The French philosopher, Rene Girard, is known for popularizing the idea of mimesis or mimetic desire.
According to Girard, people do not know what to desire. Instead, they get their idea of what is valuable by looking at others.
For instance, someone may desire a designer bag because they saw a cool model flaunting the said bag in a YouTube ad. Another person might want to become a medical doctor because they watched Ellen Pompeo convincingly portray the character of Dr. Meredith Grey on ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy. In both cases, desire is socially mediated rather than arising from individuals’ rational deliberations and cost-benefit analyses.
Girard intuited that the ability of a model to inspire imitation is tied to the physical and/or psychological distance between the desiring subject and the model.
The model oozing charisma and coolness to sell designer bags in an ad will probably not have the same effect on her family and friends who frequently see her goofy side. It’s possibly the same reason why people lose respect for their role models when they get up close and personal with them. The aura fades away and the imperfections come to the fore.
This is also something that plays out a lot on social media. Nowadays, phones and internet access aren’t things that only the rich and elite enjoy. Even people from economically disadvantaged countries are active on social media. Yet, social media is a cesspool precisely because it has made physical distance irrelevant. If he were alive today, I think Girard would say that access to smart phones and high-speed internet has made us equals. And because we’re now equals, even small differences between us loom larger in our minds – leading to conflicts, rivalries and cycles of toxicity that characterize social media as we know it today.
