Just the other day I had the privilege of listening to a brilliant talk by Kris Cohen (Reed College) who examined questions of togetherness, social alienation, and what it means to “know” someone, among other things. Expanding on his book that I have, admittedly, yet to read, Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations, Cohen looked at whether we can “know” someone from their social media profile(s), what anonymous search queries can tell us, if anything, about a population, and how we can be with those who we never meet. During the question and answer session, I sought to clarify a point he made and fired from the hip with a question/objection. As I’ve had slightly more time to think on the issue, I feel as if I ought to expand upon it and see how it might apply to other instances.
Towards the beginning of his talk, Cohen brought up the Twitter page of @tinynietzsche (embedded below) as an example of a “person” he somewhat knew. More precisely, Cohen brought up @tinynietzsche’s Twitter page along with a few other social media accounts to make the point that these accounts, these “people,” merely referenced externally existent individuals. Before raising any objection, I wanted to make sure I correctly understood the argument so as not to strawperson Cohen and, so far as I can recall, his re-affirmed thesis ran something along the lines of “When I view this Twitter account, I’m in some relation with this person, but I can only say that I know a ‘part’ of them. They have an external life that I do not and cannot know as I only have access to limited information about them.”