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I've been reading E M Forster's "Aspects of the Novel" from the library (and it's so good, I'm going to buy my own copy, Some Day). One thing he says about characters in novels, with which I completely agree, and have long thought, is that the great difference between novels and reality is that real people are unknowable to each other, whereas characters are fully known (or at least knowable) to their author. And the other thing that struck me (in that "yes, you are saying exactly what I think, just better" way), is his observation that every character a novelist creates is more or less an aspect of him or herself, since that is the only person to whose interiority the author has access.
I've often thought that this is why thinking that one can learn about people from books is such an error, and worse, expecting people to behave as they do in books. Social media has, in my opinion, made this delusion far worse, by fostering the illusion that we know what people are like, simply by the sheer amount of things that people now reveal about themselves, deliberately or otherwise. A more controlled and restricted medium like Livejournal or Dreamwidth makes the artifice more obvious; the journal-entry format is old and familiar, and known to be an edited reality. But when a life can basically be livestreamed, the illusion that what we see is all that there is becomes hard to surmount, especially for people who have never known anything else.
And then you get the next logical step, which is to treat other people on social media as if they are fictional characters, and impose expectations upon them accordingly. And to do it to themselves as well, as if their lives are a fiction of which they are protagonists. Obviously as social animals our interactions with other people do involve performance, and consideration of other people's expectations; this is a feature not a bug, the alternative to the life of Man in Society being the life of Man in Nature, "solitary, poor, brutish and short". However, anyone expecting their life to be as tidy, structured, ordered and emotionally and intellectually satisfying as fiction is going to be very unhappy.
I've often thought that this is why thinking that one can learn about people from books is such an error, and worse, expecting people to behave as they do in books. Social media has, in my opinion, made this delusion far worse, by fostering the illusion that we know what people are like, simply by the sheer amount of things that people now reveal about themselves, deliberately or otherwise. A more controlled and restricted medium like Livejournal or Dreamwidth makes the artifice more obvious; the journal-entry format is old and familiar, and known to be an edited reality. But when a life can basically be livestreamed, the illusion that what we see is all that there is becomes hard to surmount, especially for people who have never known anything else.
And then you get the next logical step, which is to treat other people on social media as if they are fictional characters, and impose expectations upon them accordingly. And to do it to themselves as well, as if their lives are a fiction of which they are protagonists. Obviously as social animals our interactions with other people do involve performance, and consideration of other people's expectations; this is a feature not a bug, the alternative to the life of Man in Society being the life of Man in Nature, "solitary, poor, brutish and short". However, anyone expecting their life to be as tidy, structured, ordered and emotionally and intellectually satisfying as fiction is going to be very unhappy.
