Burnt Out Spectacles: Analysing Social Media and Ontological Burnout

Abstract This paper explores the link between social media, the spectacle, and ontological burnout. Specifically, it is argued that social media exacerbates the burnout of the achievement-subject which Byung-Chul Han analyses in The Burnout Society , and that this burnout is an ontological burnout, an exhaustion with being. Specifically, it is an exacerbated, particularly self-destructive version of the ontological fatigue Emmanuel Levinas analyses in Existence and Existents . Social media creates another sphere in which achievement-subjects feel compelled to perform and in which they engage in auto-exploitative labour. The compulsion to perform on social media arises from social media’s forming part of Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle, which consistently incorporates spectators into the social media spectacle by allowing them to interact with and contribute to the spectacle. This occurs when social media pushes achievement-subjects to become micro-spectacles, wherein curating a representation of achievement becomes intrinsic to their being, and through the proliferation of media spectacles which social media users feel compelled to react to. This paper thus draws out the relationship between social media and ontological fatigue. It also posits a compatibility between Han and Debord’s accounts of contemporary society and, in arguing that the burnout Han describes is an extension of Levinas’ phenomenological analysis of fatigue, develops a critical-phenomenological account of ontological burnout.