Points of View

First person, second person, or third person. It’s one of those questions we have when beginning to write creative prose. Point of view (POV) is a fascinating subject. It shapes the way we can tell a story – for instance third person POV can give us direct access to the thoughts and feelings of our characters, whereas in first person POV we only get to see our protagonist telling us what they think or feel. As we know from life, the gaps between what people think and say and/or do can be large.

What’s also fascinating, while less considered, is how point of view informs our thinking in real life. We always tend to remonstrate with ourselvesin 2nd person POV – “you stuffed that one up, didn’t you?” And what does that mean? Is it the internalised voice of a parent continuing to chide us in spite of their absence, or is it a way of avoiding full responsibility for our actions by allowing part of our psyche to be the person dishing out the criticism.

The first person ‘I’, as the poet Walt Whitman wrote, “contains multitudes.” So, if you’re a sole trader running your own business, and you’re writing your own marketing communications, why not experiment with upgrading yourself to the plural first person. It might seem awkward or pretentious at first, but you’ll soon get used to it. The English Royal Family worked it out years ago. Ideas sound more authoritative when we say “we”.

Recently, there’s been an expansion of first person POV in the information we consume. This is down to the explosion of social media.  This expansion of the first person has made our world increasingly subjective – reproducing in real life the issue we so often find in first person fiction of unreliable narrators. Reading social media profiles often takes a good bullshit metre. Social media has also contributed to that weird phenomenon of celebrities sometimes referring to themselves in 3rd person POV, a way of reinforcing an ego trip by pretending to be outside of it.

With the advent of algorithms and AI, it’s possible to wonder whether this explosion of first person will paradoxically lead to the exhaustion of the kind of individualism that is at the core of our conception of democracy and philosophical liberalism. Are we experiencing the last gasp of performative individualism before it is overwhelmed by technological forces that will erode the freedoms we earn as individual workers. Economies will need us for our consumption choices at least. Which is a relief as techno-feudalism doesn’t sound as much fun.