Online Lives

Smith and Watson’s Tool Kit suggest that online lives are forms of self-narrative in which self presentation is often manipulated, altered, or guided by subjectivity. Online lives and the “myriad online forms of self-narration include blogs, online journals, social networking sites, and multi-player environments” (RA 246). Smith and Watson beg the question is the “assumed or impersonated online ‘I’ important for the construction of an autobiographical ‘I,’ or is the online ‘I’ a typical or exemplary ‘every-person’?” (RA 246). Smith and Watson point out that media and the incalculable forms of online interaction “may also flatten and normatize subjects in the conventional and streamlined formats that typify online presentation of personal detail” (RA 247). They summarize these ideas by asking the fundamental question pertaining to autobiographical narratives online; “how do digitalization and virtuality complicate the notion of authenticity and truth? (RA 247). They suggest that the constricted formats of sites that have avatar, or created alternative lives, have the potential to coax monotonous identities through the mandates of globalized cultural machinery like facebook’s social network.

In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric Claudia Rankine suggests that “Life is a form of hope…Maybe hope is the same as breath—part of what it means to be human and alive” (Rankine 119). She explains that “One waits to recognize the other, to see the other as one sees the self…the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other” (Rankine 120). Despite her often cynical language, Rankine is hinting that universal themes such as human compassion and the giving of one’s self over to another are the best paths to enlightenment or understanding human nature. She questions whether or not this knowledge is obtained through our relationships with others. Yet my question, along with Rankine, is what exactly do we owe the other, moreover at what cost do we hand our ‘self’ over to another? While I think Rankine ultimately elevated the importance of shared human relations—the unanswered questions remain—why should we open ourselves up to others like and a book, and how much do we let them read. Rankine suggested that the most powerful truths that constitute human experience are often related or negated through another’s dance with death. However, in keeping with Rankine’s cultural pessimism, there is another form of death I see in this handing over of the ‘self’; the death of aura - originality, authenticity, creative art – the death of these forms is facilitated in the handshake with facebook.

In the rising generation there exists a fascination, an obsession, a potent impulse to reveal ourselves to others via social networks like facebook. I find a substantial disconnect in the ‘self’ we present to the people in our everyday reality, where there is a real tangible and fleeting connection, and the recorded and surveyed ‘self’ we create through facebook. Smith and Watson have a section in Reading Autobiography that discusses The Medium in which they suggest “it is possible to enact self-representation in many [forms of] media” (RA 96). It is clear that facebook is a medium for self-narrative and self-representation. In the subsequent chapter, Smith and Watson relate a different version of audience in which the readers and listeners of self-narratives are what Ken Plummer calls ‘consumers’. Smith and Watson distinguish between the implications of a narrative performed orally in front of a live audience and that of readers or online ‘consumers’ who’s “responses to life writing are influenced by other kinds of stories in general circulation” (RA 98). This is true for all audiences, and yet the significance of this is particularly profound when one explores the platonic essence of facebook’s form, its function, its effect on human interactions, and the inherent subjective purpose of presenting one’s ‘self’ on facebook.

Personal Take:

A whole generation are creating, imagining, altering, fabricating, and effacing their authentic selves. Smith and Watson claim “media technologies do not simplify or undermine the interiority of the [autobiographical] subject but, on the contrary, expand the field of self-representation beyond the literary to cultural and media practices” (RA 168). Facebook certainly does expand the field of self-representation beyond traditional literary modes to cultural and media practices. But I ask at what cost, what is lost, and to what extent do we sell ourselves via our online lives. I could not agree more with Rankine’s concept of living for another through sharing personal experiences. However, the utility of this relationality only occurs when people present authentic interpretations of themselves. I cannot in good consciousness say that facebook is a viable modus operandi for people to give themselves to others through their own personal experiences because of all the conflicting tropes of identity inherent in most profiles that often contradict the message they intend to export to others, and I am far more skeptical of the idea that the majority of facebook users emanate authentic self-representation because of the insignificant trifles that constantly buzz around the ‘news feed’ like flies on a carcass. The immeasurable amount of ads and commercial links aimed at determining consumption habits are the parasites of authentic thought and self-representation. Just by clicking on a link you reveal to others that you like something, but they don’t know why you like it. Others can thus gauge your identity or essence by your selective embracement of certain cultural aspects without knowing the real reason you chose to like the thing in the first place. The problematic nature of the consumer culture of facebook lies in its capacity to engage the masses in a collective false-consciousness that encourages the coaxing of identities, the replicating of someone’s else’s aura as your own, and the scattering of the Narrating ‘I’ in various forms of social engagement for the mere purpose of making one’s self look better to others. All of these false representations of the self ultimately boil down to identity soup that leaves a bitter-sweet taste on the palate that is not even close to the original recipe. Facebook facilitates what Martin Heidegger called a ‘cult of distraction’ in Being and Time. He condemned the collective pull of mass-culture when he “lamented the ways in which an overvaluation of curiosity had led to a cult of distraction and idle chatter, which led people away from the more fundamental questions of their existence and being in general” (Being and Time 356). Facebook emanates a similar collective pull by luring people away from their realities and placing them behind a veil that is the equivalent of Claudia Rankine’s symbolic static television set which suggests that people are looking in all the wrong places for the answers to the fundamental philosophical questions of the modern day.

Using facebook as a channel to sift some sort of truth or meaning from other peoples’ lives is problematic because the typical facebook profile is not normally an authentically autobiographical source. Perhaps many people do demonstrate authenticity, but you show me one person who has not thought about the audience—consumers—before writing any word, posting any picture, or linking any aesthetic piece to their facebook page. This might just be the cultural pessimism coming out in me, but it hard to believe that people structure online-lives solely for the purpose of living for another as Rankine suggests, or even to capture their essence as an individual without having some quarrel in the mind as to the effects of an attempted portrayal of themselves as a meaningful human-being that is truly alive in the most potent sense of the word. No, you almost always do a double take. Sure there are instances when people post a self-narrative glimpse of themselves for themselves and no one else, but ask them if their profile – their quintessential structured and modern autobiographical life online – is a completely unique and personal embodiment of themselves that is untainted by external influence. In keeping with my cultural pessimism, it is the idle chatter of the cult of distraction residing in facebook that keeps people away from the real human connections that Rankine suggests enable a deeper truth about any ‘self’. We should not attempt to conform to, much less show others, a narrative we tell about our lives when we could be showing another how we live our lives through self-life writing or other more legitimate forms of autobiography. This notion is expressed by Jerome Bruner when he wrote:

“Eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very “events” of a life. In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives. And given the cultural shaping to which I referred, we also become variants of the culture’s canonical forms.”

Re-read this quote and tell me that facebook is not a prime example of the “culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes” that structures, organizes, and builds the life narratives we ‘tell about’ our lives. With the last line of Bruner’s passage in mind, it is fair to suggest that a portion of the facebook generation have become the ‘variants’ of facebook culture’s ‘canonical forms’. Facebook junkies that promote false representations of themselves because they are constantly under the eyes of their peers have become the pawns of the self-deceptive ideological processes of facebook, and thus run the risk of becoming mere aesthetic objects, similar to art or commodities, that follow the canon of facebook’s laws and its cultural imperialistic agenda. Rankine’s quote “One waits to recognize the other, to see the other as one sees the self…the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other,” does not apply to facebook in my opinion. While facebook might be an authentic self-narrative or representation for certain individuals that truly want to ‘be for the other’, they constitutes the slim margin which pales in comparison to the modern day ‘facebook whore’—be it male or female—that create a façade to wear online, an imaginative persona that is anything but true to their authentic selves.

Sorry, I kind of just started to rant. I got to go check my facebook notifications now.

-Joe Fleming