The other night I scored a ticket to the MTC's production of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. The play depicts 17th century Salem's descent into chaos as women are suspected of being witches and of practicing the dark arts on God-fearing puritans. In one memorable scene three women appear to be terrified out of their wits by a demon climbing along a roof beam — it seems they're possessed, the demon taking control of them.
The vision of people being possessed by demons elicited laughter from the audience, as did the 'irrational' fear that the spectacle drew from the other characters in the play, the judges, ministers and men of authority who scampered hither and thither.
The Crucible dramatises a time when people thought of the world as full of competing forces, spirits of good and evil, clashing around them. And they understood themselves in terms of what Charles Taylor calls the 'porous self' — a self that can be invaded and controlled by these external forces raging through the universe.
I suspect the laughter of the audience speaks of a modern understanding of the individual as self-contained, a self that isn't preyed on by forces at large in the world but that can be developed and shaped at will by the individual.
The American sociologist Robert Bellah calls this the 'therapeutic self': if an individual has problems, these can be resolved by 'therapy' of various kinds. The self can be built, enhanced and shaped as we like. So the splendours of our Facebook pages or LinkedIn profiles become means of building the self — changing its contours and shading, shaping other people's perceptions of us so that, in turn, we can think differently of ourselves.
This understanding easily directs us towards fantasy — people have dreams of turning themselves into the embodiment of certain 'forms'. That's why you have the well-worn tropes of 'social change activist', 'incredible young leader' and 'visionary' — those self-descriptive taglines that run across countless Generation Y Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and personal websites.
We can think of this as a process of self-administered therapy — all of these new media allow us to project ourselves onto a social screen to be received and critiqued. They can be used as means of convincing ourselves that we match up to the fantastical self-images we aspire to and they become a way of communicating our confidence that we can determine the shape of