Social Comparison in the Glasshouse: Rousseau and the Digital Self

Contemporary social media platforms have transformed the pursuit of recognition into a continuously visible and publicly mediated process. Individuals increasingly encounter themselves through profiles, metrics, and the anticipated judgments of others, making questions of identity inseparable from questions of appearance. I argue that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of amour-propre provides a powerful framework for understanding this transformation. In operating through a comparative social-capital economy, social media increasingly orients self-narration toward a distorted form of self-love dependent on external validation. Drawing on Rousseau’s moral psychology and scholarship on social identity, I outline how social media institutionalizes conditions that encourage individuals to experience themselves through optimized representations of themselves, inflaming amour-propre. The result is a form of social narcissism characterized by a digital sense of alienation. By reconstructing Rousseau’s account of amour-propre through his broader concern with the discrepancy between being and appearing, this article demonstrates the continuing relevance of his moral psychology for understanding identity in the age of the digital profile. I conclude by considering whether Rousseau’s educational project in Emile and contemporary practices of digital minimalism offer resources for cultivating forms of selfhood less dependent upon perpetual visibility and social evaluation.