I share therefore I am

Foreget the cogito,  cogito, ergo sum, literally, I think, therefore I am, principle stated by René Descartes. First Known Use: 1838

Now we have as Sherry Turkle has it you have the Internet 'I share therefore I am.'  ” you may not have confidence that you have a thought unless you are sharing it.’ On the internet in their pods electronic and digital caves those inside a given group have their settled audience of friends and followers, to adopt the revealing jargon of Facebook and Twitter: a self-sufficient collectivity and happy to stay that way. 

As Sherry Turkle puts it in  about by social media: ‘If you grew up in the world of “I share, therefore I am, it is a full-time regime for the young. ‘Most are already sleeping with their phones,’ Turkle says of the children and teenagers she interviewed. ‘So, if they wake up in the middle of the night, they check their messages.’ But these are messages sent and received within the group; outside, all is uncertain, obscure, and apt to bring on sensations of fragility. Adversarial stimuli are to be ignored where possible and prohibited where necessary.

Within such a group, spontaneous speech – unconditioned by the context of sharing and the previous expectations of the group – is nothing like a physical need. The very idea of membership, of affinity and loyalty, reduces the likelihood of an infraction that could carry an unpleasant surprise. Where Facebook has a thumbs-up symbol – meaning ‘I like this and kind of agree!’ – but no thumbs-down, who will risk an exorbitant word? The cost would be a forced exit from the group; and the group is the lungs that make speech possible. A provocative and half-disagreeable remark amounts to a declaration of the intention to defect. To someone who has grown up in such a setting, the older protections of individual speech are an irrelevance.