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The phone is lifted in a pause that used to belong to nothing. A queue, a corridor, a lull before sleep, a gap after a sentence. The screen lights up and the gap collapses. A message is opened and the system marks it. A reply is delayed and the delay becomes visible. A thread is left and a count remains, as if unfinished business were a physical object left on a table. The pressure does not arrive as panic but as a mild, persistent closeness that does not grant relief. It is not simply “being online.” It is being kept within reach.

That feeling has a structure. It can be described without mystique, without treating platforms as demons or users as fools, and without pretending that the problem is mere content. The structure is an evolution of the “Other,” a term from psychoanalysis that names the place from which meaning and permission seem to come. In early life, that place is first occupied by the caregiver who interprets cries and schedules satisfaction. Later, the same position is distributed across language, law, institutions, and shared expectations. Social media rebuilds that position as an engineered environment. It becomes a synthetic, always-on “Other” that answers, withholds, praises, ignores, and nudges by algorithmic cadence. The article’s chain names this migration: Other, then (m)Other as mother-as-Other, then (s)Mother as smothering closeness, then SM-Other as Social Media’s synthetic Other.

The intent is not to moralize “screens.” The intent is to identify how certain design choices abolish absence and closure, then monetize the resulting dependence.

The Other, explained without occult language

Everyday life presupposes an invisible place from which rules speak. A traffic light is not persuasive; it is binding. A workplace norm is not a suggestion; it carries consequences. Even a casual conversation relies on shared codes that decide when a joke lands, what counts as an insult, and what cannot be said without penalty. Psychoanalysis gives a name to this externalized authority of meaning: the big Other. In Lacanian theory, the big Other is not a person but the Symbolic order, the trans-individual network of language and social law that structures intersubjective interaction. It is the “objective spirit” of a community’s socio-linguistic and normative world. Context: (🔗). (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

This matters because it clarifies what is really being “sought” online. It is not only entertainment. It is often a search for authorization: a sense that an utterance has been received, that a position has been recognized, that a gesture has been counted, that the world has replied. Platforms become potent when they offer a cheap, rapid simulation of that authorization.

A second point is crucial and often missed. The big Other is not complete. It is not a perfect judge and not an all-knowing guarantee. In the lived world, rules conflict, authorities contradict themselves, and meaning is negotiated. This incompleteness is not a defect; it is the condition of freedom and interpretation. When an environment pretends to be a complete, seamless guarantor—always ready, always responding, always counting—it produces a particular kind of dependency, because it makes “lack” harder to bear and harder to name.

(m)Other: the first interpreter, the first scheduler

Before language becomes a shared public system, “meaning” begins as something retroactively granted. A cry is not yet a message; it becomes one because someone treats it as one. Someone arrives, delays, misreads, adjusts, tries again. That early figure is not important here as a sentimental image but as a function: the first Other who translates bodily disturbance into interpretable need, and the first scheduler who establishes whether satisfaction comes immediately, later, or not at all.

Winnicott’s work makes this functional view unusually precise. In his account of the parent–infant relationship, the “holding environment” is not mere affection. It is an environmental reliability that reduces impingements so that a “continuity of being” can form, while repeated intrusive interruption forces the personality to organize around reaction rather than spontaneous continuity. Context: (🔗). (TCF Website Media Library)

This is the first hinge in the chain. (m)Other is the caretaker occupying the place of the Other. It is the original site where demand is addressed and where delay becomes tolerable because delay occurs within a holding world that remains stable.

(s)Mother: when closeness becomes intrusion

Smothering is not “too much love” in a poetic sense. It is a recognizable pattern: proximity that becomes intrusive control, closeness that blocks separation, responsiveness that eliminates the subject’s own timing. Developmental psychology and clinical traditions describe related patterns with terms like overprotection and overparenting, where high involvement blends into control and undermines autonomy. A systematic review and meta-analysis identifies a unique role of maternal overprotection in predicting child anxiety symptoms, which is a clean empirical marker of what intrusive closeness can do when it becomes the dominant environmental rhythm. Context: (🔗). (AaltoDoc)

A later synthesis of “overparenting” across studies reports associations with internalizing outcomes such as depression and anxiety, while also noting that effects can be complex and not purely one-directional, a useful reminder that involvement is not automatically harm and that the problem is the form of involvement, not its existence. Context: (🔗). (The JSMS)

In the chain, (s)Mother names the point where the (m)Other function loses the capacity to permit absence and becomes continuous impingement. The experience is not dramatic; it is sticky. The world feels always “on,” always nearby, and therefore never fully finished.

Perpetual contact: the social form that makes smothering plausible at scale

Smothering becomes a mass condition only when a culture normalizes constant reachability. Mobile communication research has long named this shift as “perpetual contact,” describing how continuous access changes expectations and relationships, making availability feel like a baseline rather than an exception. Context: (🔗).

Perpetual contact does not require social media, but social media perfects it by turning reachability into a public, measurable signal and by surrounding communication with counts, timestamps, and algorithmic prompts. The result is not simply more communication but a different kind of communication: one where absence must constantly be justified.

Ambient awareness: the low-dose social field that never turns off

The older fantasy about social media imagined discrete interactions. A post, a reply, an event. In practice, platforms create an ambient social surround. “Ambient awareness” names the awareness users develop of others through constant exposure to small updates that, individually, can seem like random noise but cumulatively form a coherent representation of social others. Context: (🔗). (ScienceDirect)

Recent experimental work suggests that ambient awareness can operate with a degree of automaticity, meaning the social field is absorbed without deliberate intention, which matters because it makes “choice” an incomplete description of how the environment enters. Context: (🔗). (Taylor & Francis Online)

Ambient awareness is the perceptual substrate of SM-Other. A social world is continuously present even when no direct interaction is happening, and this continuous presence is exactly the condition in which smothering becomes ordinary.

Non-closure as design: the feed that refuses to end

An environment can smother without any shocking content simply by removing stopping cues. Infinite scroll is a paradigmatic example because it eliminates the moment where the body would otherwise feel a natural end. The gesture continues and the material keeps arriving. The most widely circulated origin story ties infinite scroll to design work associated with Aza Raskin, who later publicly regretted the downstream consequences of “doomscrolling.” Context: (🔗) and (🔗). (TED)

This is where the chain becomes concrete. A smothering caretaker is one who does not allow the rhythm of separation and return. Infinite scroll is an interface that does not allow an ending. The body learns the same lesson either way: the environment does not release.

Variable rewards: why checking persists even when satisfaction does not arrive

The next layer is not mystical “dopamine” talk but reinforcement dynamics. Platforms distribute social rewards—notifications, likes, replies, content hits—under uncertainty. A psychiatric framing of problematic smartphone behavior notes that notifications can operate on variable reward schedules, which are known to maintain habitual checking because the next reward is unpredictable. Context: (🔗). (ACM Digital Library)

The combination of variable rewards with non-closure is structurally decisive. When an environment both refuses to end and promises intermittent reward, demand is kept alive without resolution. The “Other” is always about to answer.

The quantified blessing: likes as countable authorization

A like is not merely a button. It is a quantization of recognition. It makes approval visible, comparable, and optimizable, turning the social field into a scoreboard without requiring explicit competition. A highly cited experimental fMRI study using a simulated Instagram environment shows that peer endorsement cues (“likes”) shape adolescents’ responses and engage reward-related processing, grounding the claim that these signals matter beyond mere vanity. Context: (🔗). (ScienceDirect)

This is one reason SM-Other feels authoritative. It does not merely “show” content; it counts reactions and returns those counts as social reality.

Read receipts: obligation manufactured by visibility

Older communication allowed plausible ignorance. A letter could be delayed without proof that it was read. Social messaging systems often remove that ambiguity. Read receipts make availability and response latency visible, turning delay into an interpretable act and creating pressure to respond. A dedicated study on read receipts reports that they exert pressure to respond and are associated with increased checking, avoidance behaviors, and anxiety when responses do not arrive. Context: (🔗). (SciSpace)

Separate empirical work likewise finds that negative emotions arise sooner when waiting for a reply under “read” status compared with “unread,” showing that a small UI signal can alter affective timing. Context: (🔗). (Personales)

Read receipts are a clean example of SM-Other’s method. The system does not simply enable contact; it enforces an interpretive regime where response becomes a duty.

Telepressure: the measurable form of the SM-Other’s demand

The pressure to respond is not merely anecdotal. Research operationalizes it as telepressure, defined as preoccupation with and urge to respond quickly to electronic messages. Work distinguishes workplace telepressure from private-life telepressure, showing that the demand-to-respond extends beyond employment into personal communication. Context: (🔗). (PMC)

Telepressure is the SM-Other rendered as a psychological construct. It measures how an environment turns communication into compulsion by making responsiveness salient and consequential.

Streaks: continuity as a leash

If read receipts manufacture obligation in the short term, streak mechanics manufacture it across days. Snapchat streaks require regular interaction within a fixed window, converting absence into loss. A study of early adolescents describes streaks as a gamified function motivating daily interactions and examines associations with FoMO, problematic smartphone use, and self-control. Context: (🔗). (ScienceDirect)

Streaks are smothering by schedule. They encode the refusal of absence as a rule, then distribute anxiety as the enforcement mechanism.

FoMO: the affective glue that keeps the loop intact

Fear of missing out is often treated as a personality quirk. In practice, it is an environmental affect, recruited by a world that never finishes. The foundational FoMO paper defines it as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, and links it to patterns of engagement with social media. Context: (🔗). (ACM Digital Library)

FoMO is not the cause of SM-Other; it is one of its outputs. When the social field is continuous and the feed has no end, absence becomes a threat rather than a rest.

Recommenders: the SM-Other as an optimizing system

At this point, SM-Other stops being a metaphor and becomes an engineering fact. Recommender systems are built to optimize engagement metrics, increasingly over long horizons rather than single clicks. Research explicitly proposes reinforcement learning frameworks to optimize long-term user engagement in feed recommendation, modeling sequential user interaction as a cumulative reward optimization problem. Context: (🔗) and (🔗). (ACM Digital Library)

A more recent survey of reinforcement learning-based recommenders describes the shift toward optimizing long-term engagement rather than immediate rewards, making the objective explicit. Context: (🔗). (CEUR-WS)

When an environment is designed to maximize cumulative engagement, it is rational, from the system’s standpoint, to reduce endings and increase impingements. The smother is not an accident; it is a consequence of the objective function.

This optimization has informational side effects. Work modeling engagement–diversity tradeoffs in social media asks whether echo chambers are inevitable under engagement maximization and quantifies the tension between engagement goals and diversity of exposure. Context: (🔗). (ACM Digital Library)

In SM-Other, the “Other” does not merely judge; it allocates visibility. It decides what appears, what disappears, and what will be rewarded by further exposure.

Synthetic Big Other: naming the slot the platform occupies

A Lacanian description of social media as a “Synthetic Big Other” has been advanced explicitly in Žižekian Analysis, framing platforms as providing a space where lack can be disavowed and the subject can endlessly produce themselves in the gaze of a digital Other. Context: (🔗). (Žižekian Analysis)

This is useful because it names what the mechanics already show. SM-Other behaves like an Other that refuses to admit absence. It answers continuously, counts continuously, displays continuously, and therefore keeps the subject continuously addressable.

Big Other as regime: surveillance capitalism and instrumentarian power

The chain also has a political-economic endpoint. Social media is not only a social mirror; it is an extraction architecture. Shoshana Zuboff’s essay “Big Other” names a form of power associated with surveillance capitalism, describing a regime built around data extraction, prediction, and control, and explicitly uses “Big Other” to describe this sovereign power. Context: (🔗). (UW Faculty)

This “Big Other” is not identical to Lacan’s big Other, but the overlap is not superficial. The platform’s authority over visibility and response is fused with monetization via behavioral prediction. The smother is profitable precisely because it keeps conduct within measurable channels.

Repressive desublimation: permissiveness that tightens control

A final hinge is needed to prevent the analysis from collapsing into nostalgia for stricter norms. The problem is not that platforms are “too permissive.” The problem is that permissiveness can be administered as control. Herbert Marcuse names “repressive desublimation” as a process in which liberty is extended in certain domains while domination intensifies through technological and social controls. Context: (🔗). (Marcuse)

Social media’s atmosphere of constant expression can operate in exactly this way. Expression becomes fuel. Transgression becomes content. Dissent becomes engagement. The system can appear open while it tightens the schedule and reduces exits.

What the smother does to time, and why time is the real metric

The common mistake is to argue about screen time as if duration were the essence. The more accurate target is temporal structure. Smothering is an assault on the ability to finish. It is the removal of ends, the multiplication of impingements, and the conversion of latency into obligation. The lived outcome is not always dramatic misery; it is a reduced capacity to let experience settle without immediately seeking the Other’s response.

Meta-analytic work consistently finds that problematic social media use correlates negatively with well-being indicators and positively with distress indicators, with small-to-moderate associations depending on outcome, suggesting that the syndrome is not imaginary even when causality is complex. Context: (🔗) and (🔗). (PubMed)

High-authority syntheses increasingly treat design, transparency, and accountability as core to the issue rather than only individual self-control, as reflected in the National Academies report on social media and adolescent health. Context: (🔗). (National Academies)

These findings do not demand a panic. They demand precision. The question is not whether social media is “good” or “bad.” The question is whether it is an environment that allows separation, digestion, and return, or whether it keeps the subject in a continuous state of addressability.

Procedural negativity: how an environment can be forced to admit endings

If SM-Other is produced by non-closure, intermittent rewards, visible obligation signals, and engagement optimization, then any serious corrective must also be procedural. It must reintroduce endings, reduce impingements, and restore the legitimacy of absence. The IPA/FLŽM manifesto on Yersiz Şeyler articulates this as a doctrine of cuts, pacing, provenance, and refusal encoded in tools rather than performed as mood. Context: (🔗) and (🔗). (YERSİZ ŞEYLER)

In this frame, freedom is not measured by intensity of engagement but by time returned to life through enforceable endings. The moral tone is irrelevant. What matters is whether the interface gives a clean bottom, whether messaging restores ambiguity rather than enforcing surveillance of response, whether notifications default to sleep rather than intrusion, whether the system makes its objectives legible, and whether the environment grants the right to be absent without penalty.

The chain then closes. Other is the place from which meaning and permission seem to come. (m)Other is the earliest occupant of that place, translating disturbance into message and giving time its first schedules. (s)Mother names what happens when that function abolishes absence and becomes intrusive, fused proximity. SM-Other is the industrial reconstruction of that function as a platform regime: a synthetic guarantor that counts, watches, interrupts, rewards under uncertainty, and optimizes long-term engagement, all while monetizing the prevented exit. The smother is not a mood. It is a designable temporal structure. (ACM Digital Library)