The Myth of Loss of Individuality

Josh Harris was on Digital Planet. It caught my attention when he said, "The new big problem is loss of self, or loss of individuality." I wished the presenter had quizzed him further on this remark. Anyhow, what I can gather from his remark is that the penetration of digitalization in our every day lives is challenging our individuality as we are exposed publicly by various digital technologies.

There are two problems for me in his argument. One, the connections he makes between the words, ‘loss’ and ‘individuality’. He is implying that ‘individuality’ is something that is expendable and denying the fact that we, the individuals are inherently unique and individualistic. Two, for him to say that there is a problem of ‘loss of self, or loss of individuality’, he is also implying that we had individuality before the digitalization. Obviously, we can only lose something that we had in the first place, in this case, before the digitalization. However, individuality has been a subject of social enquiry even before the digitalization and Weber, as a critique of modern society, argued that modern rationality has acted as a constraint to individuality.