% of 18- to 29-year-olds often get news from a print newspaper”. Compared to print, nearly twice as many adults often get news online from websites, apps or social media.95 Studies in Germany show a similar trend towards online news consumption on mobile devices with social media as one of the important news sources, especially for younger users.96
The introduction of algorithms to personalize news feeds has turned social networks into feeds for our natural confirmation bias — with devastating effects for partisan debate and political culture. Media research has come to describe this as echo chambers, information cocoons or filter bubbles: “The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and nar-ratives.” Social media has become a fruitful environment for “rapid dissemi-nation of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit
94 Richard Gingras, “Labeling fact-check articles in Google News,” Google Blog, October 13, 2016, accessed October 17, 2017, https://blog.google/topics/journalism-news/labe-ling-fact-check-articles-google-news/.
95 “The Modern News Consumer,” Pew Research Center, July 7, 2016, accessed October 19, 2016, http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/.
96 “ARD/ZDF-Onlinestudie 2016: 84 Prozent der Deutschen sind online – mobile Geräte sowie Audios und Videos mit steigender Nutzung,” ARD and ZDF, October 12, 2016, accessed October 19, 2016, http://www.ard-zdf-onlinestudie.de.
53 rapid, large, but naive social responses.” Selective exposure to content drives
“content diffusion” and generates “homogeneous clusters” that are appropri-ately describes as “echo chambers.”97
The trend towards personalized individuality also pervades religion, as Ro-bert Wuthnow has reconstructed in his paradigmatic 1998 study After Hea-ven. He describes the rise of a “seeker spirituality” which inspires “individuals to go beyond established religious institutions”.98 To illustrate the anti-insti-tutional effect of this trend, Wuthnow quotes Coleman McGregor: “I value the institution, but as my relationship with God has become more important subjectively and objectively, I’ve been drawn more into that and drawn less to the institution.”99
Anti-institutionalism does not mean that religion writ large is declining.
Rather, as Friedrich-Wilhelm Graf has argued, we see more religious syn-cretism.100 Leigh Eric Schmidt reminds us that this trend is not new. It has prominently influenced American religiosity since the nineteenth century.101 One of the long-term impacts is described by Wuthnow as the rise of indi-vidualist mysticism: “The supernatural remains a mysterious force, not so-mething that is revealed in an authoritative text or institution.”102 Wuthnow cites the poet Wendell Berry to illustrate what he means. For Berry,
institu-97 Michela Del Vicario et al., “The spreading of misinformation online,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113:3 (2016): 554–559, accessed October 19, 2016, http://
www.pnas.org/content/113/3/554.full.
98 Cf. Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven. Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998). Citation taken from: “After Hea-ven,” University of California Press, accessed October 17, 2016. http://www.ucpress.edu/
book.php?isbn=9780520222281.
99 Wuthnow, After Heaven, 182.
100 Outside of Central Europe religion is booming in many places. Cf. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Götter global: Wie die Welt zum Supermarkt der Religionen wird (München: C.H.
Beck, 2014). See also: Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter: Religion in der modernen Kultur (München: C.H. Beck, 2007).
101 Cf. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2005). In Europe, a more institutional version of this can be studied in German Romanticism, especially in Friedrich Schleiermacher. Some years later, Sören Kierkegaard attacks the Danish state church with an anti-institutional, individualistic re-ligious philosophy that shares features with 19th century American discourse.
102 Wuthnow, After Heaven, 134.
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tional religion is nothing but a “hodgepodge of funds, properties, projects and offices, all urgently requiring economic support” which might, in fact, be
“contrary to some of the principles of religion itself.”103
103 As cited in: Wuthnow, After Heaven, 182.
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