Awhile back, one of my favorite bloggers, Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons, deviated from his usual posts that place a big fat critical magnifying glass under the marketing (and other shady) tactics of Big Pharma and wrote a very thoughtful, (also furious) account of Web 2.0 claiming:
this whole Web 2.0, social networking, virtual community business is essentially a pornography of the self—a projected, fictionalized self that is then worshipped by the slightly less-perfect self.
It is a little off the top at times but makes some really good points that I agree with (and generated a really interesting discussion).
It merits reading alongside Danah Boyd’s recent rumination on the very same topic, fame, narcissism and MySpace, where she seeks to address narcissism but she deflects blame the suite of technologies and places it instead on the broader set of cultural practices that sustain this accentuated inward focus:
My view is that we have trained our children to be narcissistic and that this is having all sorts of terrifying repercussions; to deal with this, we’re blaming the manifestations instead of addressing the root causes and the mythmaking that we do to maintain social hierarchies. Let’s unpack that for a moment.
These two read nicely with an older piece in Harpers Attack of the superzeroes: why Washington, Einstein, and Madonna can’t compete with you . The author, Thomas de Zengotita claims “Being famous isn’t what it used to be” because new technologies of mediation and reflexivity (and by new, he means a lot more than web 2.0, it includes reality shows, focus groups, karaoke, the hyper-representation of the real stars, alongside the usual suspects) and concludes that we life as if we were always on stage, concluding somewhat disparagingly “We are all method actors now.”
Of course, this is an important part of the story but not the whole story. There are times, for example, these social technologies help to patch up what is arguably as common in North America as is this narcissistic self, which is the fragmented self, that comes into being, for example because many of us, migrate here and the, for example, for work.
So a social networking site like Facebook, provides somewhat of a stable point of reference, where there are individuals collected, in the same place, even though the people are no longer really in the same place. It is at least a recognition of certain relationships whose “local” face has now passed but instead of completely completely fading into the realm of memory, the past lives on, albeit in transformed ways, within a virtual space. This facet of social networking is not particularly narcissistic, but is building new technologies of memory that I think works somewhat against the conditions that fragment the self. And while the patching up of the person may make an individual “whole” and “individuated” it seems it is a form that is much more mundane than the “pornography” or “narcissism,” explored above, though of course, they do abound–but karaoke, that is always pornography of the self. But… porn can be fun.
I yearn for the day that I can videotape my karaoke performances and re-live them over and over again. I could post them on my Myspace page as well… to make an only slightly perfect Adam that much more perfect.
Seriously though, Myspace has always struck me as tacky and self-indulgent. Funny, that’s what porn is too. But I guess tacky and self-indulgent is ok when you’re horny for either yourself or someone else. Good times.
Comment by Adam K — March 19, 2007 @ 10:43 pm
Yea exactly, I want those videos too.
Biella
Comment by Biella — March 20, 2007 @ 5:31 am
Frank’s “The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us” touches on this to some extent I think: it’s no longer good enough to be a decent looking and moderately talented member of your village, you must be world known. BTW: When I came to graduate school I knew I’d study blogs or Wikis. Given the petty narcism of blogging, versus the often other-orientated altruism of Wikis, it wasn’t a hard decision! As I wrote about blogs in 2002: “During the WWW2002 session on blogs I commented that despite my own excitement for the phenomena and pleasure from ‘ranting’ on the Web, blogs are a danger to Buddhist-like conceptions of ego — or in other cultural ethics, incite the perils of hubris. I often feel conflicted about the rush external attention and validation can bring, and the excitement resulting from media attention, name dropping, google grabbing, and link hoaring.”
Comment by Joseph Reagle — March 20, 2007 @ 5:36 am
zOMG Biella, u have 2 add me on MySpace!!!11 I just totally pimped my page, u kinda have 2 highlight the whole thing 2 read it, lol. It’s so totally me!!!1
Sincerely,
A fan
Comment by (Julio) — March 21, 2007 @ 5:45 am
Hey Joeseph
You should check out Buddhist blogs and see if either their stylistic aesthetics or their content is different to try to soften the propensity for ego growth.
Also, there was a comment one of my graduate professors said along time ago about doing research Internet that has never left my mind. it was a class on the genealogies of capitalism and it was right around the time that web shopping was exploding. and in class, one day, he leaned back in his chair and said “this is the perfect time to study malls and store shopping.” I think there are two important insights that one can get from his statement: One that then it was simply too early to say anything meaningful about web shopping and second that the rise of a new practice is a perfect time to study that which proceeded it.
Now, I do think you can study “novel” phenomenon such as open source, blogs, and wikipedia (I did after all), but I do think that open source and wikipedia are a little easier to do so in so far as there is a genealogy, a longer history to these than with blogging. I feel like blogging kinda stands on its own (i know not entirely) and because of it, you need to really study it over years and years to say anything meaningful.
I am looking forward to Danah’s work on it precisely because she has been blogging for 10 years now and has research it more formally for years. i am skeptical of work that within a year or two of a new phenomenon has something “grand” to say about it.. it is just too soon.
b
Comment by Biella — March 22, 2007 @ 7:05 am