One of My Favorite Paintings Reimagined

 

Almost forgot. Credit where credit is due: Wigglegram.

Is the Self (Identity as Performance) a Virus?

This blog entry will probably strike you as rougher than previous entries or more authentically “blog-like,” because I spent the majority of my free time over the break working on my magnificent case study of G.I. Joe PSA parodies. If you end up seeking out another’s blog to respond to this week, I can’t blame you. 🙂

This week’s topic deals with the changing, ever-complicated nature of the self with regard to Papacharissi’s (who I will call “PapaC” from now on) concluding chapter to A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sties (Routledge, 2010), “A Networked Self.” The reason for the disturbing image above will become apparent as you delve deeper into this post.

PapaC’s final chapter brings the book around full circle to the notion of self – the networked self – and how it comes to develop, define, and be defined by the various relationships with which it engages during its SNS-related activities of sociality (“… sociality refers to the sum of social behaviors that permit the individual to traverse from the state of individuality to that of sociality and fellowship” vs. sociability, or ” … the ability to perform the social behaviors that lead to sociality . . . ,” p. 316).

Increasingly, PapaC refers the (networked) self, to one’s identity to be specific, as performance. This performance is subject to continuous change as the self/identity flits from one social milieu to another – from close, personal friends, to family, to fellow workers and employers, sometimes one or more at once. As the audiences or social groups grow based on the SNSs on which the self participates, the level of personal/private information that is shared or withheld, the amount of connectivity between SNS platforms and the media they support in the portrayal of identity (pictures, video, sound files, etc.); the management of self, its performances, and the accessibility of those performances to various audience entails a Byzantine complexity that boggles the mind (at least it makes mine reel).

I suppose that what intrigues me especially with PapaC’s concluding remarks are questions that veer more toward the philosophical, spiritual, and psychological than necessarily with emerging media, per se. With identity defined as a performance that can be replicated, transmitted, remixed, and widely thanks to networking platforms such as SNSs, what does this expanded/new(?) definition say about the self? Is there something permanent, some kernel of je ne sais quoi that persists throughout this process of ever-performing self, an identity on the go? Does the notion of the networked self add credence to the idea of the self as effectively a big ball of nothing, a concept that has no permanence, no sense of everlasting essence as certain circles of Buddhism and secular philosophy would argue? Once you strip away all the posturing and performances, what’s left?

Moreover, while networked technologies have provided the affordances that give rise to the networked self, could we now regard the self on the network/SNSs virally? In other words, could one more definition of the (networked) self be that of a virus? The networked self is one whose activities are ego driven (“ego centered,” p. 315), so at least we know where its motive comes from. Is this ego as hellbent (perhaps too pejorative of a word to use here) on propagating itself as far and wide on SNSs – professional, personal, political, etc. – as a “senseless” virus on computer networks? Considering that the affordances of social networks allow (but don’t guarantee) replication, communication, and (rapid) spread of this self in incredibly short periods of time, I am beginning to think that the virus is an apt metaphor for the networked self.

On a final note, why did I include the robot picture? The Enso circle painting refers to a popular trope in Buddhist art and literature that, depending on the audience, refers to perfection, the self, and enlightenment amongst other things. But the robot picture poses other intriguing and equally disconcerting questions about the self. On p. 316, PapaC briefly references the idea of non-human actors on social networks, in this case, Sarah the Facebot. Another question that occurred to me was how do we know when the “actor” at the other end of the computer is real, i.e., a human actor? If people are developing their sense of self (that bleeds into the networked realm online and off-) more and more from SNSs, what happens to that person who develops a deep and fulfilling relationship with an artificial self/intelligence when s/he finds out that that “person” turns out not to be real – well, human – after all? Is a relationship any less meaningful when the self at the other end is someone’s digitally programmed construct? Ah, more prickly questions to ponder.