Self-branding
Posted on | October 11, 2007 |
Some thoughts leading in to tomorrow’s MACS session, in light of the last few days of reading and worrying (and subsequent spring cleaning… you can tell there’s something going on in my life when I start moving furniture).
A key aspect of my online identity that I’ve been made aware of this week is the way that I have used my blog to express feelings of loneliness, isolation and disaffection with Brisbane since moving here. While those feelings have certainly had a real basis at times, particularly early on, it’s increasingly apparent that reading about those feelings on my blog has led people to make gestures and suggestions about my life (from coffee dates to flatmates) based on that knowledge. It seems that sometimes they have been offended when I haven’t recognised these offers as indications of potential friendship.
So, without dissecting this too much, and in the spirit of expanding this into a wider discussion about blogging voices, I simply want to ask: what is it about a blogging voice that makes people believe what they read is the truth? Is it because of the perception that blogging is ‘authentic’, or that it must be real if it sounds emotive? If the first point is true, why do people educated in post-structuralism still desire authenticity in an author (I wouldn’t imagine many people who aren’t university graduates would be interested in this blog)?
Alternatively, are these gestures a sign of a lingering suspicion, even amongst bloggers and blog readers, that people blog in order to overcome some inadequacy in their life? Do the generally negative theories of blogging affect how people interact with bloggers they know in person? Be honest!
I don’t tend to assume that people read my blog, so why would I recognise their gestures as inspired by my online state? How to negotiate an unspoken accumulation of knowingness? At least the take-up of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and various other ‘mood’ displaying platforms will make this experience more common for others. If I have described the performance of online presence in terms of ’self-branding’, as the circular for tomorrow’s discussion suggests, then describing myself as lonely seems a clear case of having been tarred by my own brush… except for the quite important fact that I consider writing itself to be my main form of retreat from feelings of loneliness. I’m starting to realise that the combination of being online and archived means that I now risk being made to feel responsible for my textual self in real life, long after the moment of motivation to write has passed.
In The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler claims that the Internet has allowed us ‘to keep in touch with family and intimate friends, both geographically proximate and distant. To the extent we do see a shift in social ties,’ he argues, ‘it is because, in addition to strengthening our strong bonds, we are also increasing the range and diversity of weaker connections’ (15).
One of the reasons I describe my current research in terms of ‘online intimacy’ is that I’m trying to find a way to start talking about these weaker connections that so many of us are experiencing without the negative connotation that ‘weaker’ implies. I want to develop a way of describing a new range of friendship functions that take place in mobile cultures - which is to say both online cultures and cultures where people are often moving from place to place for work. In this changed context, people can’t necessarily rely on, maintain or access the forms of security that existed when the terms ‘friend’, ‘contact’, ‘acquaintance’, ‘colleague’, ‘buddy’, or even ‘relationship’ were originally formulated.*
The classic example of the moment is ‘the Facebook friend’ (which means what, exactly, beyond a cheezy, zeitgeisty, middle-class chuckle?). But I’m also thinking about the whole range of reliable and valuable connections that exist, from your regular E-bay vendor to the e-mail romance that becomes Real (often after a lot of doubts and experiments, precisely because of our lack of a positive vocabulary for these new forms of connection).
What I’m most concerned about in all of this is that we seem unable to recognise that the inadequacies of our concepts - and hence the superficial anxieties about blogrolls or who is friends with whom - are mere surface symptoms of fundamental economic and employment changes. These changes mean that a hell of a lot more people will have to leave their established and comfortable intimate communities and develop new ways of identifying who can be relied on, and who will be on their team. What it also means is that only those who accumulate enough links in the right ‘textual neighbourhoods’ will prosper.
*The hollowing out of workplace hierarchies in information jobs means that the ‘co-worker’ tag and the preeminence of ‘the team’ overwrite previous forms of hierarchy and division of labor (not to mention division of affect - a whole new realm of immaterial workplace stress which, particularly after the past two weeks, I need to learn to handle better, or find another job altogether).
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6 Responses to “Self-branding”
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October 11th, 2007 @ 8:56 pm
It’s an interesting question. I just wonder whether people would reach out like that if you’d voiced your annoyances at the pub, or just taken them as the usual moaning that accompanies living in Brisbane.
It’s interesting that those offers were made without acknowledgment of what you had written - there’s a weird dynamic there.
October 12th, 2007 @ 9:12 am
“One of the reasons I describe my current research in terms of ‘online intimacy’ is that I’m trying to find a way to start talking about these weaker connections that so many of us are experiencing without the negative connotation that ‘weaker’ implies. I want to develop a way of describing a new range of friendship functions that take place in mobile cultures - which is to say both online cultures and cultures where people are often moving from place to place for work.”
ooooh, this post explains for me what your research is about, or at least gives me a better idea. I so didn’t know.
Authenticity, in the sense of a real/fake distinction through which to judge examples of something? When is anything real!?!?! lol! I think this is a really good example of the power of simulacra (in D’s sense, not B’s sense). It doesn’t matter if what you write or what is archived is true or not and relevant or not, as its force has particiular effects. Phantasms of loneliness may make people realise their own loneliness…
October 12th, 2007 @ 11:22 am
Hi Mel, thanks for your comment on my blog, and the expansion of your ideas here. Sorry I don’t have time to respond in a proper post, but just quickly - I think here you distill very effectively some questions about the need for new ways of talking about the ’strength of weak ties’ - the new forms of interpersonal intimacy, new relations between individual human ‘actants’ in these networks, and so on.
Just briefly wanted to add to the mix the other dimension of the problem of textual ‘authority’ in relation to what I clumsily referred to as distributed online ‘presence’. Call it collective intelligence, or distributed *production* - that is, even though we experience our ‘personal’ online activities kind of locally and, well, personally, how does all this stuff collectively produce something quite distinct from what we *think* we’re doing, even when we *think* we’re sharing knowledge, or making friends, or whatever? These questions become more important when we encounter enormous scale, I guess, and the politics of scale for our disciplinary expertise (our authority to speak about any of these matters from a concretist, grounded, contextualised, local viewpoint) is also affected. Mark Elliott in his recently completed PhD uses the term “stigmergy” to talk about this (http://mark-elliott.net). He posted the other day to the iDC list:
“The crux is that encodable networked media provide for the coordination of distributed, individualised contributions which may aggregate into emergent, system level behaviour such as collaborative filtering (Digg, Reddit), content creation (Second Life, YouTube) knowledge aggregation/generation (wikis, Wikipedia) etc. An important distinction to be made here, touched on in the previous posts, is that while this phenomenon achieves democratic-like outcomes, it is qualitatively different from ‘democracy’, in that its participants needn’t be associated with or form constituent groups to advocate for or with. Instead, they act solely as individuals, with those individualistic actions contributing to emergent outcomes which provide ‘use-value’ for the participants and others.”
Anyway, I guess what I’ve been wondering is the extent to which blogging, however it is practiced, contributes to or continues to resist this model?
October 13th, 2007 @ 11:16 am
on authenticity:
http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2007/10/google-earth-wh.html
crazy how different people from different theoretical orientations arrive at the same question regarding authenticity.
October 14th, 2007 @ 1:44 pm
I’m on holiday and the brain isn’t working too well, but we spent last night with two women in Rio Dell, CA whom I have known for 11 years online, but have only met f-t-f twice before. They are among my closest and most intimate friends. I got more emotional support over the death of my late partner from online friends than I did from f-t-f friends. And she got far more support in hospital from her online life than her f-t-f friends. I haven’t thought all this through properly, but I’m glad you’re doing it and I’d like to read more.
October 19th, 2007 @ 10:58 am
I tend to assume that when someone suggests getting together for a cup of tea or a beer or whatever in RL that they are actually just interested in being mates or hanging out or developing professional contacts or think I’m hawt (dang, I have to keep believing this one)…? You know, old school - like we used to network before we had the internets?
And if you’ve written on your blog that you’re not exactly happy, isn’t it a lovely thought that people will decide ‘oh, they might like a cup of tea or a beer’?
You think it’s weird that we don’t mention the fact that we’ve leanrt stuff about each other online when we meet in person (and I do - I always wonder how to handle it), you should try (partner) dancing with people after you’ve announced on the internet that you hate a particular move or will only dance to a certain type of music. Talk about mutual discomfort, confusion and miscommunication!