this week's favourite band: hymie's basement

[foxtongue]

365: day 4

I've spent the majority of my day dissolving myself in layers upon layers of technical writing, business plans, copy edits, consultations, proposals, and articles, anything I could use for some concrete writing examples, and you know what I've discovered? That joke I have about living the majority of my life behind non-disclosure agreements is more true than I considered. I don't think of documents as isolated work, but as it turns out, maybe I should.

Almost all of the design work I've done, the packaging, the clever promotions, even the press releases, are locked. Weeks of my life seem to have been swallowed up in what might be considered completely invisible work. Only the trashier articles are freely my copyright - the ghost-written fetish tartlet interviews, the essays on how the McCarthy Era is to blame for Japan's end-of-the-bell-curve pornography industry - very little I would be comfortable shopping to prospective employers. 'Course, I don't show them here, either, for very similar reasons. (It's the rare page that even carries my real name.)

Obscene interiors: terrible decor with invisible pornography.

Which brings me, (if sideways), to something Juan and I were discussing the other day, the self-referential use of digital cameras that's begun to quietly permeate our culture. People will go dancing, bring a camera, take a picture, show it to everyone, pass the camera around, keep dancing, keep taking pictures, keep pausing to look at them. Micro documentation, preserving a moment while living it. Especially odd considering that these pictures don't usually go anywhere and are rarely looked at again. They're hard-drive space.

What I think is interesting is how people are beginning to tailor the way they act in public for things like photos they know will inevitably end up on-line. I have articles I sign with a pen name, which I thought was almost shallow of me, but apparently I'm not as self-conscious as I thought. I overheard a woman on the bus talking on her cell-phone the other day, passionately discussing how she only wears make-up if she knows there will be "technology types" at a party. She felt "liberated" that she was going to a "hippy house" where no one would have cameras.

Spaz.Mike had a nice little essay on post-scarcity that I feel relates, about how the web is bringing around the death of celebrity, a topic we hash out together with some regularity, and I'd like to take that a little farther and say that it's taking what's left and spreading it thin, sure, but it's spreading it over us. Our personal narratives have become individual expression painted entirely by collective context. We have begun wearing the behaviour of miniature celebrities, even when we're not aware of it. Our journals are quietly expanding their borders, leaking out into full scale multimedia presentations that saturate our real life social interactions, as if our constant connection to the network is warping us from observers into the content itself. We The Public learning to manage Being Public.

Me, I like it. What about you?


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edit: speaking of celebrity vs. real people - Go vote for Mike as That 1 Guy! He's almost at number one!

Comments

[themythicalman.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm ... I'm not so sure I like it, for a few reasons:

1) I don't believe that celebrities are real people. That is to say, what we see isn't the person, but carefully a crafted marketing strategy. Seems obvious, right? Whenever we hear of a celebrity scandal, it's almost always the person's publicist who responds, and scandals get your name out there - hardly a healthy model to which any person should aspire;

2) When I write, 95% of the time, it's just a link to something that I find amusing and/or important for some reason - a YouTube video, or a quote from a poet or author, etc. On that rare occasion when I am trying to relate an experience, it's in the hope that there's somebody out there who might understand what I'm feeling. We want to be remembered, and we write to know we're not alone. In my opinion, thanks to modern technology, as a society, we've never been more collected, or more lonely;

3) When we write, we're not necessarily putting our true selves forward, but how we wish others to view us. We are our own publicists, often perpetuating our own myths; and

4) I'm just as guilty of this one as anybody else: if I was having a real life, wouldn't I be out living it, instead of spending so much time writing about it?

I'm not sure if or where I'm going with this, but there it is: my two bits, plus spare change.

[porphyre.livejournal.com]

1) Except that they are, and that's the trick of it, looking past the public face to the fact that everyone's a person. Celebrity is when people forget that, I think, when you become divorced from yourself through other's perceptions. It's like the shift from having a friend to having a fan.

2) I don't see us as being more lonely. Juan, the fellow I linked to in my post, and I never would have met if it weren't for he internet. he lives in Chili, yet we have a real connection, one that helps me rest and sleep better at night sometimes. We share our sultures, our experiences, and find comfort where otherwise there would be none.

3) Which is exactly the same as people in any public space, which is part of my point. I got into a discussion about modified behaviour New Years Morning, Alex saying something about "courting mode" how we fluff ourselves up, leave certain facts out or for later. No one questions that, though it's just as automatic. What's the difference?

4) The more we go out, the more we experience, the more we have to write about, to document, file, and share. That arguement especially doesn't work on me.