When Simmel published The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit in 1903, he perhaps already sensed the proximate direction toward which modernity was moving, and with it the social behavior of individuals, characterized largely by an ever-increasing intellectualization of life, to the detriment of those other human faculties—such as sentimentality—that would progressively decline with the advent of social life in his metropolis, Berlin. In this context, Simmel positioned himself midway between those among his intellectual contemporaries who viewed modernity negatively, highlighting its worst aspects, and those who, overwhelmed by the admiration of technical and scientific progress, viewed it as a stunning revelation (an epiphany). But in light of recent technological developments with the creation of the Internet and, with it, social networks —popular these days among younger generations, but not only—how is it possible to reinterpret the figure of the blasé identified by Simmel as typical of the modern attitude towards an excess of stimuli, of the culture of things?
The notion of spirit in Simmel
First of all, it is necessary to clarify what appears to be a central notion in Simmel 's philosophical work, but not only: the notion of spirit ( geist , which is sometimes accompanied or replaced by the related terms seele , "soul," or Ich , "I"). This notion, in truth, was borrowed from Hegelian philosophy and from Hegel's own terminology, specifying that while the idealist philosopher used it accompanied by adjectives characterizing the three moments of the spirit's development in reality (subjective, objective, absolute), the Berlin philosopher and sociologist adopted the qualifying adjectives "subjective" and "objective" to the extent that he did not claim to formulate a totalizing dialectical theory of the development of reality, much less of the human spirit with a final synthesis.
The hypertrophy of the objective spirit
Simmel, in a manner that can be described as astute and farsighted, diagnosed a general trend in modern social life. This trend, which he recognized, concerned the gradual hypertrophic growth of the culture of things—the objective spirit—compared to the culture of individuals—the subjective spirit—which gradually flattened, atrophied, resolving into a casual and disinterested, sometimes individualized, consumption of the products of the spirit placed on the market and which were the expression of the varied and multiple human interactions. This process has been taken to the nth degree with the interactive diffusion of cyberspace and the advent of social networks , which have finally enabled individuals to transform themselves from mere consumers of intangible products to producers of expressiveness, of the arts, derivatives of the most disparate interactions—in short, of culture. But can we be certain that this productive proliferation constitutes a useful outcome for the purposes of personal enrichment? Well, with these clarifications, we can delve into the problem of modern living's attitude towards social networks.
Changing images, a single space
The daily production and constant effervescence of cultural content (culture in the most anthropological sense of the term) on social media platforms constitutes a short-lived creative act. Indeed, since the planning of action requires individual effort, it follows that, combined with the situational conditions in which one finds oneself in the virtual environment, it translates into the consistent fulfillment of an "imperative" that dictates the search for as many contacts as possible from a quantitative perspective—forming a network of shapeless, unpredictable, unknown, and uncertain relationships—but this also leads to a decline in the quality of the relationships being established: this is the blasé attitude described by Simmel in his Berlin. Blasé, however, is not, contrary to popular belief, an attitude of voluntary indifference to the surrounding world; the blasé attitude on social media is configured as a frantic and voluntary search for the emotional sensitivity that is lacking on social media as networks of structurally cold relationships . But while the blasé in offline life finds himself disinterested and indifferent to his surroundings, completely absorbed in his hasty pursuit of his goals, in cyberspace the blasé is almost indifferent to the pursuit of pleasure. It's something approaching an immoderate hedonism, something very different from the "classic" blasé described by Simmel in Le Messe de la Mer ; it's something—or rather, someone—who must extricate himself from that web of things unworthy of arousing his attention, his pleasure, his visual stimulation. Because they are images, videos, photos, etc., they are. And his mission, his task, is to seek and calculate the greatest pleasure possible, thus distracting himself from boredom, introspection, and loneliness.
