Self Observation in Own Illusion: Facebook as the Medium of Narcissism

Baudelaire’s ninenteenth century depiction of the double (janus) face of modernity as being eternal and immovable on the one hand and ephemeral and circumstantial on the other (2004: 214), melting two poles into one concept, can be interpreted as the estrangement of modernity from its own sources by continually facing the new. Such reading of modernity, opens to rediscussion “modern thinking” as founded on Descartes’ “doubt” and the “duality” engrained in the logic of Aristoteles. The leading issue in this discussion is doubtless to be the reflexivity of modernity, an attribute comprising the evolution of one aspect over the other and the continual oscillation of opposites. Today, the processes of ‘globilisation’ and ‘individualisation’, each having gained a meaning after co-evolving, cannot be distanced from Baudelaire’s depiction of modernity if conceived as two polarities. Modernity’s janus (double) face can only be understood as the oscillations of these two processess; this “face” being a window that opens not only outwards but also inwards to itself, displaying references to the ideals of the visible world, and, even being both a process and an end. Hence, each face gives clues to a deep “secret” and the processes creating that “secret”, comprehending which allows the recognition of the face. Throughout history, man’s struggle to comprehend herself and the processess she lives through have occurred concurrently. “Know thyself !” At this point the subject opens to a key fact that is also the source of what is being reflected: “Mirror’’. The individual is acquain-ted, by looking at the mirror, with that relating to Self, Other-self and the Other, editing herself and her environment as a reflexive process in modern living. Yet, similarly to the effect of approaching the mirror since the Renaissance, with the decreasing of the space between the processes of globilisation and individualisation, the individual, having become a master of his