more essay planning
CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS:
GEN: i've typed things up under the headings of finance, celebrity, movies, tv, cyberspace - - cyberspace is the most expansive one, encompasses blog sites, myspace, messageboards, music piracy/filesharing, and somewhere in that, i'll discuss language as well, how it gets subverted and modified through internet usage.obviously some of these cross over - celebrity crosses over with tv and cyberspace, very definitely.
CHRIS: id group together myspace/forums/blogs as selfpublishing or something.
GEN: myspace, for me, is ordinary people's ability not so much to self-publish, but to self-publicise - to flatten themselves into an abbreviated, concise form; to reduce themselves to summaries, stereotypes, two dimensional beings, just like 'celebrities' [as opposed to the people behind the sleb veneer - but those people are inevitably affected by their veneer, it is integrated into their personalities, and in the worst cases [i.e. extreeeme divas], replaces them, they become simulacra] - an attempt, subconscious or otherwise, to simplify themselves and perhaps thus understand themselves/be understood.
[...Simplifying themselves in the face of a culture of information overload? We have access to more information about ourselves and each other than we've ever had; is this two-dimensionalising an attempt to make sense of it all?]
...And to satisfy their egos - to design themselves, in cyberspace, as their ideal selves rather than the splintered, faulty selves they're forced to accept in 'reality' - much like gameplayers who use avatars [hindu origin - ultimate supreme being, related to vishnu, the divinity who comes down to earth in human form, equatable with christ] to represent them, and choose the traits of these avatars rather than organically developing them/having them from birth. so both are a way of bypassing reality; rules no longer apply.
but then maybe people's human interaction with each other WITHIN the social networking space - responding to each other's profiles, affects them; like people are upset when they get unkind comments on their pictures, even though these pictures are just 2D representations that they've chosen to show a particular side of themselves [literally and metaphorically] - that comment, to some people, is not about the picture, it's about THEM, directly affects self-esteem. they cheat reality by presenting themselves in a selective way, but are cheated in turn by real behaviour in that virtual space, and accept that behaviour as being directed at their real selves, not their virtual selves.
so yr online identity BECOMES part of yr real identity, no longer a willed, subversive act, but an accepted, involuntary part of you.
actually i do think years of social internet usage definitely affects one's personality/social behaviour; one interacts socially online where, or in a way that, they might not in a physical space. this experience affects their mental/social development just as social experiences in a physical environment do. though given my limited time, i can probably only hypothesise this, rather than offer solid proof of it.
CHRIS: oooooooooooh thats good shit.as a person im massively influenced by the internet. like my sense of humour is very heavily influenced by spending too much time talking to americans on make out club when i was a wee teen
also, i still think you should choose a word other than abbreviate, compress maybe? and relate linguistic abbreviation to this. abbreviation sounds completely wrong.
also: re people being offended by bad image comments, theres the fact that, say, I CHOSE to put that pictre up, so an insult to the picture is an insult to my judgement.
GEN: i'm gonna research the word abbreviate thoroughly... right now it feels instinctually exactly the word i'm looking for, cos i like the idea of people as texts [barthes/derrida, everything is a text and can be analysed as such], as words, ideograms, strings of information and subsequent meaning, that can be analysed and altered just like language, person as expression, a person's presentation of themselves altering their meaning. but i do need to research this, cos it could well end up looking really stupid and discrediting my point. As to abbreviation vs compression - the point is that information isn't just squashed, it's actually lost, just as, when abbreviating a word, you jettison parts of it and alter its shape completely.
GEN: i've typed things up under the headings of finance, celebrity, movies, tv, cyberspace - - cyberspace is the most expansive one, encompasses blog sites, myspace, messageboards, music piracy/filesharing, and somewhere in that, i'll discuss language as well, how it gets subverted and modified through internet usage.obviously some of these cross over - celebrity crosses over with tv and cyberspace, very definitely.
CHRIS: id group together myspace/forums/blogs as selfpublishing or something.
GEN: myspace, for me, is ordinary people's ability not so much to self-publish, but to self-publicise - to flatten themselves into an abbreviated, concise form; to reduce themselves to summaries, stereotypes, two dimensional beings, just like 'celebrities' [as opposed to the people behind the sleb veneer - but those people are inevitably affected by their veneer, it is integrated into their personalities, and in the worst cases [i.e. extreeeme divas], replaces them, they become simulacra] - an attempt, subconscious or otherwise, to simplify themselves and perhaps thus understand themselves/be understood.
[...Simplifying themselves in the face of a culture of information overload? We have access to more information about ourselves and each other than we've ever had; is this two-dimensionalising an attempt to make sense of it all?]
...And to satisfy their egos - to design themselves, in cyberspace, as their ideal selves rather than the splintered, faulty selves they're forced to accept in 'reality' - much like gameplayers who use avatars [hindu origin - ultimate supreme being, related to vishnu, the divinity who comes down to earth in human form, equatable with christ] to represent them, and choose the traits of these avatars rather than organically developing them/having them from birth. so both are a way of bypassing reality; rules no longer apply.
but then maybe people's human interaction with each other WITHIN the social networking space - responding to each other's profiles, affects them; like people are upset when they get unkind comments on their pictures, even though these pictures are just 2D representations that they've chosen to show a particular side of themselves [literally and metaphorically] - that comment, to some people, is not about the picture, it's about THEM, directly affects self-esteem. they cheat reality by presenting themselves in a selective way, but are cheated in turn by real behaviour in that virtual space, and accept that behaviour as being directed at their real selves, not their virtual selves.
so yr online identity BECOMES part of yr real identity, no longer a willed, subversive act, but an accepted, involuntary part of you.
actually i do think years of social internet usage definitely affects one's personality/social behaviour; one interacts socially online where, or in a way that, they might not in a physical space. this experience affects their mental/social development just as social experiences in a physical environment do. though given my limited time, i can probably only hypothesise this, rather than offer solid proof of it.
CHRIS: oooooooooooh thats good shit.as a person im massively influenced by the internet. like my sense of humour is very heavily influenced by spending too much time talking to americans on make out club when i was a wee teen
also, i still think you should choose a word other than abbreviate, compress maybe? and relate linguistic abbreviation to this. abbreviation sounds completely wrong.
also: re people being offended by bad image comments, theres the fact that, say, I CHOSE to put that pictre up, so an insult to the picture is an insult to my judgement.
GEN: i'm gonna research the word abbreviate thoroughly... right now it feels instinctually exactly the word i'm looking for, cos i like the idea of people as texts [barthes/derrida, everything is a text and can be analysed as such], as words, ideograms, strings of information and subsequent meaning, that can be analysed and altered just like language, person as expression, a person's presentation of themselves altering their meaning. but i do need to research this, cos it could well end up looking really stupid and discrediting my point. As to abbreviation vs compression - the point is that information isn't just squashed, it's actually lost, just as, when abbreviating a word, you jettison parts of it and alter its shape completely.
posted by Gen Williams at 4:57 PM
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