Abstract
This paper takes as its launching point a scene in Elif Shafak’s novel The Island of Missing Trees in which a clandestinely filmed video of a 16 year-old schoolgirl named Ada having a meltdown in her history class goes viral on social media. Analyzing both the psychological and social impacts of this spiraling event, I argue that the digital environment through which Ada’s distress reverberates functions less as a supportive ecosystem than as an invasive species: aggressively degrading the environments it occupies, destroying vulnerable species, and eroding symbiotic relationships that sustain the entities within those environments. I contrast the scenes of Ada’s distress with another form of media: a fig tree. If trees are not customarily thought of as media, they are nonetheless, as the novel emphasizes, means of mass communication, disseminating vital ecological information through their mycorrhizal networks. This paper contends that while social media platforms have the capacity to facilitate supportive and sometimes life-sustaining social contacts, they may also inflict harms on both individuals and social environments by privileging quantity of contacts over the quality of relationships; disabling sustained dialogue; disaggregating unmediated social environments; expunging from social experiences a shared sensorial environment; and reducing, through algorithmic content selection, the diversity of interpersonal encounters. I elaborate the significance of the novel’s juxtaposition of the fig tree’s ecological network—which facilitates mutual benefits, resource-sharing, and harm mitigation—and Ada’s the social media environment which orchestrates competition for benefits and atrophies essential forms of relation and interaction.
Presenters
Rebecca SaundersProfessor of Comparative Literature, English, Illinois State University, Illinois, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Social Media; Ecologies; Social Environments; Psychological Impacts; Harm Mitigation
